Joseph and Potiphar's wife

The attribution for this hitherto unknown work has recently been confirmed by Stefania Mason who plans to publish the picture in the near future (written communication, 6 September 2006). On thematic grounds and taking into consideration the emphasis of the figures within the cramped pictorial space, she compares it closely to the artist's Samson and Delilah in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. Furthermore, she likens the female facial type to those used in the Three Graces (also Rome, Accademia di San Luca); the female posture to the Lot and her Daughters (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum); and she compares Joseph's face to that of the angel on the right side of Christ in the Christ supported by Angels (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). All these works are datable to the start of the second decade of the seventeenth century and she proposes a date of circa 1610 for the present work.

The composition was previously known by virtue of an etching in reverse, signed by the artist, and re-engraved by Luca Camberlano (1580-1641). It originally featured in a book entitled De excellentia et nobilitate delineationis libri duo by Giacomo Franco, for which Palma provided all the illustrations, printed in Venice in 1611 and republished under a different title in 1636.