Ultima comunione di san Girolamo

When this altarpiece went up in a Roman church in 1614, people came across the city to see it, and for two centuries critics ranked it just below Raphael's Transfiguration. It shows the aged Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, receiving his final communion as he nears death. But it also started a fight. A rival painter, Giovanni Lanfranco, accused Domenichino of stealing the composition from an earlier version by his own teacher, Agostino Carracci. Domenichino admitted he had studied it closely, and the quarrel became one of the first public disputes over artistic plagiarism. Napoleon's troops later carried the picture off to Paris. After his fall it came back to Rome, to the Vatican, where it hangs now.