Die Befreiung Petri

Honthorst, born in Utrecht in 1592 and dead there in 1656, had trained under Abraham Bloemaert in his native city before leaving for Rome about 1615; the museum dates this canvas to 1616 or 1618 and calls it the earliest recorded commissioned painting of his Roman years. It was made for Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, the Roman collector and connoisseur in whose palace the painter lodged and mixed with artists of the city, and whose liking for the naturalism of Caravaggio the gallery describes as unusually modern for its day; the museum adds that Honthorst may have borrowed the angel’s gesture from a Caravaggio then in the marchese’s own collection. The subject is the deliverance of the apostle Peter from prison, told in the twelfth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and the museum calls the picture’s German title “the freeing of Peter”. Rubens, who the gallery records as an equal in fame and standing, visited Honthorst’s Utrecht studio in 1627. The painting entered Berlin in 1815 with the Giustiniani collection.