The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man

Don Taddeo Barberini [1603-1647], Rome, by 1645; his son, Prince Maffeo Barberini [1631-1685];[1] remained in the Barberini family collection until at least 1922;[2] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); purchased 1932 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] Taddeo left Rome in 1645 for Paris, where he died two years later. The painting is listed in his posthumous inventory of 1647-1648 and again in Maffeo's posthumous inventory of 1686; both are published in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, _Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art_, New York, 1975: 196, no. 168, and 400, no. 138. This information was provided by Burton Fredericksen and Margaret Clark of the Getty Provenance Index (letter of 24 February 1986, NGA curatorial files); Eduard Safarik, "Domenico Fetti 1983", in _Il Sciento nell'arte e nella cultura con riferimenti a Mantova_, Mantua, 1985: 52, had reached the same conclusion. Fern Rusk Shapley, _Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XVI-XVIII Century_, London, 1973: 68, and still in Shapley, _Catalogue of the Italian Paintings_, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:178, was unaware of the inventories published by Lavin and of other versions of the subject. She thus conflated references to these versions in the Gonzaga, Crozat, and various English collections into a single erroneous provenance for the Barberini-Washington panel. Lavin 1975: 687, placed the painting owned by Taddeo and Maffeo in the Galleria Corsini in Florence, but as Fredericksen noted, her reference is to Alinari no. 45390, which is a photograph taken of the NGA painting when it was exhibited at the Florence exhibition in 1922. [2] The expert opinion by Roberto Longhi, dated 1932, on the back of a photograph in the Kress Files, NGA, states that this is the painting he discovered in the Barberini collections in 1922 and selected for the Florence exhibition that year, where it was listed as still being in the Barberini collection. [3] According to Shapley 1973: 68, and 1979: 1:179; see also The Kress Collecrion Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2263.