The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist

Follower of Federico Barocci · 1570/80

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown and gray wash, heightened with white chalk, on cream laid paper, squared in black chalk, laid down on off-white Japanese paper

Original size

17.8 × 12.7 cm (7 1/16 × 5 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This tender compositional study captures the quiet intimacy that made Federico Barocci one of the most beloved devotional artists of late sixteenth-century Italy, gathering the Holy Family and the young Saint John in a moment of gentle, domestic grace. Barocci's workshop in Urbino was enormously influential, and this drawing — attributed to a close follower working in the 1570s and 1580s — demonstrates how thoroughly his master's sensibility was absorbed by those around him. The layering of pen and brown ink beneath washes of brown and gray, lifted with white chalk highlights, produces a luminous, almost breathing quality rarely achieved in works on paper. The squaring in black chalk tells us this was a working document, a composition being carefully mapped for transfer to a larger surface — a window into the actual process of a Renaissance studio at work. The drawing is now held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains one of the finer examples of central Italian draftsmanship from this period in North American collections. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the warmth and subtle tonal depth of the original onto canvas, preserving the gentle interplay of light and shadow that gives this devotional scene its enduring emotional pull.