Saint Praxedis

If it is by Vermeer, this would be his earliest surviving painting: a religious work dated 1655 that copies an Italian original by the Florentine Baroque painter Felice Ficherelli. Saint Praxedis was an early Roman Christian who, by legend, gathered the blood of murdered martyrs with a sponge. Here she kneels in red and yellow robes and wrings a blood-soaked sponge into an ornate vessel, a beheaded martyr lying behind her. The attribution to Vermeer remains disputed, and the picture has at times been catalogued simply as a copy after Ficherelli by an unknown hand.

The Italian source

Ficherelli (1605–1660), nicknamed “il Riposo,” painted the original Saint Praxedis around 1640–1645; it has never left Italy and remains in a private collection in Ferrara. The copy follows it closely but adds one telling detail absent in the Ferrara picture, a crucifix held in the saint’s hands. For Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., who championed the Vermeer attribution in a 1986 article, the added crucifix suited a painter who had converted to Catholicism around the time of his 1653 marriage, and John Michael Montias speculated that Delft Jesuits may have commissioned the copy.

The case for and against

Wheelock pointed to similarities between the saint’s features and the sleeping servant in A Maid Asleep, arguing that the brushwork and the buildup of the heads were analogous to Vermeer’s. The conservator Jørgen Wadum challenged the attribution in 1998, noting the “trembling” wavy strokes in the red drapery, unlike Vermeer’s known work, and pentimenti that sit oddly in a literal copy. He also questioned the two signatures, a “Meer 1655” at lower left and a faint inscription at lower right read by some as “Meer naar Riposo,” meaning a copy after Riposo.

Pigment evidence and the 2014 sale

Ahead of the painting’s 2014 sale, lead-isotope analysis of the white paint indicated a northern European origin consistent with mid-seventeenth-century Dutch practice, and one sample matched lead white in Vermeer’s Diana and her Companions closely enough that conservators suggested a shared batch. Later study cautioned that matching isotope ratios can arise from shared raw materials and do not by themselves fix authorship. Christie’s sold the picture as a Vermeer in July 2014, and since 2015 it has been on long-term loan to the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.