GINEVRA CANTOFOLI (Bologna 1618-1672) Young Woman with Turban Oil on canvas 76 x 59 cm Provenance: France Expertise/attributive confirmation: Prof. Riccardo Lattuada SOLD The painting, which exhibits the technical and executive characteristics typical of a 17th-century work, has recently undergone cleaning, revealing its good state of preservation and rendering the author's intentions perfectly legible. Certainty about the subject is difficult. The turban may allude to the image of a sibyl, the cup in the young woman's hands could refer to Sophonisba or Artemisia, tragic figures of classical antiquity who take on the character of didactic images in the 17th century. In any case, the vitality with which this young woman addresses the viewer speaks of a portrait, executed perhaps in the mirror or from life, because the capacity for psychological analysis and the refinement with which the features of the face and hands and the few, essential elements of the dress are fixed are too acute and sensitive. The composure of the image and the pictorial ductus characterized by thin thicknesses and precise layers on the brown preparation lead to placing the painting in the Bolognese context of the second quarter of the 17th century, in an environment influenced by the inventions of Guido Reni and his school in the field of female half-figures. The most effective comparisons - and in the opinion of the writer decisive - are in favor of Ginevra Cantofoli (1618-1672), who spent her life in Bologna, where she trained at the private academy of Elisabetta Sirani. Cantofoli continued to work with Sirani, of whom she was older, until the latter's death. The figure of Ginevra Cantofoli has only recently been recovered thanks to a pioneering study by Massimo Pulini, but other contributions have been produced by the writer, and more recently by Pulini himself in a Milanese exhibition on female artists. Although she was also able to execute altarpieces such as the Last Supper (Bologna, Church of San Procolo), the San Tommaso da Villanova (Bologna, Basilica di San Giacomo Maggiore) and the Madonna del Rosario (Bologna, Church of San Lorenzo), Cantofoli concentrated her activity mainly on female half-figures, mostly represented individually or sometimes in pairs as well. In relatively recent years, critics have attributed to her the Woman with a Turban in Rome, Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini, traditionally considered the portrait of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni. The painting under discussion finds close comparisons, in execution and expressive character, with the so-called Sibyl or Young Woman in Oriental Clothes in Padua, Museo d'Arte medievale e moderna, the Berenice in Rome, Galleria Borghese, and many parts of the same Allegory of Painting in Milan, Galleria di Brera. In all these works we notice the same pictorial manner, the same attitude to represent the chosen subject in ambiguous terms: young woman in oriental costumes or Sibyl, or Artemisia, or Sophonisba? More generally: allegorical portrait, portrait (or self-portrait) from life or figurative abstraction on pre-established schemes? These questions, which remain unresolved for Ginevra Cantofoli, are a fundamental part of the charm of her works. Finally, once the attribution of the painting in question to the Bolognese painter has been established, it becomes difficult to propose an orientative dating. The dark preparation and the lowered palette suggest a placement between the fifth and sixth decades of the seventeenth century, when Cantofoli seems to have acquired a mastery of her means able to incorporate both the research of the great masters of her time - Reni, Cantarini, Giovanni Andrea and Elisabetta Sirani - and to seek her own identity in the competitive Bolognese artistic environment of her time. Rome, 28 July 2021 - Riccardo Lattuada SOLD