The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist

Paris Bordone (attributed to) 1500 - 1571

Summary

This finely executed painting attributed to Paris Bordone depicts the Holy Family with St John the Baptist. The Infant Jesus leans forward from his mother's knee to play with the end of a scroll, while the Baptist kneels before them in supplication, a lamb at his knee, clasping the other end of the scroll to his chest. The eyes of Mary and the Baptist meet in tacit acknowledgment of the prophetic text with which the Infant is playing naively. Joseph looks directly at them, party to the knowledge. Bordone was greatly influenced by Titian, who was his teacher, and by Giorgione. Titian was the first to develop this type of composition with the figures seated in a landscape. The composition of this painting follows in general terms the type of arrangement evolved by Titian in such works as The Holy Family with St John the Baptist and an Unidentified Saint, c.1515-20, National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh (Bridgewater Loan, 1945), inv. no. NGL 061.46. The Manchester painting has a marked horizontality, a line undulates across it, from the bottom of Joseph's orange robe, through the pure white stream of the Infant's robe and the scroll, to the Baptist's left hand. This movement is echoed in the landscape that stretches the breadth of the canvas and in the distinctive horizontal bands in the sky. The pose of the Baptist derives in reverse from Titian's Saint Jerome in Penitence, c.1575.