Attributed to Marco Pino

Between 1543 and 1545, Perino del Vaga, the Florentine painter who had been one of Raphael's assistants, decorated the chapel of the Holy Sacrament in St Peter's in Rome with a team of helpers. That decoration was later taken apart. The scholar Barbara Agosti has identified this canvas at the Galleria Borghese as one of its pieces, a saint praying on clouds against a gold ground, turned towards a centre that is now missing and would have held the tabernacle. On her reading he is Saint Simon, one of the chapel's first patrons, which is why the museum gives both names, Saint Peter and Saint Simon.

The Borghese inventories once called the canvas a Michelangelo. It is now attributed to Marco Pino, a Sienese painter trained under Domenico Beccafumi, who worked in Rome in Perino's circle and later settled in Naples, where he died in the early 1580s. Attributed to means the museum finds his hand the likeliest without documentary proof. Its companion, the same size and on the same gold ground, is catalogued under Girolamo Siciolante.