Samson and Delilah

Samson and Delilah was irresistible to Caravaggist painters: betrayal, sensuality, and lamplight converging in a single dramatic moment. Stom’s version, painted around 1630 and now in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, captures the instant before the cutting of Samson’s hair. The Barberini collection context is fitting, as Cardinal Francesco Barberini was one of the great seventeenth-century patrons of Caravaggist painting.

A warm lamplight illuminates Delilah’s face and Samson’s sleeping body while the soldier lurks in half-shadow. Stom’s paint handling is particularly fluid in the draperies, applied in broad, confident strokes.