Circumcision

Giulio Romano painted this in Rome in the early 1520s, during the strangest stretch of his career. Raphael, whose workshop he had run as chief assistant, died suddenly in 1520, leaving papal commissions across the city unfinished, and Giulio spent the next few years completing them before he left for Mantua in 1524 to serve the Gonzaga court. The subject is the naming of Jesus in the temple eight days after his birth, packed edge to edge with figures. The picture then had a very French afterlife. It belonged to Nicolas Fouquet, the finance minister Louis XIV had arrested in 1661, passed to Charles Le Brun, the king's own painter, and Louis XIV bought it in 1684. It no longer sits on its original wood panel. The paint was transferred onto canvas, a treatment French restorers regularly gave old Italian panels, and that is what hangs in the Grande Galerie today.