The Holy Family with the Infant St John

Author: Klazina Botke

Scenes of the Holy Family in the company of the young John the Baptist were often depicted by Luca Cambiaso and his school.^[1] The humorous composition of this drawing, with Joseph watching from behind a tree, is typical of Cambiaso’s inventions. A similar pictorial element is found, for instance, in a drawing in London of the mystic marriage of St Catherine.^[2] Cambiaso was a gifted and very productive draughtsman. His corpus is regarded as the most sizeable of the sixteenth century, running into thousands of sheets that are now to be found in different collections around the world. His drawings are lively, the scenes set down in rapid lines, almost always in pen and ink.^[3] His work was being copied by pupils from as early as the mid-1550s, Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554-1627), Lazzaro Tavarone (1556-1641) and Bernardo Castello (1557-1629) among them, and later by other artists too.^[4] Deft, assured drawings without corrections and retouches are usually by Cambiaso himself. Copies are of varying quality.^[5] The composition of the Rotterdam drawing, for instance, is clearly based on an original invention by Cambiaso and the style is very similar to his work. However, the execution of the Virgin’s right arm and the drapery of her garments is stiff and clumsy, so the drawing must be attributed to the circle of Cambiaso. Because the maker clearly wanted to imitate Cambiaso’s style, it is hard to point to a specific pupil or follower.

The watermark with a siren and the initials NT indicates sixteenth-century paper from Genoa; a similar mark is found in a drawing in Paris, also attributed to the school of Cambiaso.^[6] At the bottom of the sheet is the inscription 'Lúcas Cangiagio.', the Ligurian spelling of Cambiaso’s name. According to Plomp, this is the handwriting of J.P. Zomer, the collector who owned this drawing in the eighteenth century, as the collector’s mark shows.^[7] A sheet depicting Lucretia done in 1570 by Cambiaso himself, now in London, bears a similar inscription.^[8]