Berkeley Art Museum acquires painting by Ginevra Cantofoli

31 December 2021

Allegory of Truth by Ginevra Cantofoli has been acquired by the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. A young woman in a billowing silvery-blue gown, its neckline worked with gold brocade, holds a balance, while a mirror returning a reflection of her profile stands upright on a pile of large books. Because of the mirror the subject has previously been described as an Allegory of Vanity, though the painting is more likely to represent, or to meditate upon, the idea of Truth.

Similar subjects occur among the northern Caravaggesque painters working in Rome. A picture in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, dated to about 1620 to 1630 and attributed in turn to several French and Netherlandish hands, shows a woman holding a balance and standing a mirror upright on a book, with a skull reflected in the glass. Another, now given to the Candlelight Master and dated to about 1630 to 1633, in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, treats the same allegory: the woman holds up a mirror in which books and a lit candle are reflected and points to a skull set before it, while a balance rests on the table in the foreground.

Here the scales are not in balance, there is no skull at all, and what the mirror returns is the woman's own profile, which does not quite match the profile of the figure holding it. These departures suggest something beyond a personification of Truth revealing the vanity of the world, and point instead to an allegory about art and artifice that painter and patron would have recognised. Where the Ashmolean picture and its relatives are usually described as Truth Presenting a Mirror to the Vanities of the World, this one might better be called Truth Revealing the Artifice of Art. Iconography of this kind suited a learned patron, and at this scale the painting would have been seen in a study or a collector's cabinet rather than on a public wall.

The Bolognese painter and sometime etcher Ginevra Cantofoli was one of four women in the academy of female painters founded by Elisabetta Sirani, and so belonged to the wider circle around Guido Reni, who had trained Elisabetta's father Andrea. The half-length female figure, whether a saint or a personification, was among Reni's most popular and most influential inventions. Cantofoli is the only one of Sirani's immediate followers to whom a substantial surviving body of work is ascribed, some forty paintings in all. Early sources give her six pictures in Bolognese churches, noting in three cases that Sirani designed and retouched them. None of those writers, Malvasia included, records private commissions for gallery or cabinet pictures, and the attribution of this painting, along with some thirty-five others of the kind, rests on the Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, first given to her in 1902.