Saint John Nepomuk Confessing the Queen of Bohemia

In 1729 the Church declared John of Nepomuk a saint. He was a priest of Prague who died in 1393, and by then his story ran like this. He was confessor to the queen of Bohemia, he refused to tell King Wenceslaus IV what she had confessed, and the king had him thrown from the bridge into the Vltava. In the years after the canonisation his image spread across Catholic Europe as the guardian of the secrecy of confession.

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, in his mid-seventies, painted the confession itself around 1740 to 1743. Over the confessional runs a Latin line from John's Gospel, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Charles Emmanuel III, king of Sardinia, bought the canvas in Bologna. Its author was not always remembered in Turin. A lithograph made after 1825 for a series reproducing the royal gallery's pictures gives it to the Spanish painter Murillo.