Saint Peter

Around 1725 a cardinal, Pompeo Aldrovandi, wanted the Griffoni family chapel in the basilica of San Petronio in Bologna refitted to a newer taste. The altarpiece standing in it, painted by Francesco del Cossa some 250 years earlier, was taken apart, its panels trimmed down to the size of ordinary pictures and sold off one by one. This Saint Peter stood at the left of the main tier. A Bolognese collector bought it in 1893 on the advice of a historian who suspected where it came from, and in 1934 Roberto Longhi worked out on paper that the pieces in Milan, London and Washington had all once been bolted into the same frame. Sixteen panels are now traced across nine museums; they stood together again for a few months in Bologna in 2020. Peter holds the great key loosely, a second one swinging from a ribbon at his side.