The Holy Family with St John the Baptist

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

This drawing is a copy after Andrea del Sarto’s painting The Holy Family with St John the Baptist (c.1520), a work now hanging in the Galleria Palatina in Florence (fig.).^[1] Domela Nieuwenhuis gave the drawing to Museum Boijmans in 1923, together with another copy after the painting (inv. DN 120/17).^[2] It is clear from the many copies of Del Sarto’s work made at this time, with The Holy Family as one of his most admired paintings, that the artist was very popular in sixteenth-century Florence. This copying of paintings could have had different reasons and was done in different media; our drawn copy is very probably an exercise by an aspiring artist.

The maker of the drawing adopted the composition of the painting in broad outlines: a kneeling Virgin, with Christ and John the Baptist, is being watched over by an exhausted Joseph, who stands behind them with his head resting on his arms. The Virgin and John the Baptist gaze down at the Christ Child sitting at their feet. A striking difference between this and the painting is that the landscape in the background and the rocks in the foreground have been omitted, most likely because the artist wanted to concentrate on the correct positioning of the figures. It is clear from the many pentimenti that he was making changes as he drew. For instance, the black chalk lines by John’s left hip show that it was originally much rounder. The artist must also have tried to block out the pentimenti around John’s shoulders with white highlights. We can also see from the Christ Child’s head that he was still searching for the right proportions for the figures and between them; the Child was originally positioned further to the left. With the many changes, the hard lines and the flat faces, the features and the expressions and poses of the figures lack persuasiveness, a quality for which Del Sarto was so renowned.

Del Sarto painted The Holy Family for the private apartments of the Florentine merchant Zanobi di Giovambattista Bracci (1488-1531 or later). This meant that the painting was not accessible to the public, so artists could not base their work on the original when making copies.^[3] One of these copies, now in Budapest,^[4] was painted around 1540 by one of Del Sarto’s pupils, Pier Francesco Foschi (1502-1567), and was very probably based on preliminary studies and cartoons that Del Sarto had made in preparation for The Holy Family.^[5] Of this preparatory material, four drawings have survived in Amsterdam, Florence, Los Angeles, and Regina.^[6] For now it is not possible to discover whether the maker of the Rotterdam drawing also had access to these drawings or was working from one of the many painted copies after The Holy Family.