Italian, 'A Female Figure resting on a Sword', early 17th century

A young woman leans on the hilt of a sword and there is what appears to be a fragment of a wheel next to her shoulder. She is probably Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the fourth-century martyr who was tortured by being bound to a wheel studded with iron spikes and later beheaded. The saint is often represented in paintings and her pose here – tightly cropped and looking out at the viewer – is not unlike that in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

This work is painted on a poplar panel. Recent X-rays have shown that it is painted on top of another one, in which there is a landscape in the left background and two figures – presumably a Virgin and Child (the halo of the former is clearly visible). Although the date of the picture underneath is not known it appears to be considerably earlier, perhaps even late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.

The strong lighting in this picture draws its inspiration from Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro. Although the artist has not been identified, the paint is handled and applied in a sophisticated manner: the soft modelling of the hands, clasped together with interlocking fingers, is very different to that of the white undershirt, the crisp folds of which are so brilliantly conveyed. The red cloth the woman wears on top of her shirt is held together with a delicate clasp on her chest and another on her shoulder. The figure appears all the more three-dimensional for being set against a plain dark background.

When this painting was presented to the Gallery in 1926 it was attributed to the eighteenth-century Neapolitan artist Francesco Solimena. Although it is now classified as Italian, it may be by a French artist working in Rome in the seventeenth century, perhaps in the circle of Simon Vouet or Carlo Saraceni (such as Guy François, about whom very little is known).