The article deals with an unpublished and intriguing work by a major exponent of early 17th-century Italian painting, Bartolomeo Schedoni, an artist from Parma known for his highly original style and short-lived career. The small painting (another version of which was known in the United States) has, however, in addition to its high pictorial quality and invention, another point of interest: its certain provenance from a celebrated and highly-refined 19th-century collection that had been discerningly put together in Ferrara, partly through inheritance and partly through some shrewd purchases, by Marchese Giovanni Battista Costabili, and was later dispersed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A provenance attested by various still legible inscriptions on the verso of the painting and supported by numerous inventory statements and other documentary sources. The new painting also offers an opportunity to reflect again on Schedoni's later years, during which the small painting should be placed for stylistic reasons, and on the hypothesis already advanced by scholars of a second, late sojourn in Rome which may have brought the artist into fruitful contact with the captivating innovations introduced by Caravaggio.