Denial of Saint Peter

The bird that does the naming

Peter's keys are absent from this subject, and something else takes their place. The denial is one of the few episodes in the Gospels with a built-in timekeeper — the cock that crows — and painting has used the bird as the identifying element ever since. It is not an attribute Peter carries; it is an attribute that happens to him, and its presence in a picture of an old man among strangers is what makes the scene readable without a caption. 2 titles in this collection name the denial.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1610 and gives the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as its location. The dimensions are 94 x 125 cm, wider than tall — the format of figures gathered at close range rather than a scene with somewhere to stand. It is filed under group portraiture and Religion, with Baroque and Tenebrism as the styles and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Why the categories say group

The record indexes this as group portraiture and does not file it under religious cultural heritage at all, which sets it apart from most of the martyrdom subjects here. That is a fair reading of what the title describes: not an execution, not a miracle, but an exchange between people. The attribute system carries the identification; the category field is recording the kind of picture it sits in.