The story of Elisabetta Sirani's untimely death has added a sort of melodramatic interest to her name, which was not needed to make her life a noticeable one. Every one who has heard her mentioned has heard that she died by poison. Her contemporaries suspected that she might have been poisoned; the following generation said and wrote, that she probably had been thus destroyed; and Lanzi, and after him the manuals, and other common sources of information, content themselves with simply stating that she was poisoned, without expressing any doubt on the subject. The reader of the following pages will see that there is every reason to think that she died from natural causes. The circumstances of her death, however, and the judicial investigations to which they gave rise, will furnish some of those little traits of the artist–family's home and mode of life, which, far too trifling ever to have been recorded as such by contemporaries, are yet in every case more precious in their suggestiveness than facts of greater importance to those who, at a distance of a couple of centuries, seek to catch a glimpse of any life as it passed amid its ordinary every–day environment. [Sidenote: THE FAMILY.] The records of the judicial proceedings to which Elisabetta's death gave rise, were for many years sought for in vain by various writers on subjects connected with Bolognese art–history. The name of the person accused of the crime was unknown. And for want of this indication it was, it seems, impossible, without searching the entire mass of the archives in question, to find the required papers. At last, however, in 1833, Signor Mazzoni Toselli had the good fortune to light on them, and published the result of his discovery in a small pamphlet printed at Bologna in that year. Since that time another fortunate discovery has brought to light the "conclusions" submitted to the court by the advocate employed for the prosecution, as we should say. This document was not found in company with the records discovered by Signor Toselli; but was put before the world by Signor Ulisse Guidi, in a pamphlet printed at Bologna in 1854. So that, besides obtaining from the evidence of the witnesses examined, those little hints above alluded to of the manner of life led in the "Casa Sirani," we have now the means of forming a tolerably well–grounded opinion as to the real cause of the young artist's death.