(Ravenna 1552 – circa 1638)
Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist,
traces of a signature lower right (strengthened): BARA DI LUG ONGH,
oil on panel, 128.5 x 99 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection of Marchese Giacomo Bovio, Bologna (as Perin del Vaga according to a label on the reverse)

The present painting is a significant addition to the oeuvre of Barbara Longhi, an artist about whom only few documentary records exist and whose signed works are extremely rare.

In the second edition of his Vite (1568), Vasari mentions that the artist, although still a young girl, ‘draws very well, and has begun to do some work in colour with no little grace and excellence of manner’ (G. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. II, London 1996, p. 779). Together with her older brother Francesco she was apprenticed in the workshop of her father Luca Longhi in Ravenna which the two siblings took over after their father’s death in 1580. Barbara Longhi mainly devoted herself to small-format paintings of private devotion and portraits for which she enjoyed great popularity among her patrons.

In the present Holy Family the artist overcame her father’s Raphaelesque models, rather finding inspiration in the works of Michelangelo, as evidenced by the pronounced musculature of the two children, as well as the Christ Child’s restless pose. The large size of the present painting and its panel support also mark two extremely unusual and unique elements in the artist’s production.

Such a large work was certainly due to an important commission; on the back of the panel a label refers to the provenance of the work from the collection of the Marquis Bovio of Bologna with an attribution to Perin del Vaga – at a time when Barbara Longhi’s signature was probably no longer legible due to dirt or the darkening of paint. The collector referred was probably Giacomo Bovio, who in the early 19th century had an important collection which included Raphael’s Portrait of a Man with the same kind of label, acquired by the Princes of Liechtenstein in 1838.

Unfortunately, the loss of the 17th-century inventories of the Bovio collection makes it difficult to reconstruct the painting’s early history today. However, it is possible that the Bolognese family originally commissioned the work: their patronage of the arts is known from at least the mid-16th century (see F. Chiodini, La collezione di Antonio Bovio (1676–1738) tra palazzo senatorio e villa Carlina a Castenaso, in: Il Carrobbio, no. 26, 2000, pp. 111–120).