The Raising of Lazarus

By 1617, when Cardinal Scipione Borghese paid Alessandro Turchi for a group of pictures, Caravaggio had been dead for seven years, and Rome was full of painters working in his manner. Carlo Saraceni from Venice, the Dutchman Gerrit van Honthorst and several French painters were all working with figures that loom out of darkness. Turchi took that language and made it lighter and more decorative, as this small Lazarus shows.

It catches the moment in John's Gospel when Christ calls out, "Lazarus, come forth." Christ points, a woman kneels with open hands, and the dead man, still wrapped in his shroud, turns toward the voice while a man in a red cap leans over his shoulder. Near the bottom edge a painted 44 matches the number the picture carried in the Borghese inventory of 1790.