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The former attribution to Parmigianino (1503-1540) is untenable. The style suggest knowledge of the work of both Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596) and Samacchini (1532-1577).
As Sylvie Béguin pointed out in a note on the modern museum matte (1980), this is a copy of the painting in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, once given to Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596) and now accepted as by Bagnacavallo junior (inv. no. 541). The same copyist may have been responsible for the drawing of St. Paul Raising Patroclus after Antonio Campi (D01849).
The composition resembles in reverse the lower half of Cambiaso´s great altarpiece in the monastery of San Lorenzo, El Escorial (now Sala de Capas), painted in Genoa and dispatched in 1581, two years before the artist himself transferred to Spain as court painter to Philip II. The altarpiece did not remain for long over the high altar of the basilica, being substituted at some point between 1586
