The Calling of St Peter Walking on the Water

Allori came back to Peter on the water more than once, and this is a later treatment from around 1595. The title leans on the word calling, the moment Christ summons the fisherman across the impossible surface of the sea and Peter, for a few steps, believes enough to walk on it. It is a subject about faith and the failure of nerve, and it plainly held Allori's interest late in his life. By the 1590s the polished Florentine manner he had practised for forty years was going out of fashion, with a rougher, more dramatic naturalism rising to the south in Rome. He kept to the style he knew. This panel stayed in Florentine collections and is now in the Uffizi.