La Virgen y el unicornio (Virgen con un unicornio)

Around 1604 the Palazzo Farnese in Rome held the most talked-about ceiling in the city: Annibale Carracci and his workshop were covering the vault of the Farnese Gallery with painted gods and lovers, and every ambitious young painter wanted in. One of them was Domenichino, barely into his twenties and newly arrived from Bologna. This fresco over the entrance is his, a young woman leading a white unicorn by a slender cord. The old legend held that a unicorn, untameable by any hunter, would lie down meekly beside a virgin, and that was how you caught one. Domenichino gives the scene a calm, classical steadiness that would become his signature and set him apart from the more flamboyant Roman painters around him. He would go on to run some of the biggest fresco commissions in Italy, but here he is still a junior hand on someone else's ceiling.