Sebastiano Ricci

The rare subject is taken from Judges 14, 5-9. Samson returns home from a journey to marry a woman of Timma with honey taken from the stomach of a lion he had killed with his bare hands. The attribution was first suggested at the time of the 2009 exhibition by Dr. Filippo Pedrocco, who proposed a dating around 1700, and was endorsed by Prof. George Knox, who also regarded this as an early work by the painter. Scarpa Sonino suggests that it belongs to a phase between Ricci's Emilian period and his arrival in Rome in 1691. She compares the figure of Samson's mother to a type used, for example, in Ricci's Abraham and the three angels in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, and the monumentality of the figures of Samson and his father with those in his painting of Tarquin consulting Attus Navius, today in the Getty Museum, California, both works of around 1690-91.¹

^1 See J. Daniels, Sebastiano Ricci, Hove 1976, pp. 45 and 69–70, nos 130 and 219, reproduced figs 137 and 135.