[2] Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo illustrates a scene from the first tale on Day 4 of The Decameron, a medieval collection of short stories (novelle) by Italian author and poet, Giovanni Boccaccio.

[3] Seated at an ornate wooden table, wearing a pearl tiara and flowing silk, is Sigismunda (called Ghismonda in Boccaccio's original tale), the heroine of one of the novelle.

It had become popular after being translated in John Dryden's 1699 volume of Fables, Ancient and Modern, and adapted for the English stage by James Thomson in 1745.

For Lord Charlemont, Hogarth chose to paint the satirical Piquet, or Virtue in Danger (also known as The Lady's Last Stake, after a 1708 play by Colley Cibber), which, with echoes of Marriage à-la-Mode, shows an army officer offering an aristocratic lady a chance to recover the fortune she has just lost by gambling (with the implication that if she loses again, she will have to take him as her lover).

[2][5] Nevertheless, Hogarth priced his Sigismunda in line with what was paid for the "Correggio" version and commensurate with the time he had spent creating it – at least two hundred days (although it appears he was also working on finishing Piquet during this period)[4] – and this may have contributed to Grosvenor's eventual loss of interest.

[7] Many critics were repulsed by the shocking contrast between the melancholy beauty of Sigismunda and the grotesquely bloody organ that she delicately touched.

Walpole, who had admired the "Correggio", compared Hogarth's portrayal of Sigismunda to that of a "maudlin fallen virago",[5][9] and saw in it: None of the somber grief, no dignity of suppressed anguish, no involuntary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet, no amourous warmth turned holy by despairJohn Wilkes dismissed it as "not human".

[4] More predictably, in his Epistle to William Hogarth, Charles Churchill sympathised with Sigismunda as the "helpless victim of a dauber's hand".

[10] After ten days of the exhibition, Hogarth replaced the painting with another of his canvases, Chairing the Member, the fourth and last piece in his Humours of an Election series.