The Tears of Saint Peter

After the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church held up Saint Peter's tears as proof that sorrow and confession could wash away even a grave sin, and the scene became a favourite with painters. Peter had denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Here the old apostle sits in a brown cloak, hands locked together, tears in his eyes, looking toward something beyond the frame. On a broken fluted column at the upper left stands the cock itself, which the museum reads as a sign of the betrayal and also of dawn. Who painted the canvas is still open. An 1833 Borghese inventory listed it as a work by Jusepe de Ribera, the Spanish painter based in Naples. Later scholars proposed Giacinto Brandi, active in Rome, or an unnamed naturalist of around 1640. The museum files it simply as Roman, from the second quarter of the 17th century.