The Beheading of St. Paul

For the same Bolognese church for which Borromini supplied designs, Algardi carved a bronze relief and the two figures of the Beheading, put in place towards the middle of the century; it was the homage of the sculptor (who in Rome was emerging from the shadow of obscure restoration work on antique marbles, with the commissions for works for St. Peter's) to his native city, which had seen him as a diligent apprentice at the Academy of Ludovico Carracci. Algardi carves the head with unquestionable finesse, diligent and refined, attentive to the transitions of light and shade that mark the calculated torsion of the figure; but in the end rigour and scrupulous precision end up chilling the image, abstracting it from any concrete expressive function in the unfolding of the narrative.