Allegory of painting.

The Allegory of Painting, dated around 1650 and among Turchi's last known works, depicts the personification of Pictura — painting as a female figure, typically shown at work before a canvas, adorned with a chain of gold masks and other iconographic attributes drawn from Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. This was a self-reflexive subject — painters painting Painting — that flourished in the seventeenth century as a way of elevating the status of the art and meditating on its nature and challenges. Artemisia Gentileschi's celebrated self-portrait as Pictura dates to around 1638; by 1650, the subject was well established in the vocabulary of Italian Baroque allegory. Turchi's choice of this subject in old age — he died in Rome in 1650, making this potentially a terminal work — may carry personal meaning: a meditation on the craft to which he devoted his life. The canvas support without a confirmed collection suggests the work may be in private hands.

Canvas with oil paint, likely executed with the refined technical mastery of Turchi's late career. Pictura's iconographic attributes — chain of masks, painting in progress, perhaps a blindfold referencing the unguided imagination — would be rendered with careful attention. The subject invites a rich, dark palette punctuated by the flesh of the working figure and the luminosity of the painted surface she works on.