The Denial of Saint Peter

For most of the 20th century this painting had no author. Roberto Longhi, the scholar who did more than anyone to recover Caravaggio's Roman followers, gathered some 60 canvases under an invented name, the Master of the Judgement of Solomon, and this was one of them. In 2002 Gianni Papi argued that the invented master was in fact the young Jusepe de Ribera, a Spaniard who reached Rome at about 15 and worked there for a decade before going south to Naples. That attribution is now widely accepted, though it is not closed. Meanwhile the picture itself had been hanging in Rome since 1883, when the Corsini family's collection passed to the Italian state. Ribera sets Peter's denial in what looks like a tavern, three soldiers at dice, one of them turning to look straight out at the room.