St Peter Walking on the Water

The scene is the storm from Matthew's Gospel. Christ walks across the water, Peter steps out toward him, and the moment Allori catches is the one where the apostle's nerve fails and he begins to sink, reaching back for the hand that will pull him up. The straining, muscular bodies are not accidental. Allori was serious about anatomy. He dissected corpses supplied by the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and wrote a treatise on the rules of drawing the human figure, and that study shows in the way these men are built and posed. He painted the subject on a small copper plate around 1590. The picture later passed through Medici hands and reached the Uffizi in 1753.