The Holy Family

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

A domestic setting was chosen for this scene of the Holy Family, with a tub in which the Christ Child is about to be bathed. The Virgin holds the child, while Joseph looks on over her shoulder. None of the figures has a halo, so it is not clear whether the woman on the left, pouring water into the tub, is a midwife or another saint. In the background a kneeling woman warms a towel at an open fire to wrap the baby in after his bath.

Although scenes of the Holy Family and bathing the infant Jesus occur frequently in Italian Renaissance art, no exactly similar composition is known. This makes it difficult to determine who the draughtsman is. The drawing was attributed to the Lombardy artist Gaudenzio Ferrari (1477/1478-1546) when in the collection of Franz Koenigs,^[1] but this was rejected by Philip Pouncey, who placed the maker in the workshop of the Bolognese artist Biagio Pupini (1490-1575).^[2]

It is clear from examples in Oslo and Paris that both Ferrari and Pupini made lavish use of white highlights in their composition drawings in order to suggest three-dimensionality with light and dark contrasts.^[3] In that regard, the Rotterdam drawing, where the elements heightened in white in conjunction with the brown ink lines stand out strongly against the yellow ochre background of the paper, does bear some resemblance to their work. However, the highlights in our drawing are much more angular and more simply applied compared with the soft, fluid execution of Ferrari’s and Pupini’s drawings. Our drawing, moreover, lacks persuasiveness, mainly because of the stiff outlines, the flat faces of the figures and the unconvincing three-dimensionality of the space in which the tub appears to hover. It consequently seems likely that the drawing was done by a young, inexperienced artist, who made a copy of an existing fresco or painting as an exercise. The striking dimensions of the drawing tend to support the suggestion that this is a copy of another, currently unknown work. Sheets as large as this were seldom used for preliminary studies, which were usually a good deal smaller.

The expressionless features, the figures’ subtly elongated hands, and the position of the naked Christ Child with his outstretched right arm point more in the direction of Ferrari’s drawings and paintings than Pupini’s. For the time being, therefore, the anonymous maker of this drawing is placed in Ferrari’s circle, dating probably to the first half of the sixteenth century.