Holy Family With Saint Anne, Italy 17th century

attributable to Sebastiano Ricci (Belluno 1659 - Venice 1734)
Holy Family with Saint Anne

Oil on canvas
135 x 100 cm. - with frame 147 x 112 cm.

Of extraordinary scenic impact is this Holy Family with St. Anne, which, conceived by the author according to the most canonical pyramidal composition of Leonardo's memory, is enhanced by a studied plasticity of the figures and their perfect articulation in space.

At the apex St. Joseph, leaning on his staff, serenely watches over the Madonna holding her son, with whom she exchanges a gaze full of love, with Anna kneeling before them as a sign of respect.

This is a work of excellent quality that reproduces a composition by the great Baroque painter Sebastiano Ricci (Belluno 1659 - Venice 1734), from the Molinari Pradelli art collection (published in Volpe C., La Raccolta Molinari Pradelli. Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1984, p. 88, no. 46, and again in Daniels J.'s monograph, The Complete Works of Sebastiano Ricci, 1976, p. 111, no. 264)

Although the quality of execution might lead us to attribute our canvas also to the Venetian master, for the sake of scruples we prefer to enlarge the reference to an author working in the workshop or to one of his close collaborators who, on request, made a similar version.

An artist of extraordinary renown, celebrated by his contemporaries and in demand by the most prestigious patrons, Ricci is considered one of the main figures in the revival of Venetian painting in the 1700s. He was trained by studying the work of Paolo Veronese and other 16th-century Italian painters, in turn influencing painters of the new generation, foremost among them Giambattista Tiepolo.

Indeed, the work can be read in its original derivation from Veronese's models, with the pictorial material absorbed into a luminous layout and compositional syntax typical of 16th-century Venetian modes (even in individual elements, such as column and balustrade) and reinterpreted in a contemporary key.

See in particular the beautiful figure of the Virgin, draped in the antique style, almost a classical statue as a backdrop to the main scene, and actually the true protagonist of the composition.