The art–critics assure us that her works are stamped with a vigour, and bold free precision of outline, which have been rarely attained by female artists. "It is indeed a wonderful thing," writes Lanzi,[228] "that a young girl, who lived only six–and–twenty years, should have painted the vast number of pictures recorded by Malvasia[229]; still more so, that she should have perfected them with a care and finish of the highest order; and most wonderful of all, that she should have reached this perfection in historical pieces of large size, in a style free from that timidity, which La Fontana, and other painters of her sex, never got rid of." It would be easy to multiply citations from the best authorities on art, to prove the high degree of excellence in her vocation attained by this girl, at an age when most of her competitors of the stronger sex were climbing the first steps of the ladder. But taking this for granted, and leaving the critical appreciation of her works to those whose studies lead them specially in that direction, it will be more interesting for us to endeavour to make out for ourselves some tolerably life–like representation of the young worker as she lived and laboured a couple of hundred years ago in her home at Bologna. The picture ought to be, if presented aright, a singularly pleasing one, healthy in its tone, invigorating in its suggestions, and addressing itself vividly to the sympathies of every admirer of honest energetic labour. Of all the types of female character and life gathered in these volumes from various social conditions, differing every one of them so widely from our own, this artist figure seems to claim the closest kin to some living phases of the life around us, and to be the most readily and advantageously transplantable into our own social system.