Scuola Veneto Lombardo

Area: Veneto-Lombard school Technique: oil on panel; dimensions: 68 x 55 Subject: Holy Family with Saint Anne and urban landscape. Period: late 16th century The pleasant panel we present, depicting the Holy Family with Saint Anne (on the left), constitutes a reworking in more popular terms and certainly less observant of the meticulousness of anatomical detail of famous compositional antecedents by Raphael (Madonna della perla) and Giulio Romano (Madonna della gatta). More similar to the second model than the first, our painting revisits by simplifying the traditional pyramidal scheme, eliminating the figure of Saint John the Baptist, but, interestingly, enhancing the architectural element through the insertion of the scene in an urban landscape of fine workmanship, in which it is possible to recognize a bridge (perhaps the Scaliger bridge of Verona) with a tower (that of Castelvecchio?). The greater horizontality in the geometric arrangement of the scene as well as a more vibrant and expansive chromatism compared to Giulio Romano's model trace the coordinates of an original imprint, capable of expanding by reconnecting to the famous Madonnas with Child by Fra Bartolomeo, all retranslated in less lyrical terms, certainly characterized by an abandonment of the formal Platonism of the evoked painter with greater concessions to realism, sometimes paroxysmal for the aforementioned popularizing features, which invest all the characters, from Saint Anne to the Child to Saint Joseph with the partial exception of the Virgin Mary, distinguished in all her sacredness by the colors blue (which recalls the sky, the transcendent, purity) and red (of Christological value, as a symbolic prefiguration of the Passion of Christ). In the antinomic coexistence of human and divine, daily and eternal, form and matter, a far from marginal message embodies the presence of the cat, located on the left of the scene, at the feet of Saint Anne and in front of the Virgin, almost in a pose of otherness thus representing the everydayness of evil (of which the animal, as in Lotto's iconic Annunciation, is traditionally a symbol) hidden within the walls of the domestic hearth, of which it is also traditionally evocative. In a composition that thrives on contradictions, not least that between the urban world, a visual expression of microcosmic harmony, and the aforementioned domestic hearth, the balance of opposites seems to be the most suitable key to interpreting a cosmos, the late Renaissance one, in which man is at the center of the universe, admirably sublimated by the mystery of the Incarnation here contemplated.