The Adoration of the Golden Calf

While Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the law, the Israelites waiting below lost patience. In the Book of Exodus they ask his brother Aaron for a god they can see and give him their gold earrings. He melts them down and casts a calf, and the people feast and dance around it, until Moses comes down the mountain and breaks the tablets in anger. François Perrier painted the subject in Rome in 1642, on a canvas more than two metres wide, and the picture belonged to the Sacchetti, a family of Florentine bankers settled in the city. Its author has not always been clear. An old photograph of it in the archive of the Italian connoisseur Federico Zeri is captioned with the name of Pietro da Cortona, the painter whose first patrons were the Sacchetti, and Zeri noted Perrier's name on the back with a question mark. In 1972 the German art historian Erich Schleier published it in an article on previously unknown paintings by Perrier in Rome.