Picart, Étienne (1632-1721), after Lanfranco, Giovanni (1582-1647; Italian)
Séparation de St Peter and St Paul [The Separation of Saints Peter and Paul] 1679
Engraving
Gift of George Collins Levey 1879
National Gallery of Victoria (p.183.3-1)
= Levey gift, cat.18
Lanfranco’s canvas, in Cardinal Mazarin’s collection by 1653, was acquired by Louis XIV in 1671. Transferred from Versailles to the Louvre in 1899, and then back to Versailles in 1949, it has been at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Carcassonne since 2012: see comparative photo below.
The imagery apparently refers to the story of Peter and Paul’s arrest and subsequent martyrdoms in Rome in about 66 AD, during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Nero. According to tradition, Peter was crucified upside down (at his request), while Paul was beheaded.
[photo: Lanfranco’s canvas in Carcassonne]
Refs.
Not listed in NGV 1894 or 1905
See https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/37610/ (not reproduced; as by an unknown engraver). Cf. Suite et Arrangement (1727), p.1; Duplessis Cabinet du roi (1869), p.7
For Lanfranco’s painting (reproduced above), see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_Saints_Peter_and_Paul_(Giovanni_Lanfranco) (accessed 24 March 2020). Before seeing this image, I mistakenly suggested (in an earlier version of the present catalogue entry) that the iconography relates to the debate between Peter and Paul in Antioch in 50 AD regarding whether Christian salvation was available only to Jews or all mankind: see now my detailed discussion in Gregory & Zdanowicz Rembrandt in the Collections of the NGV (1988), pp.21ff. (concerning the Rembrandt painting in the NGV generally known as ‘Two Old Men Disputing”). However, the present image obviously relates to the final years of both men’s lives