Domine, quo vadis?

The story on this small wooden panel is an old legend of the early Church. Saint Peter, fleeing Nero's Rome to save his life, meets Christ walking the other way, into the city, and asks where he is going. Christ answers that he is going to Rome to be crucified a second time, and Peter, shamed, turns back toward his own death. Annibale Carracci painted it around 1601, in a Rome then rebuilding its faith after the Reformation and hungry for exactly these stories of martyrs. It was almost certainly made for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, whose own name-saint was Peter. Christ fills much of the panel, one arm flung out toward the road, and the whole encounter is compressed into that single startled gesture.