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Lot Essay
This charming and spirited canvas, intimate in its scale and design, showcases Francesco Guardi’s talent as a figural painter. His storied career as one of the most important vedutisti of the eighteenth century, capturing the essence of Venice like few others, meant his work as a history painter was largely overshadowed until the nineteenth century. Yet he produced numerous altarpieces and religious compositions, as well as still lifes, characterised by the same sensitivity and vibrancy that runs through his view paintings.
This composition is based on an etching by Bartolomeo Biscaino (fig. 1), a Genoese artist working in the mid-seventeenth century; Guardi subtly adapted Biscaino’s invention, omitting the Infant Saint John the Baptist and the classical column, allowing the focus instead to fall more directly on the Madonna and Child. The practice of using and reinterpreting extant compositions in this manner was quite typical of Francesco Guardi and his brother Gian Antonio – indeed, they were commissioned by Field Marshall Johann Matthias von Schulenburg to make copies of works by Titian and Tintoretto, and for The Continence of Scipio (sold in these Rooms, 4 July 2019, lot 43) Francesco based himself on a picture by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. This Holy Family, for which a corresponding drawing exists in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, dates to the latter part of Guardi’s career, when he favoured such cool tones and pale hues as evidenced here.
This composition is based on an etching by Bartolomeo Biscaino (fig. 1), a Genoese artist working in the mid-seventeenth century; Guardi subtly adapted Biscaino’s invention, omitting the Infant Saint John the Baptist and the classical column, allowing the focus instead to fall more directly on the Madonna and Child. The practice of using and reinterpreting extant compositions in this manner was quite typical of Francesco Guardi and his brother Gian Antonio – indeed, they were commissioned by Field Marshall Johann Matthias von Schulenburg to make copies of works by Titian and Tintoretto, and for The Continence of Scipio (sold in these Rooms, 4 July 2019, lot 43) Francesco based himself on a picture by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. This Holy Family, for which a corresponding drawing exists in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, dates to the latter part of Guardi’s career, when he favoured such cool tones and pale hues as evidenced here.