Christ and the Samaritan Woman

In Bologna in the 1590s, Abbot Astorre Sampieri had a room in the family palace fitted with three large canvases set over the doors, and he gave one to each of the Carracci. Ludovico painted Christ and the Canaanite woman, Agostino the woman taken in adultery, and Annibale this meeting at the well, where a Samaritan woman drawing water is asked for a drink by a stranger who then tells her everything she has done. Annibale finished it around 1594, and the next year he left for Rome and never worked in Bologna again. The three canvases stayed together. In 1811 Francesco Sampieri, short of money, sold the family gallery, and the interior minister of the Kingdom of Italy bought seven pictures from it for the Brera, these three among them. They hang in Room 28.