L'ultima comunione di san Girolamo

Agostino Carracci was better known in his day as a printmaker than a painter, and he took this altarpiece almost impossibly slowly, setting it aside for years at a stretch until a church official finally pressed him to finish it in the late 1590s. It shows the aged Saint Jerome, the scholar who put the Bible into Latin, receiving communion one last time as he sinks toward death. It hung in a charterhouse in Bologna, facing a picture by his cousin Ludovico. The composition had a long afterlife. A generation later the younger Bolognese painter Domenichino leaned on its arrangement so closely for his own version that a rival publicly accused him of theft, in one of the loudest plagiarism quarrels in Italian art.