Portrait of Francesca Gommi Maratti

The sitter is the painter’s own wife, Francesca Gommi, his model since the 1670s and the mother of his only child; Carlo Maratti married her in 1700, after the death of his first wife, and this portrait was probably painted soon afterwards as an homage to her. Behind her he set a picture within the picture — a drawing of Venus forging the love-darts of her son Cupid — so that an allegory of love runs beneath the formality of the pose. Maratti was the leading painter in Rome in the generation after Bernini and the last great master of the Italian Baroque, the head of a studio whose output shaped the look of Roman churches for decades, and the portrait is unusual among his grand public commissions for its intimacy. It came to the museum in 2018. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.