Earlier scholars identified the flower she presses to her breast as orange blossom or bergamot, symbol of marriage and fidelity, and claimed the subject as Caterina Campi, wife of Caravaggio's friend Onorio Longhi.

Caravaggio scholar John Gash, however, identifies the flowers as "definitely jasmine", symbol of erotic love, and therefore more suitable to a courtesan than to a respectable married woman.

This was part of an experiment to determine if a theory put forward by Caravaggio expert, Dr. Roberta Lupucci of Florence, Italy, could be true.

Lapucci proposed that the original painting was made with the help of a number of optical devises which caused a facial distortion claimed to be quite noticeable in the portrait.

In February 1599 she was arrested together with a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni, who seems to have been her pimp, (he came from a good family but was continually turning up in police records in the company of prostitutes, and not as a customer), and charged with creating a disturbance in connection with a noisy Mardi Gras party in her house.