The Coronation of the Virgin with Saint Augustine and Saint William of Aquitaine

Around 1616 Lanfranco decorated a whole chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome for Bernardino Buongiovanni, a lawyer at the papal court, and this canvas was painted for its altar. It is not the one that hangs there. The altarpiece still in the chapel repeats the design in reverse and adds God the Father in the sky above, and one explanation offered for the change is that the patron wanted him in the picture.

Here Christ, bare-chested in a white cloak, lifts a crown over his mother on a bank of cloud. Below them look up the two saints the chapel is dedicated to. Saint Augustine, whose rule the friars of the church followed, kneels in a bishop's gold cope and throws his arms wide. Behind him, hands joined, in a dark habit, is Saint William of Aquitaine, a duke who in the legend told of him gave up his lands to live as a hermit, and whom the Augustinians counted as one of their own. At the lower left a small angel holds a book open on the ground.

The discarded canvas ended up in Paris, in the collection of Pierre-Alexis Ponce de La Feuille, and in 1671 it was bought from him for Louis XIV.