The Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist

The Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist

Polidoro da Caravaggio

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This delicate composition is full of luminous and atmospheric effects achieved through a masterful use of washes. It depicts the Holy Family with Saint Anne (she is less likely Saint Elizabeth) and the infant Saint John the Baptist seated in a landscape-a "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" with some artistic license. As the drawing exhibits faint traces of squaring, it seems clear that it served as a preparatory modello (demonstration drawing) for a painting or another type of two-dimensional work. The outlines of the figures are confidently sketched, the application of the washes is free and airy, and the landscape is drawn with a suggestive economy of line. The study was probably produced between 1520 and 1525, during the artist's late Roman period. The figural style here still reflects the vocabulary of the late works of Raphael (1483-1520), with whom Polidoro studied, but the monumentality of form and expressiveness of line are fully his own. Born at Caravaggio in Lombardy in northwest Italy, Polidoro was one of the most original artists of his generation working in Rome, Naples, and Sicily. (Carmen C. Bambach, 2009)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the BaptistThe Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the BaptistThe Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the BaptistThe Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the BaptistThe Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant John the Baptist

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.