Martha, her face shadowed, leans forward, passionately arguing with Mary, who twirls an orange blossom between her fingers as she holds a mirror, symbolising the vanity she is about to give up.

His paintings for Del Monte fall into two groups: the secular genre pieces such as The Musicians, The Lute Player, and Bacchus – all featuring boys and youths in somewhat claustrophobic interior scenes – and religious images such as Rest on the Flight into Egypt and Ecstasy of Saint Francis.

The models were two well-known courtesans who frequented the palazzi of Del Monte and other wealthy and powerful art patrons, and their names were Anna Bianchini and Fillide Melandroni.

Fillide Melandroni appeared in a secular Portrait of a Courtesan done the same year for Del Monte's friend and fellow art-lover, the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani.

A finely grained cream-brown table running in front of the sisters displays three objects, of which a Venetian mirror is the most obvious.

[3] Since its rediscovery, its influence has become apparent, most notably in the number of copies, a now lost work by Carlo Saraceni and a well known version by Orazio Gentileschi, today in Munich.

[2] The writings of the Church Fathers (starting with Origen) established Martha and Mary as representative of the active versus the contemplative aspects of Christian faith.

This distinction was exemplified in art like Bernardino Luini's Martha and Mary, once in the Barberini Collection in Rome, and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.