Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

1. Giovanni Baglione, Studies for a Holy Family and a
Martyrdom, pen and brown ink, Budapest, Museum of
Fine Arts.
2. Pieter Paul Rubens, Holy Family with St. John the Baptist, St.
Elizabeth and a Dove, 1608-9,Metropolitan Museum.
Baglione advocates drawing from life 4 and he was
himself a versatile and dedicated draughtsman,
working in both chalks and pen and ink. The surviving
works on paper include academy studies mostly in
chalk, single figure studies for paintings, rapid pen
sketches and more finely worked pen and wash studies.
As Andrea Czére described in a long article in Master
Drawings ‘New Drawings by Giovanni Baglione’ 5 , the
influences that played upon Baglione are often more
visible in his drawings than his paintings, in which
the effect of Caravaggio has often been overplayed.
Raphael, Correggio, Barocci and Cavaliere D’Arpino
all had a marked effect on his style of drawing.
The present work, which shows one of his most
charming compositions for a Holy Family probably
dates from the late 1590s. The most obvious points
of contact are with a sheet of pen and ink studies in
the Albertina, Vienna, which has on the recto a Holy
Family with St. Elizabeth, St. John the Baptist and an
Angel and a rapid copy of Correggio’s Madonna del
Latte and on the verso, studies for a St. Jerome and,
even more strikingly, with a composition study in the
Budapest Museum of Fine Arts for a Holy Family with
St. Elizabeth, St Zaccharia and St. John the Baptist
(fig.1) and studies relating to a Martyrdom on the verso.
The latter’s recto shows the Christ Child seated on the
Virgin’s knee showing something, which, with the
benefit of the present drawing, we now know to be a
bird, to the kneeling St. John the Baptist. This motif is
portrayed again in reverse in the present work and the
Virgin turns away to read. Andrea Czére describes the
Budapest drawing as containing most of the features
that characterise Baglione’s draughtsmanship, and this
is true of the present sheet also. Here, an attention to
formal composition whilst upholding naturalism plus
the addition of a more powerful use of wash adding
a rich tonality of light and shade suggest perhaps that
it is a slightly later work, close to 1600 and, in Czere’s
words, the arrival with Caravaggio of the new realism
and emotionalism as conveyed through the dramatic
use of chiaroscuro 6 .
The bird motif, particularly a bird quite as large as
this one, different in scale to the more commonly
seen goldfinch, is an unusual one. The outstretched
wing and fine head and beak show it to be a dove,
symbol of the Holy Spirit. Piero di Cosimo painted
a gentle and beautiful Madonna and Child with
the Dove which was in the Farnese Collection
but this iconographic model in which the dove is
being handled, even roughly, by the children is an
unusual one and only seems to have appeared in
these immediate years close to the century’s turn.
Baglione’s composition is the earliest of the three so
far described, the other two being a dramatic painting
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