17th-century Follower of Sebastiano del Piombo

Private collection, New York, by 2023.

P. Baker-Bates, "Copies and Versions in Sebastiano's Art? The Christ Carrying the Cross," in Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo: The Compass and the Mirror, M. Wivel (ed.), Turnhout 2021, p. 70, reproduced fig. 18.



Focusing on a lone bearded figure in a rocky landscape, this composition depicts the hermetic Saint Anthony Abbot looking up as God the Father appears before him. The existence of several autograph, workshop, and sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century versions of the painting attest to the image's importance and almost immediate popularity. These include a canvas sold at Christie's, New York for $3,150,000 in April 2021; a panel in the chapel in Musée National du Château de Compiègne (inv. no. 841); a canvas in the John G. Johnson collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. no. 193); and a reduced copy on panel of the composition's upper half in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (inv. no. 420), presently attributed to Girolamo Muziano. In addition to the difference in support among these, the inscriptions (and the incorporation of both cursive and block capital letters) and background elements also differ.