Saint John the Evangelist

For most of the 20th century this young Evangelist went under another painter's name. In 1943 the art historian Roberto Longhi gave it to Giovanni Serodine, a painter from Ascona in Switzerland who worked among Caravaggio's followers in Rome, and in 1950 it was listed in the catalogue of a Serodine exhibition on the Brissago Islands, in Lake Maggiore. Not everyone was convinced. In one copy of that catalogue an anonymous hand noted beside it that it is not by Serodine.

In 2020 the scholar Gianni Papi argued firmly for Hendrick ter Brugghen. He placed the canvas in the Dutchman's Roman years, before his return to Utrecht around 1614, and pointed to close links with an Adoration of the Shepherds and a Denial of Peter from the same early group. In 2023 the picture went to Modena for the exhibition on ter Brugghen's Italian period. The Galleria Sabauda keeps a more cautious line. Its label says attributed to ter Brugghen and dates the canvas to about 1621 to 1624, the years after he was back in Utrecht.