Education
He had arranged for her to marry a cousin, but she chose to remain single and dedicated herself to painting.
He had arranged for her to marry a cousin, but she chose to remain single and dedicated herself to painting.
She started training under the painter Gaspare Celio, and then under Giovanni Lanfranco. She was a contemporary of Giovanna Garzoni. Her success in Rome was mainly limited to religious altarpieces.
She painted a ‘Guardian angel (now lost) for the church of dell"Angelo Custode.
After Cardinal Domenico’s death, she was endowed to help establish a convent of nuns of an order of Saint Teresa at the adjacent site of the family palace, Palazzo Ginnasi. The modern chapel inside this building contain the only identified works of Caterina Ginnasi, including the altarpiece of the Martyrdom of Street Lucy, and the lunette with a Last Supper in the sacristy.
Among its funereal monument inscriptions, the one for Caterina harkens to a morbid post-reformation focus on the afterlife. The inscription can be translated as:
She did not use the money on earth to purchase the profits from Heaven, but proferred it in charity towards all.
In furnishings, in victuals, in lodging: in all, she only sought suffering for herself.
And to live after death, she lived as if her residence were but a tomb. In the early morning in winter while attending the sacred functions, spurred by the heat of her divine love, she contracted a cold, and for this, she died, but her charity will never die.