Mater dolorosa

Against a dark background, the Virgin's face and clasped hands emerge, and a pale ring of light (a halo) is painted behind her head. She lowers her eyes and prays quietly, as if holding back her grief. The deep blue of the mantle that wraps her body comes from paint made of lapis lazuli, a blue mineral, and sets off the whiteness of her skin.

Dolci painted this work around 1655, when he was about thirty-nine. According to Filippo Baldinucci, who wrote the painter's first detailed biography, Dolci was devout from childhood and belonged to a confraternity of Saint Benedict throughout his life. The pose with clasped hands goes back to Titian's depictions of the Virgin, and it is thought to draw also on a type of Virgin image favored in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.

For a long time the model was said to be his wife Teresa, whom he married in 1654, but doubts remain when the painting is compared with an autograph drawing of her. On the back of the canvas is written a Latin phrase meaning "Queen of Martyrs, pray for us." After being passed down in families including an English ducal house, it was purchased by the National Museum of Western Art in 1999.