The Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother

Nowhere in the Gospels does the risen Christ appear to his mother. The scene comes from later devotion, told in the Golden Legend, the medieval book of saints' lives, and in the Paris of the 1640s it was contested. Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila had accepted it, while two French churchmen, the abbé de Saint-Cyran and Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Saint-Sulpice seminary, condemned it. Jacques Stella painted it all the same, around 1640 to 1645, in a manner the Louvre calls more Italian than French. His support is an octagon of alabaster about 40 centimetres wide, and he used the veins of the stone to give the scene movement. During the Revolution it was seized from the collection of Quentin Crawford, a Scottish collector living in Paris, and it entered the Louvre in 1797.