The Raising of Lazarus

In the mid-1550s Michelangelo was about 80, still directing the building of Saint Peter's, and a word from him could make a painter's name in Rome. He saw this canvas at the Palazzo di San Marco, today Palazzo Venezia, and praised it openly. Its author was Girolamo Muziano, a newcomer from the Brescia area still in his twenties, who had signed it and painted it, probably in 1555, at Subiaco in the hills east of Rome, for Francesco Colonna, an archbishop of the great Roman family.

The subject is the Gospel story of Lazarus, four days dead in his tomb at Bethany when Christ called him back out, and Muziano spread it across almost four and a half metres. The picture stayed tied to him to the end. After his death in 1592 it hung above his own tomb in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and it went on to the papal palace on the Quirinal before reaching this gallery.