{"id":5963,"date":"2012-06-22T11:25:20","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T15:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/rosso\/?page_id=5963"},"modified":"2012-12-21T14:03:06","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T19:03:06","slug":"rp-18","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/catalogues\/rejected-paintings-sculpture\/rp-18\/","title":{"rendered":"RP.18 Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Young Saint John the Baptist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

RP.18, Holy Family<\/p><\/div>\n

New York, Art Market.<\/p>\n

Panel, 92 x 71.<\/p>\n

Fig.RP.18<\/a><\/p>\n

The Virgin\u2019s mantle is wine red, her sleeve and skirt and the cloth over her head, gray-blue.\u00a0 St. Elizabeth has a gray headscarf and a brown sleeve.\u00a0 Joseph wears a very dark green tunic and a lavender sleeve.\u00a0 The Christ Child has reddish hair.\u00a0 St. John\u2019s hair is dark blond; the animal fur he wears, browns and tans.\u00a0 The background is dark green, the parapet, green-gray.<\/p>\n

Since its publication in 1963 the drapery that covered the genitals of Christ and the Baptist has been removed.<\/p>\n

PROVENANCE: Florence, Private Collection (1963),1<\/sup><\/a> New York, Piero Corsini (1983).\u00a0 Exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1987, and in the 1990-1991 exhibition, \u201cRosso Revealed,\u201d as Rosso?, about 1514, and as related to Sarto about 1513-1514 (Bruce L. Edelstein).<\/p>\n

LITERATURE: R., \u201cDipinti manieristi in collezioni fiorentini,\u201d Vasari<\/em>, 23, 1963, 91, Pls. 46-47, as incontestably by Rosso Fiorentino, 1510-1520.<\/p>\n

It seems to be that the robust and emotionally active Sartesque children in this picture, the awkwardness of Saint John, and the compositional incoherence of the painting created a kind of hope that these stylistic aspects would be those of an early work by Rosso Fiorentino.\u00a0 But the drawing, anatomy, faces, and expressions of the Sartesque angels in Rosso\u2019s Assumption<\/em> of 1513-1514 (Fig.P.3a<\/a>) are not like those of the children in the Holy Family<\/em>, nor do the heads of these children resemble the head of Rosso\u2019s Angel Playing a Lute<\/em> (Fig.P.4a<\/a>).\u00a0 The children also do not look like the angels in the S. Maria Nuova Altarpiece of 1518.\u00a0 There is a blank prettiness in the Virgin\u2019s head that is not relatable to Rosso, and an unspirited commonness of the heads of St. Elizabeth and Joseph that is far from Rosso\u2019s intense persons.<\/p>\n

The picture seems to me to have been done in the 1530s or 1540s with the children imitative of Sarto\u2019s of around 1512 and 1513 and the adult figures looking rather weakly like those in Sarto\u2019s late works.\u00a0 If there is any hint of influence from Rosso\u2019s works it would be from paintings like the Dei Altarpiece of 1522 (Fig.P.12a<\/a>) and the Marriage of the Virgin<\/em> of 1523 (Fig.P.13a<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The head of the Virgin somewhat resembles that in the Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist<\/em> in Frankfurt (Fig.RP.10a<\/a>).\u00a0 Similar to the Child is the young Christ in the Madonna Crowned by Two Angels<\/em> at Colnaghi\u2019s in 1982 (Fig.RP.15<\/a>).\u00a0 The curly hair of the children recalls that in the version of the Madonna and Child and the Young Saint John the Baptist<\/em> in a private collection in Norway (Fig.RP.3, Norway<\/a>), of which another version is in Berlin (Fig.RP.3<\/a>).\u00a0 All of these pictures are Sartesque images done as a kind of revival of his style after his death.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a>1<\/sup> The photograph in the Longhi fototeca makes a reference to Sig. Salocchi, October, 1963.\u00a0 I thank Philippe Costamagna for sending me this information.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>2<\/sup> A note on the photograph in the Longhi fototeca ascribes the three principal figures to Rosso before 1520, with the two saints added some decades later by another and unidentifiable Tuscan artist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York, Art Market. Panel, 92 x 71. Fig.RP.18 The Virgin\u2019s mantle is wine red, her sleeve and skirt and the cloth over her head, gray-blue.\u00a0 St. Elizabeth has a gray headscarf and a brown sleeve.\u00a0 Joseph wears a very dark green tunic and a lavender sleeve.\u00a0 The Christ Child has reddish hair.\u00a0 St. John\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"parent":1357,"menu_order":19,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5963","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5963"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7963,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5963\/revisions\/7963"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/rosso\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}