The Hospitality of Saint Julian

Julian's legend is a hard one. A stag he was hunting turned and told him he would one day kill his own father and mother, so he moved far away. Years later they arrived at his house while he was out, his wife gave them her own bed, and Julian came home, found two people in it and killed them both. The hospice he and his wife then built beside a river, and the ferry they ran across it, were his penance.

Allori painted the penance. Julian is helping a traveller step out of the boat and up the bank, in a canvas over two and a half metres high that the Medici kept for themselves. In 1653, more than 30 years after the painter died, the grand-ducal tapestry works had Pierre Lefebvre weave the whole composition again in wool and silk.