Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

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Denys Calvaert, born in Antwerp, arrived as a young man in Bologna, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. The late-seventeenth-century biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia notes that the artist first belonged to the studio of Prospero Fontana (1512–1597), then moved around 1568 to the studio of Lorenzo Sabatini (about 1530–1576), with whom he traveled to Rome from 1573 to 1575.

The present picture appears to date from the time of Calvaert’s collaboration with Sabatini, which was relatively early in his long career. It reveals greater stylistic independence than the artist’s later paintings of the 1580s and onward, which share considerable affinities with the style of Federico Barocci (about 1535–1612).

Another version of The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist with the same dimensions can be found in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (De Castris 1994: 268). Later on in his career Calvaert reutilized his own designs to create a large number of small pictures on copper for commercial purposes. The use of canvas for the paintings at the Hood Museum of Art and Capodimonte (as well as a smaller version in Leipzig) is another indication of the early date of their execution.

Michele Danieli