Saint Praxedis

Saint Praxedis was a Roman woman of the early Church who, tradition says, gathered up the blood of martyrs and buried their bodies. Ficherelli shows her kneeling, wringing a blood-soaked sponge into a vessel beside a severed head. He was a Florentine painter of the mid-1600s, nicknamed il Riposo, the restful one, for his gentle and unhurried manner. This composition became unexpectedly famous long after his death, because a near-identical version signed "Meer 1655" turned up and was argued by some scholars to be an early work of Johannes Vermeer. Whether the young Dutchman really copied this Florentine saint is still debated. What is not in doubt is that the invention was Ficherelli's own.