Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri

In 1617 Prince Marcantonio Borghese, the teenage nephew of Pope Paul V, wanted two canvases to hang above doors in his family's palace in Rome's Campo Marzio. He gave the job to Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri, a painter from Fossombrone, a small town in the Marche. One of the pair, Jael and Sisera, is lost. The other, Lot and His Daughters, hangs today in the Galleria Borghese.

Guerrieri had first come to Rome in 1606, still a teenager, and learned from Orazio Gentileschi, one of Caravaggio's early followers. The Lot shows him taking up a newer fashion, the candlelit night scenes that Dutch painters such as Gerard van Honthorst were bringing to Rome. The candle catches the reflection of fingers on the side of a jug, and the jug's dragon-shaped handle is a nod to the dragon on the Borghese coat of arms. For centuries the picture passed under other names, Artemisia Gentileschi among them, until the historian Paola della Pergola confirmed his authorship from archival documents in 1959. Guerrieri spent his last years in Pesaro with his daughter Camilla, who was also a painter.