The Martyrdom of Saint Stephen

Only one painting by Bernardo Cavallino carries a date: a Saint Cecilia of 1645 in Florence. He signed about eight pictures out of roughly eighty now given to him, left no documents worth the name, and probably died in the plague that emptied Naples in 1656. Everything else about his work has been argued into place from that one fixed year, which is why the museum dates this canvas only to around 1645 and the scholar who first published it, in 1965, gave it a five-year window. Stephen kneels in the red dalmatic of a deacon, hands crossed on his chest, looking up, with the stones already lying around his knees. At the left a knot of men is still pulling off outer clothes, the detail Acts gives when the witnesses lay their garments aside. The picture has no traceable history before about 1950, when it was in a private collection in Birmingham. It was bought on the London art market in 1954 and came to the Prado in 1989 as a gift.