Christ before the High Priest, Gerrit van Honthorst, about 1617

Honthorst painted this around 1617, during the decade he spent in Rome as a young man barely into his twenties. He was working in the household of his patron, the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, and the picture was made for Giustiniani's palace, not for a church.

The whole scene turns on a single candle flame on the table between Christ and the seated priest questioning him, most likely Caiaphas, though the identification has been argued over since the seventeenth century. Everything outside the candle's reach falls into total darkness. It is this style, learned in Rome and carried home to Utrecht, that earned Honthorst his nickname among Italians: Gherardo delle Notti, Gerard of the Nights.

The painting stayed in private hands for three centuries before the National Gallery in London bought it in 1922. It hangs there today, catalogued as NG3679.

Corinthian's wallet is set from a public-domain photograph of the painting, the candlelit scene carried across the leather face, its dark ground reading as the body of the wallet.

Source: The National Gallery, London, NG3679 — nationalgallery.org.uk