In a recent article in this Magazine, David Stone proposed a new reading of Caravaggio's 1608 Beheading of St John the Baptist within the architectural and decorative context of the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato in the Conventual Church of St John, Valletta.' He also drew attention to the significant transformation of the hall later in the seventeenth century, with the addition of paintings and decorations by Mattia Preti and then of a magnificent altar ensemble. In 1689, a vast new silver and gilt-copper reliquary containing the right hand of St John the Baptist (Fig. 1) became the most important objet-d'art in the oratory. Set on the altar, beneath a full- size, white, gessoed-wood statuary group of the Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist which had been installed there in 1653, the shimmering reliquary dominated,indeed almost completely obscured, Caravaggio's vast tenebrous canvas (Fig.2). In fact, the impact of Caravaggio's painting was so radically diminished that an important late- seventeenth century manuscript description of the Oratory, written by Fra Giovanni Domenico Manso, who had participated in planning the new decorations, fails even to mention it.2

Among the many Seicento families who flashed across the Roman scene only to vanish into oblivion are the Ginetti, whose lavish marble chapel is one of the finest in the church of S. Andrea della Valle. Their fortune was made as cloth merchants in Velletri, where they lived until the marriage of Giovanni Battista Ginetti to Olimpia Ponzianelli, a scion of the capitoline nobility, in the late Cinquecento.' All three of Giovanni Battista's sons were educated in Rome: Giuseppe (later ennobled as marchese di Roccagorga) and Giovanni followed military careers, while Marzio entered the Curia and was appointed cardinal under Urban VIII in 1626 also assuming the post of Vicar of Rome (in which he continued under five Popes).2 He was considered avaricious and accused of aiming at the Papacy.3 Giuseppe remained a bachelor, but Giovanni sired three sons, Giovanni Francesco, Giovanni Paolo and Marzio (here called marchese Marzio to distinguish him from his uncle). Marzio married Girolama dei Cavalieri, another member of the Capitoline nobility, and his brothers both followed curial careers.

Nineteen years ago, in an article concerned with Sisto Badalocchio's Burial of Christ painted for the Oratorio della Morte in Reggio Emilia, Carel van Tuyll suggested that the inspiration for thisnow fragmentary altar-piece and the prototype for a number of small paintings of the same subject was a lost picture by Annibale Carracci.' He was not the first to hypothesise the existence of such a work. When cataloguing one such picture at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1967 James Byam Shaw drew up a preliminary list of paintings that repeated the composition, the finest of which, in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, was attributed to Badalocchio (it is here shown in its newly cleaned state in Fig.32). He concluded: 'the fact that so many versions of the composition exist suggests that the prototype may have been by a more important artist; and our picture [i.e. the version at Christ Church] may be no more than ancareful examination of seventeenth-century biographical sources and inventories, Van Tuyll was able to establish that such a work had indeed existed, and that it was painted by Annibale in 1594-95 for a member of the Sampieri family of Bologna, from which it was acquired in 1811 with the rest of the Sampieri collection by Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy and, from 1817, Duke ofLeuchtenberg.3 The first certain visual record is an engraving (Fig.33) by the curator of the Leuchtenberg gallery, J.N. Muxel, that first appeared in 1835 and then again in Passavant's 1852 catalogue of the Leuchtenberg pictures. The picture, described by Waagen in 1864, was sold in the early years of this century and virtually lost sight of until last year, when it appeared at auction in New York with an attribution to Sisto Badalocchio and was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig.31).4