Solomon Worshipping Idols

In 1688 Sebastiano Ricci, then a young painter, left his wife and daughter in Bologna and ran off to Turin with Maddalena, the daughter of the painter Giovanni Peruzzini. He was arrested there, and by the early accounts he came close to being executed before his patron, Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma, obtained his release. 36 years later, around 1724, Ricci was painting for the royal house of Savoy, the rulers of that same city.

This canvas belongs to the start of that work. Its subject comes from the First Book of Kings. In his old age Solomon, the wise king who had built the Temple in Jerusalem, was led by his many foreign wives to worship their gods. Ricci puts the king on his knees before the statue of an idol at the centre of the picture.

The canvas was restored in 2008 at the conservation centre of the Venaria Reale outside Turin, and the next year it travelled to Brussels for an exhibition on the splendours of the Savoy court. It now hangs in Sala 42, in the same room as Ricci's Moses and his Daniel.