The Rapture of Saint Paul

In his second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes of a man he knew who was caught up into the third heaven and heard words no one is permitted to repeat, and readers have long taken that man to be Paul himself. Domenichino paints the moment on a sheet of copper about half a metre high, the apostle lifted by three small angels, arms flung wide, his red cloak billowing round him.

He made it around 1607 or 1608 for Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi, a learned cleric who ran the household of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Rome and was one of the painter's first supporters there. It was one of three small pictures for the same patron. The second, a Saint Jerome, survives, and the third, a Saint Francis at prayer, is lost. Before 1643 this one was in Paris, where its owner gave it to the Jesuit house on the rue Saint-Antoine, and around 1685 it passed from the Jesuits to Louis XIV. The Louvre also owns Nicolas Poussin's version of the subject, painted some 40 years later for the poet Paul Scarron.