To celebrate Classic Art London, Summer 2026, Trinity Fine Art is delighted to present

Gentileschi – St Jerome

which examines a masterpiece by the ardent admirer and colleague of Caravaggio, painted in 1610.

What makes the present picture so unique, as well as key to our understanding of what “dipingere dal naturale” (painting from life) entailed, is the fact that we can identify the person who posed for the picture and even hear his experience of doing so.  He was a seventy-two-year-old pilgrim from Palermo named Giovanni Pietro Molli.  Prior to August 1611, he had lived in Rome for a year and half, returning again on March 19, 1612, the same year in which he was called as a witness at the trial held at the Corte Savella in Rome in July and September-October of 1612 regarding the rape of Orazio’s daughter Artemisia by a former colleague, Agostino Tassi, in March of the preceding year.

“Signor Orazio Gentileschi, the painter, made use of me to portray a similar head in some paintings he was undertaking, and in a full-length St Jerome; He had me undress from the waist up to paint a Saint Jerome similar to me, and for this purpose he kept me at his house during the whole of that Lent, because three or four days a week I always had to go to his house and on some days that I went I stayed there from morning to evening and ate and drank in his house and he paid me for my days but to sleep I returned to my house…”

From the testimony of Giovanni Pietro Molli – 27 July 1612

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