(Brescia 1532–1592 Rome)
The Holy Family,
inscribed lower left with an inventory number: 529,
oil on canvas, 100.5 x 76.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection

Inscribed on the back of the canvas with the letters ‘C.C.B.’

We are grateful to Patrizia Tosini for confirming the attribution and for her help in cataloguing the present lot.

Tosini dates the present painting to an early stage of Girolamo Muziano’s career, between the mid-1550s and the early 1560s, and it belongs to the time of his first Roman commissions. There are close points of comparison with his other work of these years, and especially those executed for Orvieto: the altarpiece with the Resurrection of Lazarus for the city’s cathedral (1555–1556; see P. Tosini, Girolamo Muziano, 1532–1592, dalla maniera alla natura, Rome 2008, cat. no. A7, p. 86, fig. 70) and the frescoes for the palace of bishop Girolamo Simoncelli in the nearby Torre San Severo (1556–1559). These are works which display the same monumental and ‘stony’ pictorial language as in the present Holy Family. The Virgin’s profile compares to that of the two women at the centre of the altarpiece for Orvieto, in which the colouring of the robes is also echoed, while the head of Saint Joseph is modelled after that of Winter in the ceiling of the Salone della Caminata of the Palazzo Simocelli (see P. Tosini, Ibid., 2008, cat. no. A9, pp. 340-343, fig. 9.1.3), even down to the pulsing vein in the old man’s temple, which also reoccurs in the profile of Saint Jerome in the Ruiz chapel in Santa Caterina dei Funari, Rome (see P. Tosini, Ibid., 2008, cat. A15, p. 184, fig. 168).

The subject of the painting, the Holy Family in the company of the Infant Saint John the Baptist, prefiguring the Passion of Christ, must have been particularly successful in the artist’s repertoire, since he replicated it in various compositional arrangements, some of which are documented in engravings created to Muziano’s designs (P. Tosini, Ibid., 2008, p. 55 fig. 45). In Muziano’s biography it is stated that ‘A Madonna, life size, with Saint Joseph, Saint John and our Saviour which would move stone to devotion’ (‘Una Madonna come al naturale con San Giosef S. Giovanni e il nostro Salvatore che muoverebbe le pietre a devozione’) (see U. Procacci, Una ‘vita’ inedita di Girolamo Muziano, in: Arte Veneta, 1954, pp. 251-252; see. P. Tosini, Ibid., 2008, cat. no. D61, p. 487). A painting with the same iconography is also recorded in 1686 in the collection of Maffeo Barberini, in his family’s Roman palace at the Quattro Fontane (this also has the same dimensions as the present painting, which is only slightly smaller, possibly owing to its having been relined; see Getty Provenance Index) and another of the same subject was at Villa Medici during the nineteenth century (see P. Tosini, Ibid., 2008, cat. D55, p. 485).

In addition to that under discussion, at present two other versions of this composition are known: the first is identical in all its parts and is manifestly an autograph replica, taken from the same cartoon (see P. Tosini, Ibid., 2018, cat. A2, p. 23). The second is in the Galleria Borghese and is also an autograph work by Muziano, but it has suffered a singular ‘camouflaging’ owing to the intervention of a late seventeenth century painter (see P. Tosini, Palinsesto borghesiano: un Muziano ‘seicentesco’, in: Amica Veritas. Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Claudio Strinati, ed. by A. Vannugli, Rome 2020, pp. 525-532). As yet it has not been possible to identify the number ‘529’ painted lower left, which is evidently the record of its belonging in a collection.

The sculptural composition of the painting and its cool palette, reveal Muziano’s understanding of Roman mannerist culture of the 1540s and 1550s, incarnated by its emerging protagonists Daniele da Volterra, Girolamo Siciolante and Taddeo Zuccari; meanwhile, the elegant head of Saint Joseph with his rippling veins and soft hair, modelled after the naturalistic paintings of Girolamo Savoldo and Domenico Campagnola, with its Lombard and Venetian mood, fully reveals the inheritance of the artist’s training.

Girolamo Muziano (1532–1592) is one of the leading exponents of later sixteenth century Roman painting. He trained in Brescia, Padua and Venice in the studios of Lambert Sustris and Domenico Campagnola, and he arrived in Rome in the 1550s, probably thanks to the protection of the Venetian Cardinals Barbaro, Corner and Pisani. His positive reception in the city gained him many prestigious commissions in the churches and palaces of the leading aristocratic families in the city: the Colonna, Gabrielli, Ruiz, Mattei, and Della Valle. During the 1560s he became court painter to Ippolito II d’Este, for whom he frescoed the celebrated Villa d’Este in Tivoli. With the advent of Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni (1572–1585) he became the organiser and author of all the most important commissions of the pontificate, including the Cappella Gregoriana in Saint Peter’s and the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche in the Vatican Palace. His singular style of counterreformation painting tempered by a soft Venetian realism was to open the way for the most innovative aspects of early seventeenth century painting.