Conserved in the private chapel of Gesualdo's church, Santa Maria delle Grazie, the painting underwent important restorations in the late twentieth century, following the destructive Irpinia earthquake of 1980.

A unique testimony, in the field of religious painting, to the devotion of the composer prince, Il Perdono di Gesualdo has been the object of numerous commentaries and analyses since the seventeenth century.

"[2] Denis Morrier points out that this monastery was “endowed with a comfortable annuity by Gesualdo.” The chapel bears an inscription recalling that the prince began its construction in 1592:[3] Dominvs Carolvs Gesvaldvs Compsae Comes VII.

Don Carlo Gesualdo, VIIth count of Conza, IIIrd prince of Venosa, Had this temple erected, Dedicated to the Virgin Mother, Domicile of Religion And incentive to piety, In the year of grace 1592.

[18] Today, the revelatory circumstances surrounding this commission are well established: Glenn Watkins sees in them a perfect example of Ars moriendi, “where elements of the Last Judgement and the search for pardon are principle themes.”[19] In fact, the American musicologist paints a powerful picture of the state Gesualdo found himself in during the early seventeenth century: “the Prince’s health was in such decline that many feared for his life.

But the influence of the Counter-Reformation affected more than the painting's modesty: the most impressive alteration was done to the figure of Eleonora d’Este, entirely covered by a Capuchin Poor Clare nun in a monastic robe.

According to Françoise Viatte, “his drawing style, directly descendent from the teaching of Vasari and very close to that of Naldini, is marked by an attachment to traditional models of representation.”[33] William Griswold, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adds that, “Although he was a prolific artist, profoundly influenced by Naldini, Balducci was a timid draftsman, and his pen drawings—characterized by thin, nervous contours and pale washes—are seldom to be confused with those of his master.”[34] Francesco Abbate therefore describes the Perdono di Gesualdo as “a prestigious commission” for a painter of minor importance who had not found a way to impose himself in the face of “fierce competition in Rome,”[35] and whose pictorial technique was readily critiqued by his colleague Filippo Baldinucci as “mannered and somewhat crude.”[36] From the seventeenth century to the present, art historians and music critics have been interested in the painting primarily for the “history” it evokes.

[39] In his analysis of the Perdono, Glenn Watkins suggests that Gesualdo intended for his wife to appear “as the sole person in the painting to maintain a blank frontal stare, a completely passive witness to the implorations of forgiveness.”[40] Biographical information on the couples marriage sheds some light on the nature of their conjugal relations: with the support of her brother Cesare d’Este, Eleonora obtained her husband's permission to return to the court of Modena, where she stayed first from October 1607 to November 1608, then again from October 1609 to November 1610, “not without provoking the irritation of Gesualdo, who implored her to return to the conjugal residence.”[41] Considering this absence, her portrait was likely created from a pre-existing portrait, such as the one conserved in the house of Este museum at the Ducal Palace of Modena, rather than from life.

[42] The portrait of Carlo Gesualdo has an otherworldly eloquence: clothed in black, his tense face resting on his Spanish ruff, his gaze dark despite his blue-grey eyes, his hair cut short, his beard sparse, his air austere and his hands joined together.

Gesualdo appears in it as “a bloated, obese figure with Daliesque moustache and billy-goatee.”[46] The second, dating probably from the seventeenth century but only discovered in the early 1990s, has been reproduced on the cover of numerous scores.

[47] A final portrait, a fresco in Gesualdo's Church of san Nicola, shows the composer––sword at his side, hands together, smiling enigmatically––following the Pope Liberius among a procession of cardinals with his wife Eleonora, all under the benevolent gaze of the Virgin and the baby Jesus.

[59] Pointing to the influence of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend on Renaissance art, Glenn Watkins reveals a layer of signification that a modern spectator might not see: “The collection of saints in the altarpiece clearly held a special meaning as all of them, like Gesualdo, had encountered the devil or demons but had nonetheless prevailed.”[60] In his first book, Gesualdo, the Man and his Music, the American musicologist notes that the prince thought of the flagellation that adolescent boys, hired for this purpose, performed on him as a form of exorcism to drive his demons away.

Denis Morrier believes that “they can be approached as purely symbolic representations.” However, historians and musicologists have proposed diverse interpretations by lending a complacent ear to the dark tales of the composer's biography.

The theme thus became a topos among others, providing beaux-esprits with ample subject matter to poeticise.”[77] In France, Pierre de Bourdeille, Lord of Brantôme, took up the narrative in his Lives of Noble Women (first discourse: “On the ladies who make love and cuckold their husband”).

“Crime and divine punishment, fault and expiation: barely twenty years after the death of the prince, all the ingredients were already in place for the mythic edification of the character of Gesualdo,” who become “the bloody murderer of the nineteenth century historiographies, the monster tortured by his conscience and by the ghost of his wife.”[85] Dennis Morrier notes that “the presence of the small child at the centre of the painting has caused much speculation.”[86] Three possible explanations have been considered.

"[87] During his reclusion, “Believing that he recognised in its features a resemblance to the Duke of Andria, he had the cradle, and within it the unfortunate child, suspended by means of silk ropes attached to the four corners of the ceiling in the large hall of his castle.

He then commanded the cradle to be subjected to ‘violent undulatory movements,’ until the infant, unable to draw breath, ‘rendered up its innocent soul to God’.”[88] It is even said that Gesualdo covered up the child’s cries with the sound of musicians performing one of his macabre madrigals.

The docufiction Death for Five Voices, directed by Werner Herzog for ZDF in 1995, associates this event with the madrigal Belta, poi che t’assenti of the Sixth Book of Madrigals,[89] a composition “on the beauty of death”[90] with audacious chromatics that “completely disorient the listener”[91] even today: Beltà, poi che t'assenti Come ne porti il cor porta i tormenti : Ché tormentato cor può ben sentire La doglia del morire, E un'alma senza core Non può sentir dolore.

For this reason, “commentators of the Perdono di Gesualdo could not help themselves from associating these allegorical figures with the assassinated lovers and with an even more horrible crime: infanticide.”[99] Denis Morrier mentions yet another interpretive tradition.

In fact, Eleonora d’Este described the reunion of the father and his son in a letter date March 2, 1609, addressed to her brother Cesare: “My son Lord Don Emmanuele is here at our place (in Gesualdo), and he is seen with great joy and pleasure by his father, since the differences that opposed them are calmed, for the greatest pleasure of all, and in particular for myself who loves him so.”[103] Glenn Watkins, who worked on the recovery of Gesualdo's motets, draws a parallel between the composer's religious music and the painting the prince commissioned.

Seven-voice counter-point?”[106] In a letter dated June 3, 1957, addressed to Robert Craft with a view of recording the three motets recomposed by Stravinsky under the title Tres Sacrae Cantiones (Da Pacem Domine, Assumpta est Maria and Illumina nos), the composer Ernst Krenek emphasizes how “In the tradition of the Church, the Holy Ghost has always been associated with the figure ‘seven’ [...] The source of it seems to be Isaiah XI, 2, where the ‘seven gifts’ are attributed to the Spirit of the Lord.”[107] Moreover, Glenn Watkins suggests that the motet Assumpat est Maria can be read as a musical equivalent to the representation of the Virgin who, surrounded by cherubs, sits to the right of Christ in the Perdono di Gesualdo.

[108] The subtleties of harmony and counterpoint in Gesualdo’s musical language, the expressive dissonances and chromaticisms, the very conscious use of word painting and of symbolic numbers in his religious pieces, “Such a collection of codes […] paves the way for a more intensive examination of the Passion message” halfway between liturgy and multimedia.

[109] In fact, Glenn Watkins suggests another parallel between Gesualdo's religious music and the Perdono of 1609 from a close reading of the title page of Tenebrae Resposoria (or “Responsory to Darkness for Holy Week”), published in 1611 by Giovanni Giacomo Carlino in Gesualdo's palace:[110] “Here, uniquely in his lifetime, the Prince of Venosa not only signed his work with his name but implicitly signalled the connection of its contents to the worlds of music, literature, and art.

Clearly this music and text were specifically intended to be sung in a location involving two extremely personal commissions, one each of architecture and of painting: the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and the altarpiece, Il perdono.”[111] In his opera, La terribile e spaventosa storia del Principe di Venosa e della bella Maria (“The terrible and frightful story of the Prince of Venosa and the beautiful Maria”), composed in 1999 for the Sicilian Puppet Opera, Salvatore Sciarrino concludes with a song per finire, “written in a decidedly pop mode,”[112] in which he clearly alludes to the Perdono di Gesualdo, and to its composition between heaven and hell:[113] Gesualdo a Venosa Oggi è stato perdonato.