Jacques Stella

In July 1631 Prince Marcantonio Borghese, heir to the family collection, paid a Frenchman working in Rome 35 scudi for two small paintings, a Judith and a Nativity. The receipt survived, and it settled a question that had drifted for centuries. The Judith at the Galleria Borghese, oil on a slab of slate about 30 by 36 centimetres, had been credited in turn to Alessandro Turchi of Verona, the Flemish Jan Miel and the Bolognese Elisabetta Sirani before the document returned it to Jacques Stella.

Stella, born in Lyon in 1596, spent about ten years in Rome from 1621 and made his name there with cabinet pictures painted on stone, on slate, onyx and lapis lazuli, where the dark natural surface does part of the work. His Judith prays for strength just before she kills the Assyrian general Holofernes, while three putti play with the sword and her servant waits in the shadows. Back in France, Cardinal Richelieu took him up and he was made painter to Louis XIII, with lodgings in the Louvre. He died in Paris in 1657.