Holy Family with St. Jerome and the Young St. John the Baptist

The Holy Family with St. Jerome and the Young St. John the Baptist is an important new addition to the catalogue of paintings by Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, known as Il Nosadella, which consists for the most part of pictures in small and medium formats designed for private devotion. The only works that can be attributed to the painter solely on the strength of old sources and documents in the archives are two altarpieces: an Immaculate Conception with the Blessed Rainier and Saints in the oratory of Santa Maria della Vita (1563) and a Circumcision painted for Santa Maria Maggiore, which was completed by Prospero Fontana on Bezzi’s death (1571-1579). With such scant information, the opinion of Nosadella’s manner voiced by Carlo Cesare Malvasia in his Felsina Pittrice played a crucial role for 20th-century scholars in the rediscovery and definition of the artist’s personality, which, in the interpretation of the 17th-century historian’s view, is fleshed out only by the yardstick of his supposed master, Pellegrino Tibaldi, by comparison with whose work Nosadella’s paintings, «If they are not as perfect and studied [as those of Tibaldi], they are perhaps more powerful, singular, and resolute»¹.

Hermann Voss’s pioneering article published in 1932², which marked the start of modern scholarship’s interest in the painter, takes its cue precisely from these stylistic considerations, for they serve as an attributive base for expanding the artist’s catalogue of works, which would otherwise consist of a mere two pictures. Voss attributes to Nosadella a stylistically uniform group of Holy Families clearly inspired by Tibaldi’s style, yet characterised by an emphatic use of a kind of Michelangelesque terribilità that translates, in his case, into a boundless exasperation of muscle mass and a taste for extremely intense expression. To describe this rustic vigour, Voss uses the effective expression «Plebejischerer Geist», thus marking the artist’s distance from Tibaldi’s more elegant style. Bezzi’s compositions influenced by the style of Tibaldi include a Holy Family with St. Catherine in the Muzeul Național de Artă al României in Bucharest, a Madonna and Child in a private collection in the United States, which was in Berlin in Voss’s day, and a Holy Family with St. Anne and the Young St. John the Baptist formerly on the French art market and now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nancy. In the course of the 20th century, and more particularly after World War II, this corpus of Holy Families was considerably expanded with new attributions, although scholars tended to attribute them to Pellegrino Tibaldi³. The most significant attributions include, for example, a Holy Family with St. Catherine and Putti in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and a Madonna and Child in Glory in the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach. The controversy surrounding these attributions was resolved by Vittoria Romani in a crucial essay published in 1988⁴. Returning to Voss’s suggestions but corroborating them with solid critical and stylistic argument and documentary evidence, Romani closed the debate over the Holy Families by ruling in favour of Bezzi, to whom she also attributed a frieze in the Sala di Susanna in Palazzo Poggi (1551), which had previously been thought to be a definite work by Tibaldi, closely linked in stylistic terms to the panel paintings in question.

The Holy Families today comprise the most substantial and solid group in Nosadella’s catalogue in critical and attributive terms. The number of surviving pictures – 15 Holy Families out of a total of 28 works currently considered to be autograph – and the presence of a number of copies drawn from lost originals⁵ suggest that, in all likelihood, this kind of devotional painting must have been produced in series, in accordance with the principle of variations on a theme. In terms of design, this kind of production was based on recombining in different configurations certain set figurative motifs which Bezzi took from prints or, more often, from his own personal repertoire of drawings.

The Magnum Gaudium Foundation’s Holy Family with St. Jerome and the Young St. John the Baptist, arguably the finest version in the series, stands out for it subtle, finely graduated chiaroscuro. The “terribilità” of the figures, massive and beefy, instantly brings to mind the words of Malvasia quoted above, while the painting’s half-figure composition compresses the distance with the observer, amplifying the feeling of proximity and direct involvement. The crowd of bodies pressing in the foreground, tumbling over one another and filling virtually the entire space of the picture, almost to the point of spilling over the edges of the painting, on the other hand, conveys that sense of “encumbrance” which Francesco Arcangeli argues has been a constant feature over the centuries of an expressive, popular minority tendency in Bolognese art, one of whose chief exponents was Amico Aspertini⁶. Giovanni Francesco Bezzi’s artistic output certainly falls within that particular figurative tradition and, in the context of Bologna at least, he is undoubtedly the spiritual heir of that “eccentric” early 16th century Bolognese master.

The sacred scene is played out in a space bordered by a parapet: the figure of the Young St. John the Baptist, on our side of the parapet, uses his gaze and a gesture to attract the attention of the faithful at prayer, playing a mediator’s role between the painted space and the space occupied by the observer. The visual and symbolic centre of the composition is the group of the Virgin and Christ Child, who dominate the scene with their monumental forms, relegating the other two figures, of whom we can see only the heads and hands, to a marginal position. The figure on the left is easily recognisable as St. Jerome thanks to his traditional attributes of a crucifix and a book, distinctive features of the saint at prayer. The figure on the right, on the other hand, may plausibly be identified as St. Joseph thanks to his intimate, affectionate interaction with the Christ Child. Joseph holds in his fingers a string attached to the feet of a goldfinch resting on Jesus’s arm. The scene hints at a tender, playful moment between father and son, but it also has a deeper meaning in Christian symbology, the goldfinch – associated with Christ’s thorns – heralding Christ’s Passion. The scene is completed, in the foreground, by the Young St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner, pointing out Jesus as the Saviour to the observer.

In his compositional practice we can discern the artist’s habitual modus operandi, namely the reworking and repetition—albeit with variations—of certain passages or motifs across different works. The figure of the Virgin with her right arm outstretched in front of her pointing towards her left hip and her head inclining slightly to the right, is a typical motif in his repertoire, previously used, albeit for a seated figure, in the Capodimonte Holy Family, which can be dated to the early 1550s. The same motif of the Virgin with her arm extended downward recurs in two other paintings: a Madonna and Child in a private collection in the United States and, even more strikingly, the Bucharest Holy Family (fig. 1). The latter painting, which is extremely sophisticated in its execution, reveals close stylistic similarities with the Gaudium Magnum Foundation’s picture, particularly in its enamelled palette and its more graceful handling of the figures. Moreover, the two paintings are almost the same size, which suggests that Nosadella used the same cartoon for both compositions, before making a number of minor changes directly on the panel with his paintbrush. The Virgin’s profile, in the twist of her bust, the characterization of her face and the way the veil sits on her head, echoes in its upper part the profile found in the drawing depicting the Adoration of the Magi in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (fig. 2)⁷. The two children, on the other hand, resurface, somewhat stiffer and less bonny, in the Holy Family in Most (fig. 3), a picture painted at around the same time as the Immaculate Conception in Santa Maria della Vita, in which we can clearly detect the hand of Bezzi’s workshop assistants. In this picture, the way in which the light slides and the shadows gather over the Young St. John the Baptist’s face and chest echoes, in simpler form, the same pattern that clearly acted as a model for the Czech version. Nor is Bezzi’s compositional strategy based on the reuse of already codified motifs restricted to figures; he resorts to it also for individual anatomical details in the sense of set formulae for reuse in different contexts even years later. St. Joseph’s left hand with its fingers splayed, fixed in a somewhat wooden motion, resurfaces with minimal gestural variation in the Virgin in the Bucharest Holy Family and in St. Catherine in the Holy Family in a private collection in Paris⁸, which the calmer rhythm and more elongated figures suggest should be dated to some time around the mid-1560s.

Regarding the painting’s date, the stringency of the composition and the subtle intelligence in the handling of light point without any doubt to the artist’s mature years; thus it may well have been painted, indicatively, in the early 1560s, when Nosadella, having now imbibed the sculptural and volumetric teachings of Pellegrino Tibaldi, enriched his stylistic and expressive vocabulary with new, crucial sources of influence. In this instance, the figures’ greater composure, the softening of their features and the adoption of a warmer, more nuanced palette tell us that Bezzi was gradually beginning to embrace a number of formal solutions proper to Bolognese classicism, which were to culminate shortly afterwards in the Immaculate Conception in Santa Maria della Vita (1563). As in the Bucharest Holy Family with St. Catherine, so here, too, the forms are carefully polished, with smooth, compact brushstrokes enhancing the figures’ sculptural vigour. Yet while in the Bucharest picture the chiaroscuro is clearer and more incisive, here the light and shadow softly swathe the bodies to create a more suffused and natural atmosphere. Also, by comparison with the Bucharest picture, this painting reveals a new taste for description, as we can clearly see in the artist’s meticulous and realistic rendering of detail – an aspect that also characterises the Holy Family in Most. Thus, Nosadella no longer focuses solely on the physical and anatomical depiction of the human figure, but extends his focus also to embrace the surrounding elements – animals and objects – that enrich the scene: the goldfinch, the book and, above all, St. Jerome’s crucifix, which is depicted with such intensity that it almost seems real. Nosadella’s interest in these still-life details, possibly fuelled by frequent consultation of northern European prints, reveals a new sensitivity, more attentive to the concrete, tangible dimension of reality. The artist was to further deepen this tendency in the course of the 1560s, when he achieved results of astonishing technical skill, as in the case of the Princeton Annunciation, in which his superb optical rendering of the Virgin’s sewing accoutrements and prayer books on display in the foreground reaches new heights⁹.

One final aspect that deserves highlighting is the artist’s effort to consolidate the bond between the various members of his sacred group and to portray their emotional reactions in a natural manner. Take, for example, the amused smirk with which the Christ Child looks at St. Joseph. Yet for all that, the dialogue between the figures still appears to be a little awkward in many ways. Their gazes never quite cross and their gestures find it hard to interact, appearing on the whole to be somewhat rigid. What emerges with clarity, on the other hand, is the artist’s aim to place the sacred story in a dimension of greater human truth, an approach which he was to develop more fully in the course of the 1560s and which still appears, in this work, to be in an embryonic stage.