Judging from the picture in the Ercolani gallery at Bologna, which represents her in the act of painting a portrait of her father, and which has been engraved for Signor Toselli's pamphlet, she must have been very pretty. And it is recorded that her figure was tall and elegant. She was a good musician, and her conversation is said to have been witty and sprightly. Yet one of the innumerable sonnets on her death begins:
"Fui donna in terra, e non conobbi amore."
"A woman while on earth, I yet knew nought of love."
And indeed it may be supposed that she had resolutely determined to devote herself and her life and energies wholly and exclusively to her art. For in Italy few marriages are made by women after the twenty–sixth year.
Her funeral may be said to have been a public one, so extensive were the absurdities of funeral pomp, and so general the participation in the ceremony of all classes of the citizens. Malvasia, the historian of Bolognese art, who was intimate with her and her family, has written what he calls her life, in his "Felsina Pittrice," really in the tone of a man beside himself. He is furious that Lucia was not tortured to make her discoverer the instigator of her supposed crime; he regrets that "being a Christian and a Priest," he cannot with propriety curse all persons guilty of her death, as violently as he should like to do; and altogether has written some score of pages in a style of monstrous bombast, which seems a caricature of the well–known absurdities of the Italian style of that epoch.
Finally, there is a volume, entitled, "Il Pennello lagrimato," published at Bologna in the year of her death, which consists of a great variety of orations, odes, sonnets, anagrams, funeral conundrums, and epitaphs, in Latin and Italian, by all the literary and learned men of the city, proving the high place poor Elisabetta had held in the affections and esteem of her contemporaries, and the extremity of bad taste, puerility, and abasement, into which a century or so of "orderly" despotism had plunged the nation.
LA CORILLA.