The Sacrifice of Isaac

For a long stretch of its life this canvas belonged to somebody else. The old Medici inventories entered it under Cristofano Allori, and the Italian state catalogue still lists Giovanni Bilivert as an alternative hand. Battelli gave it back to Cigoli and current scholarship follows him. The muddle is easy to understand, since Allori and Bilivert were both his pupils, all three were painting in the same years in the same manner, and a 17th-century inventory clerk had no reason to care which of them held the brush. It was probably painted in Rome for Cardinal Pompeo Arrigoni, with the dating swinging between the painter's first Roman stay of 1604 to 1605 and his second of 1606 to 1607. The subject is from Genesis, Abraham with the knife over the bound Isaac and the angel catching his arm.