La Circoncision du Christ

Guercino painted this in 1646 as the high altarpiece for a convent church of nuns in Bologna, where he was by then the city's leading painter. It has not stayed whole or in place. A curved panel of God the Father and the Holy Spirit once crowned it, and that piece now hangs separately in Bologna. The altarpiece itself left Italy after Napoleon's armies swept up religious paintings from suppressed churches, and since 1811 it has hung in Lyon, far from the altar it was made for. The scene keeps the quiet gravity of Guercino's late manner, the priest bending over the infant while Mary and Joseph look on in the warm brown light he favoured in these years.