Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist (Rome, Galleria Borghese) was painted in 1609–1610 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V, and although many scholars have carefully studied and analyzed it in the last decades, the meaning of this unusual image has not been fully revealed. This present article focuses on the parable of the Good Shepherd related in the Gospel of St John (10, 11–21) as a key to the reading of particular aspects of Caravaggio’s work, and interprets its depiction as a visual message conveyed to Cardinal Borghese that the artist strongly wished a pardon from the Pope for the murder that he had committed on 28 May 1606.
Claude Lorrain’s evocation of the world of classical antiquity in his paintings is rightly celebrated, but his indebtedness to antique painting has been the subject of some speculation. This article explores the evidence, in the light of recent research and in the context of a heightened interest in the antique in seventeenth-century Rome. Many of the artist’s noble Roman patrons collected examples of antique painting, or drawings after them by P. S. Bartoli and his son Francesco, while illustrations to the Vatican Virgil (borrowed by both Cassiano dal Pozzo and Camillo Massimo) may have provided the starting point for Claude’s rendering of bucolic subjects.
While it is widely recognized that many successful artists, such as Titian, made autograph replicas of their own paintings, this phenomenon is only beginning to be studied in the work of Guercino. He started making such replicas from the very beginning of his career, since a surprising number of duplicate versions have been identified from before his Roman period (1621–1623). Repetitions made during the period of the artist’s Account Book (from 1629 until the artist’s death in 1666), on the other hand, are a more vexed issue. The debate over prime and second versions by Guercino from his mature period was reopened in 2005 with the re-appearance on the London art market of Guercino’s lost version from Northbrook Park of his 1645 composition, Semiramis at her Toilet Receiving a Messenger, first published by Denis Mahon in 1949 and now in a private collection, New York. Less than five years earlier, another autograph version of the same subject, now in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park, had come to light and was also endorsed by Mahon. This article examines the differences between the two versions and concludes that the Cobbe version of the composition (commissioned by Cardinal Federigo Cornaro), slightly less finished, was painted first.