Ecce Homo

The painter's nephew wrote the famous version of this story before 1628. The Roman patrician Massimo Massimi, he said, secretly commissioned the same Ecce Homo from three painters at once, Caravaggio, Domenico Passignano and his uncle, and his uncle won. Documents published in 1989 are drier. Caravaggio's commission is dated 25 June 1605 and Cigoli's is from March 1607, two separate orders almost two years apart, and part of the scholarship now treats the contest as a family invention. What survives the deflation is a Florentine working in Rome in 1607 who knew exactly what Caravaggio was doing there. Cigoli took the faces from life and packed the space around them with damask, satin and velvet in Venetian colour. The canvas is 175 by 135 centimetres and hangs in the Hall of Ulysses.