Saint John the Evangelist

In the same years that Reni painted this oval, between about 1617 and 1620, he was at work on a far larger picture for the Capuchin friars of Bologna, a Crucifixion nearly four metres tall, with the Virgin, Saint John and Mary Magdalene beneath the cross. That altarpiece set a pattern copied for generations, and the museum links the Christ of this small set to it. The three coppers tell the same scene in close-up, Christ crowned with thorns, his mother, and John. In John's Gospel he is the disciple Jesus loved, and from the cross the dying Christ gives him his mother to care for. Behold thy mother, he says. Here John's eyes are turned upward, like the Virgin's, and the museum reads in both faces the grief of witnesses who already sense the meaning of what they are watching. All three ovals passed to the Italian state in 1883 with the Corsini collection.