Circumcision

The confraternity that ordered this altarpiece in Pesaro was devoted to the Name of Jesus, and that explains the subject. In Luke's Gospel the child is circumcised on the eighth day and named at the same moment, so for these brothers this was their own feast. They commissioned Federico Barocci around 1581, payments followed in 1583 and 1588, and he signed and dated the canvas 1590 on the Virgin's prie-dieu. Almost a decade went into this one picture.

The high priest holds the child while an attendant in yellow, his back to us, prepares the cut, and Mary and Joseph watch from the right. In the left foreground lies a lamb, the sacrificial animal that points ahead to the death of the child being named, and on the other side stand the basins and jugs of the rite.

In 1798 the painting was taken from its altar and brought to Paris. In 1802, the year Notre-Dame returned to Catholic worship, it was assigned to the cathedral, and the cathedral chapter handed it to the Louvre in 1862.