After Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), Italian
Holy Family, undated copy
OIL ON CANVAS, 56 x 40 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks

This reproduction of Andrea del Sarto's 1529 composition reflects both the subdued palette and large size of the Renaissance master's origi­nal painting, which hangs today in Florence's Pitti Palace, The scene shows Mary and Jesus at the right with the infant John the Baptist and his elderly mother, St. Elizabeth. Del Sarto painted several versions of this composition during his career, but this particular one was given special treatment by one of the artist's earliest admirers, the biographer Giorgio Vasari, for the excep­tional, life-like realism in the figure of St. Eliza­beth. Although del Sarto's reputation has waned since Vasari's day, the immediacy and directness of his later style had a lasting impact on Tuscan painters working in the mid-sixteenth-century mode known as mannerism.