Saint Peter

The title is the only thing calling him a saint

Peter's keys are the most familiar attribute in Western painting, and a picture of a grey-bearded man holding them needs no further explanation. What is unusual in this entry is the record itself: the categories give male portraiture and two style labels, and no religious heading at all. Of the 611 works in this collection, 171 carry a Religion tag; this one does not. Strip the title away and the fields describe a portrait of an old man.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1620 and gives Private Collection as its location. No dimensions are recorded. The styles are Baroque and Tenebrism, and the nationality is Dutch; the measured colour family is brown.

Tenebrism outside Italy

Tenebrism — a picture built out of darkness with light admitted narrowly — is usually associated with Rome, and 34 entries in this collection carry the label. A Dutch entry with that tag is a reminder that the method travelled: painters who had worked in Italy took the lighting home with them, and the manner arrived in the north as a technique rather than as a school. On a half-length saint the practical consequence is the same wherever it is used. There is no room for a setting, so the light falls on a face, on hands, and on whatever those hands are holding — which, in the working logic of an attribute, is exactly where it has to fall.