The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Around 1620 the painter Domenico Fetti made his name in Mantua and Venice with a series of small pictures illustrating the parables Christ told in the Gospels, and his workshop repeated the popular ones. This is one of them: the Good Samaritan, the traveller who stops to help a stranger beaten and left by the roadside after others have walked past. Fetti's idea was to tell these stories at close range, with ordinary figures in a plain landscape, so the lesson felt like something happening on a nearby road rather than a sermon. The version here comes from his workshop rather than his own hand, made while the subject was in demand. The wounded man and his helper carry the whole story, which is why Fetti kept the setting simple and the cast small.