Saint Peter's Vision of the Unclean Animals

In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter is praying on a rooftop in the port of Joppa, hungry, when he sees heaven open and a great sheet let down by its four corners, full of animals that Jewish law counted as unclean. A voice tells him to kill and eat. He refuses, it happens three times, and only afterwards does he understand it as a sign that the new faith was open to people who were not Jews. Fetti painted this small panel around 1619, as court painter in Mantua, where small biblical pictures like this one, his parables above all, were made for the Gonzaga dukes to keep in their own rooms. It stayed with the family for less than ten years. In 1627 and 1628 Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga sold much of the celebrated family collection to King Charles I of England, and this panel went with it. It later belonged to the Duke of Buckingham and reached Vienna by way of Prague, cut down at some point along the top and the left side. It still carries the stamp of Charles I's collection.