Orazio Borgianni

Acquired by Arthur Vermot, France, at Christie's, circa 1920 (as Ribera);

Thence by descent to his great-grandson, the present collector.

“The shift at the end of Borgianni’s life to a style of monumental reality, comparable with that of such Caravaggesque masters as Caracciolo and Orazio Gentileschi, makes one wonder what would have happened if Borgianni had lived another twenty years.”

--Harold Wethey¹

This recently rediscovered Holy Family with Saint Anne is an unpublished autograph variant of a composition that Orazio Borgianni treated several times. In this, the most Caravaggesque of the known versions, Borgianni renders the dramatically cropped figures with somber realism, an effect heightened by the theatrical use of chiaroscuro. The intimate subject must have fascinated the artist, who returned to it several times during his abbreviated career, cut short by his untimely death in 1616 at thirty-eight. 

Borgianni centers the tightly grouped composition around the Madonna and Child, the latter struggling to hold a restless dove. Saints Joseph and Anne flank the pair and look toward Christ with tender attention, modelling the viewer’s own devotional focus. While Borgianni retained the salient compositional elements across the five known versions, variations in figural treatment and modulations in tonality and paint application suggest that he executed the canvases over a period of several years, as his stylistic approach shifted from one influenced by the colorists of the Veneto to one rooted in the physical reality of Caravaggio. The earliest iteration, today in a private collection, Savona, dates to 1612-1613 and has recently been identified as the work that appears in the 1682 inventory of abbot Giovanni Carlo Gavotti.² Borgianni executed two versions circa 1615: one, formerly with Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, London, and another formerly in the collection of Isabelle Renauld-Klinkosch, are both in private collections, London.³ Borgianni produced a fourth version in 1616, the year he died, that is today in the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Florence.⁴

Borgianni signed three of the canvases—inscribing Joseph’s staff in the ex-Gavotti, ex-Hazlitt, and Longhi paintings with his monogram—and modulated the features and expressions of the figures across the versions. The Madonna, depicted with a starry aureole in the ex-Renauld-Klinkosch painting and a simple halo in the others, is rendered full-faced, engaging directly with the viewer in the ex-Hazlitt and Longhi works. In the others, as in the present painting, her features are more elongated and, with a hint of reticence, she averts her gaze from the spectator. Borgianni similarly adjusted Joseph’s appearance: nearly bald in the ex-Gavrani version, he has a full head of hair in the others (centrally-parted in the present painting and side-parted in the ex-Hazlitt, ex-Renauld-Klinkosch, and Longhi versions). 

¹ H.E. Wethey, “Orazio Borgianni in Italy and in Spain,” in Burlington Magazine 106, no. 733 (April 1964), p. 158.

² “Nostra Signora con San Giuseppe, Bambino con cornice dorata con una columba in braccio et altra figura.” The work reemerged in 2006. See A. Leonardi, “Per Orazio Borgianni (1578-1616) a Savona e la Sacra famiglia con Sant’Anna dell’abate Gio Carlo Gavotti,” in Studi di Storia dell’arte 23 (2012), pp. 148-155, reproduced (both before and after its 2010 conservation).

³ The former, first published by Benedict Nicolson in 1973 (when with Hazlitt), was most recently sold at Christie’s, London, 10 July 1998, lot 68. “A New Borgianni,” in Burlington Magazine 115, no. 838 (January 1973), p. 42, reproduced. The latter, first published by Otto Benesch in 1930 (when in a private collection, Vienna) was subsequently in the collection of Jacques Koerfer, United Kingdom. O. Benesch, “Ein Bild von Orazio Borgianni,” in Belvedere 9 (1930), pp. 220-221. See G. Papi, Orazio Borgianni, Soncino 1993, p. 121, cat. no. 31, reproduced pls. 42, 44; pp. 129-130, cat. no. 41, reproduced pls. 43, 45.

⁴ First published by Roberto Longhi in 1943. “Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia,” in Proporzioni 1 (1943) p. 42. See Papi 1993, pp. 134-135, cat. no. 49, reproduced pls. 58, 59. The existence of a possible sixth version is suggested by a watercolor by John Frederick Lewis that records a horizontal iteration of the composition that in the early 1830s was in the Seville collection of John Williams. Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, inv. no. 1992.480.