The Martyrdom of Saints Nereus and Achilleus

When the Corsini household listed its pictures in 1784, this canvas went down as the beheading of two saints, an original by an unknown hand. Later it was given to the Roman school. In 1972 the art historian Mina Gregori returned it to Orazio Riminaldi, a painter from Pisa who had come to Rome among the followers of Caravaggio, and she matched it to a line in an old Pisan source. The 18th-century writer Alessandro da Morrona had recorded that Riminaldi painted, for a Signor Affricano Gerardelli, the martyrdom of two saints with nude figures.

The saints are Nereus and Achilleus, Roman soldiers whose story was already told in the 4th century by Pope Damasus. His verses say they had obeyed the tyrant's orders, then suddenly became Christians, gave up their soldiering and died as martyrs. Scholars place the picture at the end of the 1610s or soon after, the same years as Riminaldi's Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia in Florence, where the figures stand out against a background that is completely dark.