CanaceANCIENT_AldobrandiniMisfortunates

Ancient fresco depicting a female figure named Canace, rendered in a simple, graceful style with light colors on a textured background

Each of the five young woman depicted in the set is the subject of a mythological narrative dealing with perverted love.

Canace, the Aeolid who bore a son to her brother Macareus

Ovid tells her sordid narrative in Heroid 11, the Letter of Canace to Macareus.

When Aeolus learned that Canace had born the incestuous child, he threw the child to the dogs and sent a dagger to his daughter that thereby she would kill herself. Canace's letter to Macareus opens with the image of the hapless girl bearing the pen in her right hand, the scroll in her lap, and the drawn dagger in her left:

dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, / et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo.

Like the classical myths of Phaedra and Myrrha, this one, too (in Ovid's telling), involves a nurse though here not as unwelcome go-between. (See Heroid 11.33-44) Canace's nurse tries to help abort the fetus.