A criminal court in Rome opened a file on a killing. The question before it was who had sheltered the man afterwards, and the answer it wrote down was his wife. The dead man was her brother-in-law. The court had no particular interest in what she did for a living and recorded it anyway, the way court papers gather up everything standing near the question they were opened to settle.
Those papers turn out to be among the better surviving sources on a painter.
Her name was Claudia del Bufalo, and until about a year ago she was one picture: Portrait of Faustina del Bufalo, 1604, oil on canvas, a woman in brocade with pearls, emerald and ruby bracelets and a buffalo’s-head pendant, signed at the base of a painted column, with a dedication near the right sleeve that reads Allmia Car:ma Sorella / La Sig:ra Faustina Dl / bufalo / Roma — to my dearest sister (Finestre sull’Arte). One painting, one sitter, one line of handwriting.
The researcher Francesca Curti has spent the past year or so in the archives, and the portrait now arrives at the National Museum in Oslo on 8 October with a biography attached. Patrizia Cavazzini, who is co-curating the show: “We now know Claudia, who lived in Rome, was a poet and theatrical impresario as well as a professional painter. Despite being married she had a lover and was sent to a convent to repent. She may also have at some point been a courtesan—and we discovered from court papers that she was mentioned in a trial in Rome as being involved in a murder—she was accused of having hidden her husband who had killed her brother in law” (The Art Newspaper). And, separately: “neither Claudia nor her sister were members of the prestigious family at all—they just had the same name.”
So. Three errors, in the order they were made.
The first is a letter. A 1610 inventory of the Palazzo di Monte Savello lists “a large painting by Claudia del bufalo” and “an andromeda tied to the rock by Claudia del bufalo’s hand with a black frame.” Forty years later the Villa Borghese inventory reaches the portrait and records: “That of Faustina del Bufalo is made by Claudio del Bufalo” (Finestre sull’Arte). The earlier document was correct. The later one was authoritative. That is the whole mechanism, and it took three and a half centuries to unwind.
The second is a pedigree. She had been understood as a del Bufalo of the del Bufalos, plausibly close kin to a cardinal — which is the kind of fact that makes a woman with a brush legible without anyone needing to explain further. Curti’s documents remove it. The name was a coincidence. What replaces the pedigree is a career.
The third is a hand. In the same Oslo exhibition, a later addition has been taken off a Gentileschi. Cynthia Osiecki, the other curator: “Removing it has strengthened the figure, because it looked like Gentileschi couldn’t paint the hand properly” (The Art Newspaper). Someone improved the picture. The improvement made the painter look incompetent. It stayed on for a very long time.
A scribe’s word ending, a scholar’s reasonable inference, somebody’s brush: three unrelated failures, three different centuries, three different trades — and all three point the same way. A set of errors with a consistent sign is not a set of errors. It is a preference, expressed by people who would have described themselves as doing careful work, and who were.
The museum’s own framing is that these painters “were recognised in their day, but later fell into obscurity” (Nasjonalmuseet). Worth sitting with, that. The loss did not happen at the moment of making, when it would at least have been an argument somebody lost. It happened afterwards, in the copying, in documents drawn up correctly by people with no view on the matter at all.
And the documents were doing their jobs. An inventory is a property record. It exists to establish what is in the house and what it is worth, for probate, for insurance, for division among heirs. The maker’s name appears in it as an attribute of the asset, in the same grammatical position as the black frame. Nobody’s fee turned on getting it right, no second reader checked it against the earlier list, and no one anywhere in the chain was confused. There was nothing to be confused about. The system was not built to hold that information and it did not hold it, and it went on being trusted because in every other respect it worked.
Which leaves the court file: the one archive in the story with no stake in art whatsoever, compiled by a body that wrote down a woman’s occupations, household, lover and legal trouble specifically because it intended to use them against her. Keep exhaustive records of the people you mean to prosecute and you will, four hundred years later, hold the fullest surviving account of their lives.
Curti’s work in the family inventories points to at least two more paintings, and the suspicion is that others are hanging now under “Claudio.” The remedy, in other words, is to go looking for a man who does not exist. My guess is that the show’s count of nineteen painters will look conservative within a decade, and not because anyone discovers a new artist — because the rest are already on the wall, correctly hung, correctly conserved, correctly labelled with somebody else’s name.
W̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ Painter runs at the National Museum in Oslo from 8 October to 7 February 2027: nineteen painters, some fifty works, Gentileschi and Clara Peeters and Michaelina Wautier and Lavinia Fontana among them. The title has its first word struck through. A museum has reached for typography to do something four centuries of catalogues could not, and the strikethrough is at least honest about the shape of the thing: not an addition. A deletion, left visible.
Sources
- “From a murder case to hidden works: new details about mysterious 17th-century painter Claudia del Bufalo revealed”, The Art Newspaper, 22 September 2026
- “Claudia del Bufalo, the seventeenth-century painter of whom we know only one painting”, Finestre sull’Arte
- “W̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ Painter”, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, 8 October 2026 – 7 February 2027