Il giudizio di Salomone

This huge canvas was left unfinished, and that turns out to be the interesting thing about it. Sebastiano del Piombo painted it in Venice in the early 1500s, when he was young and still working near Giorgione, and it was among the most ambitious narrative pictures the city had seen. The subject is the Old Testament judgment of Solomon, the king testing two women who each claim the same baby by offering to cut it in half. A restoration in the 1980s stripped away later overpaint and showed that Sebastiano changed his mind more than once, three different compositions surfacing beneath the paint. When the poet Byron urged an English traveller to buy the picture in 1820, it was passing as a work by Giorgione. It hangs today in an English country house in Dorset.