The Farewell of Saints Peter and Paul

An old Roman tradition says that Peter and Paul were led out to die together, and that on the road to Ostia their paths divided, each apostle going on to his own execution. A chapel was built at the spot, perhaps as early as the Middle Ages, and it was called the chapel of the Separation. Bernardo Cavallino painted that crossroads in Naples in the second half of the 1640s. The procession halts for a moment. Peter, his wrists tied, blesses his companion, and Paul bows to him with joined hands, the sword of the guard already close behind him. Paul is said to have greeted Peter as the foundation of the churches, and the museum ties those words to the stone on which the column at the right rests, a reminder of Peter's name, which means rock. The Italian state bought the canvas in 1909, and the gallery's catalogue of 1924, by the art historian Federico Hermanin, still read the scene another way, as Saint Peter with Cornelius the centurion, the Roman officer who in the Acts of the Apostles falls at Peter's feet.