Auferstehung Christi

Annibale Carracci painted this Resurrection in 1593 for a private chapel in a Bologna palace, at a moment when he and his cousins were pushing Italian painting back toward clarity and warm, natural light after decades of mannered artifice. Christ rises above the tomb holding the banner of the cross, lifted on a cloud of angels lit from within. Down among the startled guards, look for a small piece of storytelling: one soldier points out to a man in a turban that the tomb's seal is still unbroken, the scroll intact, so the body could not simply have been carried off. Some guards flee, one sleeps straight through it. French troops took the picture from Bologna in 1797, and unlike much of that plunder it never went home.