Saint Gregory the Great

In 1638 the inventory of the Roman palace of Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, a banker and one of the great collectors of his day, listed four canvases with half-length figures of the four Doctors of the Church, believed to be by Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard. This Gregory the Great, the pope and writer, is one of them, and the museum dates it 1614 to 1615, when Jusepe de Ribera was a young painter working in Rome. What followed shows how easily a name drifts. By 1793 the palace inventory called it a Caravaggio. After it passed to the Torlonia family, a description written around 1820 praised Gregory writing his homilies, helped by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, as one of Caravaggio's greatest efforts. In 1855 a Torlonia catalogue gave it to yet another painter. Modern scholarship has brought it back to the name the Giustiniani household first wrote down.