Sinite Parvulos

The title is Latin, from the Gospel of Mark. When people brought their children to Jesus and the disciples tried to send them away, he told them, Sinite parvulos venire ad me, let the little children come to me. The subject is very rare in painting. Another important version, by Artemisia Gentileschi, was identified in 2012 in the sacristy of the church of San Carlo al Corso in Rome.

Nicolas Tournier builds the scene from three groups. On the left a young woman in a wide golden cloak holds one child in her arms and leads another, who leans eagerly towards Christ in the foreground. Christ, dressed in red, stands at the centre and turns his welcoming gesture towards them, while on the right two old apostles are caught in a tight, heated exchange.

Around 1806 an inventory of the Corsini apartments called the picture an original Caravaggio, and it gave Christ's words as nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli, unless you become like little children, a different saying from the Gospel of Matthew. In 1935 the critic Roberto Longhi gave it to Tournier, and apart from one early dissent that name has held. Longhi most admired the woman and her children, and in the marvellous fair-haired child whose gaze fixes us he found a note of quiet rusticity that recalled the Le Nain brothers, French painters of peasant life.

The date is less settled. The museum places the canvas around 1618, a year before the first Roman document to mention Tournier, while other catalogues put it in the mid-1620s.