Peter's vision of a sheet with animals

Peter's Vision of a Sheet with Animals, painted around 1619, depicts the New Testament moment (Acts 10:11–16) when Peter, in prayer, saw a great sheet descend from heaven containing all manner of animals — clean and unclean — and heard a voice commanding him to eat. The vision prefigured the opening of the Christian mission to Gentiles, overturning Jewish dietary law as a sign of the universality of salvation. Fetti's treatment belongs to his series of works on New Testament narrative subjects for the Gonzaga court. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna preserves this canvas alongside the other Fetti works that entered the imperial collections from Gonzaga sources.

The vision is rendered with the supernatural illumination characteristic of Fetti's handling of miraculous subjects: a heavenly light source descends with the sheet, casting warm radiance on the kneeling figure of Peter below. The animals in the sheet are rendered with variety and naturalistic attention, requiring the painter to demonstrate skill across multiple animal types simultaneously.