An attribute made of the cross itself

Peter is named by keys, from the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which the keys of the kingdom are given to him. This title names a subject in which the keys have no place, and the tradition supplies a substitute that is just as fixed: the inverted cross. It comes from the account that Peter asked not to die in the same position as Christ, and the shape alone has been enough to identify him for centuries. It is a rare case of an attribute that is also a piece of stage machinery — the thing that names him is the thing the scene is built around. 22 titles in this collection name Peter.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1601 and gives Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome as its location — a church rather than a museum, which only a handful of entries here do. The dimensions are 230 x 175 cm. It is filed under male portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Baroque and Tenebrism as the styles and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour families are brown and yellow.

Tenebrism, on a diagonal

Tenebrism names a picture built almost entirely out of shadow, with light admitted narrowly and used to select what the eye is allowed to find. 34 entries in this collection carry that label. Applied to a subject whose central object is a wooden frame being raised, it leaves the frame as one of the few things the light reaches.