David with the Head of Goliath

In 1635, when the pictures of the Dukes of Savoy were listed, this David was written down as a work of Bartolomeo Manfredi, a Lombard painter among the closest followers of Caravaggio. It was a reasonable guess, and it was not the last. Later the canvas was given to Lionello Spada of Bologna, then to Mattia Preti, then back to Manfredi, every one of them a painter in Caravaggio's wake. Only in the catalogue of a 2003 exhibition at the Galleria Sabauda did it settle on Orazio Riminaldi, a young painter from Pisa, and the museum now dates it between 1617 and 1620, in his first years in Rome. The subject comes from the first book of Samuel, the shepherd boy holding the severed head of the giant. In 2014 the conservation centre at the Venaria Reale, outside Turin, cleaned the canvas and took away discoloured material left by an earlier restoration.