Liberation of Saint Peter

Liberation of Saint Peter, painted in 1621 and now in the Birmingham Museum of Art, depicts the miraculous release of the apostle Peter from Herod's prison, recounted in Acts 12. An angel wakes the sleeping, chained Peter, whose bonds fall away as he is led to freedom. The subject had considerable theological currency in the Counter-Reformation period, demonstrating divine protection of the Church's founding leader and, by extension, the papacy. Lanfranco painted this around the same time he was working on other Old and New Testament subjects for Roman clients, demonstrating the range of his scriptural knowledge and his ability to move fluently between sacred narrative registers. The Birmingham provenance indicates the work's eventual absorption into the Anglophone art market.

Oil on canvas, the nocturnal prison setting gave Lanfranco a natural laboratory for Caravaggesque chiaroscuro: the angel's light cuts through darkness to illuminate Peter's awakening, creating the kind of dramatic illumination that Baroque painters and their clients consistently valued in night scenes.