Elisabetta Sirani: A Talent Gone Far Too Soon

Elisabetta Sirani - Virgin and Child - 1663 - Oil on canvas, 86 x 70 cm - National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (click photo for larger image)Elisabetta Sirani - Portrait of Beatrice Cenci - c. 1662 - Oil on canvas, 64,5 x 49 cm - Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome (click photo for larger image)Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) was an Italian Baroque painter, daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani, who had been the principal assistant of the master Guido Reni. Her talent was encouraged by the writer Malvasia, who later wrote an adulatory biography of her in his 'Felsina Pittrice' (1678). Sirani was active by 1655, and by 1662 she had recorded about ninety works, executing at least another eighty before she died at the tender age of twenty-seven. Only a scant few of her portraits has survived. Her religious, mythological and allegorical subjects were painted in full view of a crowd of admirers. Her style is close to that of Reni - idealized, affecting, and somewhat sentimental, but them embody a strong chiaroscuro and fine color. Her sisters Anna Maria (1645-1515), and Barbara (alive in 1678) were also painters. Barbara's portrait of Elisabetta is in Bologna. At age twenty-seven, Elisabetta Sirani came down with an unexplained illness, accompanied by weight loss and depression. Although she continued to work, she remained ill from the spring through the summer, and died in August--at age twenty-seven. Bologna gave her a large and elegant public funeral. Elisabetta Sirani's father blamed her maid for poisoning her Her body was exhumed and the cause of death was determined to be a perforated stomach--what we would deem as gastric ulcers today. Where might her at have taken her?