Holy Family with Zachariah and Saint John the Baptist

A whole series of painters from the village of Santacroce near Bergamo moved to Venice, where, until the early seventeenth century, they worked by following the style of the leading Venetian masters, often simply producing copies. The first among them was Francesco di Simone, who became a member of the painters’ guild in Padua in 1462 and, from 1492 until his death, worked in his Venetian workshop. During his Paduan period he imitated Mantegna; in Venice he came under the influence of Bellini’s art. The Esztergom painting is a fine example of the half-length Sacra Conversazione iconographic type, popular and widespread in the circle of Giovanni Bellini. The Holy Family, together with Zacharias and the infant John the Baptist, appears before a landscape adorned with a fortified structure. The softly and delicately modelled faces, the gentle devotional gestures, the prismatically broken folds of the drapery, and the sunlit, serene colour scheme evoke the formal language of the leading figure of the Venetian Quattrocento. In the arrangement of Mary and the two children, we recognize a compositional scheme that recurs in similar or identical form in dozens of paintings from Bellini’s school; in some pictures, only the figure of the young Saint John is replaced either by the donor or by the motif of a book. The prototype of this scheme was created by Bellini in a lost work. Vilmos Tátrai, 1993.

Provenance

Simor collection. Purchased from the Bertinelli estate in Rome in 1878.

Restauration

1916 Endrődy Sebestyén

Bibliography

• Sallay Dóra: Raffaele Bertinelli és reneszánsz képtára. Egy műgyűjtemény útja Rómától Esztergomig. Esztergom, 2009, kat. sz. XXXIX.
• Tátrai Vilmos, in: Keresztény Múzeum 1993, 235–236, 113. sz., korábbi irodalommal (ua.).
• Tátrai 1983a, 150–152 (Francesco di Simone da Santacroce)
• Heinemann 1966–1991, III (1991), 9, 55c kat. sz. (Francesco Rizzo da Santacroce fiatalkori mûve
• Della Chiesa – Baccheschi 1976, 43, 26. sz. ( Santa Croce-beli)
• Boskovits–Mojzer–Mucsi 1964, 90, korábbi irodalommal (Francesco da Santacroce)
• Gerevich szerk. 1948, 95, korábbi irodalommal (ua.)
• Gerevich 1928, 238 (Francesco da Santacroce)
• Rényi 1879, 14 (ua.)
• Maszlaghy 1878 és 1891, 65. sz. (Giovanni Bellini)