Heliodorus Driven from the Temple

The Second Book of Maccabees tells how Heliodorus, a minister of the Seleucid king, came to Jerusalem to seize the treasure kept in the Temple. As he went in, a horseman in golden armour rode at him and two young men flogged him, and he was carried out half dead. In 1725 Francesco Solimena painted the scene in fresco across the inside of the entrance wall of the Gesù Nuovo, the Jesuit church in Naples. This canvas belongs to that commission. The French national museum database describes it as a preparatory oil sketch for the fresco, and the Louvre dates it to around 1725. It is a large sketch, though, a full two metres wide, and a canvas of almost the same size is in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, so what exactly each version was for has been debated, including in the Louvre's own scholarly journal. In 1786 the Paris dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, husband of the portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, sold it to Louis XVI together with a picture by Panini of an apostle preaching among ruins.