The Virgin and Child with Saint John of Nepomuk

In 1729 Pope Benedict XIII made John of Nepomuk a saint. He was a Prague priest drowned in the Vltava in 1393 on the orders of King Wenceslaus IV, and he was venerated across the Habsburg lands. Within a few years Sebastiano Conca painted him kneeling before the Virgin and Child. An angel presses a finger to its lips beside a scroll reading Posuit custodiam ori suo, he set a guard on his mouth, because John is said to have refused to tell the king what the queen had confessed. Another angel brings a wreath of stars, a child lifts the martyr's palm, and a bridge rises in the gloom behind. The Italian state bought the canvas in 1921 as the work of Carlo Maratti, the leading Roman painter of the generation before, until the art historian Roberto Longhi found a signed drawing by Conca for it.