Un dipinto dimenticato dell’ultimo Polidoro

The history and provenance of an unrecognised Martyrdom of Saint Placidus, long housed in the storerooms of the Museo Civico Castello Ursino in Catania, are reconstructed through nineteenth-century sources which refer to the painting as by Polidoro da Caravaggio and in the collection of Giovanni Battista Finocchiaro. A study of its style and comparisons with Polidoro’s late oeuvre in Sicily confirm the attribution, offering parallels with two similar subjects in Messina and point- ing to a date in the early 1540s. The painting thus belongs to a group that remains hard to define, in which Polidoro’s late technique, swift and sometimes impetuous, prompts the questions of whether they are sketches or finished works, and why and for whom they were painted.