The Good Samaritan

Domenico Fetti's Good Samaritan, painted around 1618-22, illustrates Christ's parable of compassion across social boundaries. Fetti painted a celebrated series of New Testament parables during his years at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, creating small, intensely colored compositions that combined religious meaning with genre-like naturalism. These parable paintings were widely copied and influenced religious genre painting throughout the seventeenth century.

Fetti's oil-on-wood technique produces a rich, warm palette with the painterly freedom characteristic of his parable series. The intimate scale and loose brushwork create a sense of immediate narrative drama, while the landscape setting is treated with atmospheric breadth.