The Holy Family, with St Catherine of Alexandria, St Margaret of Antioch and St Francis of Assisi

Orazio Samacchini
Italy
1534 – 1577

The Holy Family, with St Catherine of Alexandria, St Margaret of Antioch and St Francis of Assisi
early 1570s
oil on wood panel
Currently on display, Gallery 15
Place made
Parma?, Italy
Medium
oil on wood panel
Dimensions
102.0 x 86.5 cm
124.0 x 108.5 x 7.8 cm (frame)
Credit line
Mrs Mary Overton Gift Fund 1999
Accession number
996P31
Signature and date
Not signed. Not dated.
Provenance
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Imperial Hohrnzollern Collection by 1931; American Art Association, New York, Important Old Masters of the Italian, Flemish, Dutch, French and English Schools 22 January 1931, lot 71; Private Collection 1931-?; P & D Colnaghi & Co., Ltd., London 1999.
Media category
Painting
Collection area
European paintings

  • WALL LABEL: The Holy Family

    This very impressive panel by Orazio Samacchini, which was once owned by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, dates from the early 1570s when the artist was working on a large cycle of fresco paintings in the cathedral of Parma.


    Samacchini’s elaborate, crowded composition swirls around the infant Jesus who balances on the Virgin’s knee. Like many other Mannerist paintings of this period it is built on a series of careful dualities. The faces of the Virgin and St Catherine, Jesus and St Margaret, Joseph and St Francis are conceived as pairs. The brilliant fields of colour are devised as opposites, as are the devil disguised as a dragon and the holy church, which are placed in diagonally opposite corners.


    The painting is one of the finest sixteenth-century Italian paintings in Australia, and a very beautiful example of the late Renaissance art movement known as Mannerism.


    Tansy Curtin, Curator of International Art Pre-1980