Christ and the Woman of Samaria

The Gospel of John sets this meeting at a well in Samaria, around noon. Jesus, tired from the road, sits down and asks a local woman for a drink, and she is taken aback, because Jews and Samaritans kept apart. The conversation turns from well water to what he calls living water, and ends with him telling her things about her own life that no stranger could know. Annibale Carracci had painted the scene once before, for a palace in Bologna in the early 1590s. This version comes a decade later, from around 1604 or 1605 in Rome, and it has a very different shape, about 60 centimetres high and nearly one and a half metres wide. It belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who assembled one of the great picture collections of the 17th century in Brussels and brought it home to Vienna in 1656. His pictures later passed to the imperial collection, and this one with them.