Landscape with the Killing of Saint Peter Martyr

On 6 April 1252 the Dominican preacher Peter of Verona was walking from Como to Milan when hired killers attacked him in the woods near Seveso, along with a fellow friar named Domenico. The story told afterwards is that the dying man dipped a finger in his own blood and wrote "Credo", I believe, on the ground. He was made a saint the following year. Bril sets the murder on a pale, sandy path beneath towering trees, where the people are small enough to miss. In front, a friar throws up his arm as a swordsman runs at him, and higher up the slope a second armed man stands over a kneeling figure. The clerk who listed the panel in the Borghese inventory of 1693 never named the saint. He wrote of a landscape with two men running with swords at two friars.