The Crucifixion of Saint Peter

Saint Peter, by tradition, asked to be crucified head down, unworthy to die as Christ had died. In 1601 Caravaggio painted that moment for the Cerasi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and a few years later the same subject went to a young painter from Bologna. Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, ordered it from Guido Reni for San Paolo alle Tre Fontane, the abbey church outside the walls on the spot where Paul was said to have been beheaded. Reni painted it in 1604 and 1605, and the museum counts it as his first success in Rome.

His biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, writing in 1678, told a sharper story. The painter Cavalier d'Arpino, he claimed, steered the commission Reni's way to wound Caravaggio, who accused the newcomer of stealing his manner and warned him that he would rather fight with fists than with brushes. Whatever the truth of that, the debt to Caravaggio is clear, and the museum notes how Reni lowers the pitch of the drama. Around 1787 the panel left the church for the papal palace on the Quirinal, and since 1819 it has belonged to the Vatican's picture gallery.