The release of St Peter

The Apostle Peter's miraculous release from prison by an angel — described in Acts 12 — was a significant subject for Counter-Reformation art, representing divine intervention in the face of state persecution. Strozzi's 1635 canvas in the Art Gallery of New South Wales depicts the moment the angel wakes Peter in his cell and leads him past the sleeping guards. The subject's relevance to Rome's centralising programme was not subtle: Peter, the rock on which the Church was built, could not be contained by earthly power. Strozzi's treatment, like most seventeenth-century versions, emphasises the contrast between the sleeping soldiers (human failure to prevent the divine) and Peter's wondering awakening. The AGNSW holds this as one of its significant Italian Baroque acquisitions, representative of the period's confident integration of dramatic narrative and contemplative religious subject matter.

The nocturnal setting of the prison scene required Strozzi to work primarily with artificial light — the angel's radiance supplanting candles or lamps as the illumination source. This chiaroscuro challenge, popularised by Caravaggio, allowed dramatic contrasts between the glowing angel and the dark cell. The sleeping guards' slumped forms provide compositional grounding below the vertical axis of Peter and the angel.