(Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
The Holy Family with Saint Anne, Saint John and a Dove,
oil on panel, 66 x 51 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, France, until 2005;
Private collection, United Kingdom, 2005–2014;
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
Caserta, Da Artemisia a Hackert, 16 September 2019 - 16 January 2020, pp. 54-55, no. 25

The present panel, portraying The Holy Family with Saint Anne, Saint John and a Dove, was unknown to Ludwig Burchard, whose research laid the foundation for the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, and long languished in European private collections. Dated to 1609/1610, recent analysis has confirmed Rubens’s authorship of the present picture, assisted by his workshop, rendering it a significant addition to the master’s known early oeuvre. Two other versions of the composition are known, one conserved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (oil on panel 138.43 x 120.65 cm) and the other in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, (oil on panel 66 x 51.4 cm), and remain fully attributed to Rubens by their respective museums.

Leaning over the shoulder of the Virgin, whose face is rendered in a manner that exhibits Rubens’s acquaintance with the works of Correggio (1489–1584), stands an elderly woman. This figure is identified as Saint Elizabeth, the mother of Saint John, in the other two versions, which were apparently executed at the same time as the present panel. However, Fiona Healy, author of the upcoming volume on the Madonna and the Holy Family for the Corpus Rubenianum, identifies the figure as Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin, on account of her advanced age, indicated by Rubens in the handling of her wizened flesh and lack of teeth, and her placement behind her daughter and grandson. The virtuoso highlighting of Saint Anne’s single tooth, the delicate suggestion her thinning greying black hair beneath her veil and the impastoed heightening of the veil’s folds are typical of Rubens.

The dove struggling in Christ’s hands, its feathers plucked by Saint John, is noted by Nils Buettner as the sacrificial animal of the Jews (Leviticus 15:14), therefore prefiguring the suffering of Christ on the cross. Relative to the Metropolitan and LACMA versions, the dove here has a more characteristically Rubenesque playful immediacy in the quizzical expression on its face, as its ruffled feathers, defined with vigorous brush strokes, are plucked by the two babes.  To the left Joseph looks down, lovingly, the black curling strokes used to model his hair also found in the head of Samson in Samson and Delilah (see fig. 2) in the National Gallery, London, which like the present panel, dates to circa 1610.

According to the late Walter Liedke, the slight change of the position of the lower left foot of Saint John in the Metropolitan version, spoke for Rubens’s authorship. However, this is a very minor pentimento compared to the significant and central alteration made by Rubens to the composition of the present panel, also in the figure of Saint John. In the current work, the right knee and calf of Saint John, beneath where one of the dove’s feathers falls, have been added by Rubens to rationalise the posture and balance of the child. The red robe of the Virgin shows through Saint John’s flesh where his leg has been extended, but not fully worked up by Rubens, to bend back in on itself. Although originally to have Saint John’s leg terminate at his knee might have been easier in terms of execution, Rubens’s many contemporaneous anatomical studies, such as Crouching Man From the Back (black chalk with grey black wash on paper, 46.5 x 32 cm, private collection) show the importance the artist placed on depicting believable tension in musculature in this period. The fact that the Los Angeles and Metropolitan panels follow this amendment, without Rubens’s pentimenti, suggests that the present panel is the prime version of the composition.

In spite of the sheer vivaciousness of the movements and brilliant fleshy forms of the two babes, the work is imbued, through the plucking of the dove, with a poignant reminder of the coming violence of the Passion of Christ. Unlike Joseph and Saint Anne, who are probably based on earlier ad vivum head studies, as recently suggested by Nico van Hout (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Study Heads, Part XX, 2, no, 8, fig 25, Turnhout, 2021), the slightly caricatured faces, contorted torsi, and the straining of the arms of the two children, along with the serpentine way the drapery constricts Saint John’s flesh, are redolent of earlier studies made by Rubens after the antique in Rome.

The compression of the crib’s cushions under the feet of the children, the vivid heightening of their flesh tones and elements of the overall compositional scheme are apparently drawn from a masterpiece of the collection of Rubens’s great Italian patron, Vincenzo I Gonzaga (1562–1612), Duke of Mantua, namely Raphael’s ‘La Perla’ (see fig. 1) now conserved in the Prado, Madrid. The modelling of the hair of the children, with bold highlights and the slightly unorthodox manner in which the loose curls hang about the heads, would have marked the modernity of Rubens’s style, recently returned from Italy, vis-a-vis his Antwerp contemporaries, and may be compared with the putti at the top or Rubens’s 1608 work Saints Domitilla, Nereus and Achilleus, which still hangs in the church for which it was commissioned, Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.

We are grateful to Fiona Healy and Nils Buettner of the Centrum Rubenianum for confirming the attribution of the present picture to Peter Paul Rubens, assisted by his workshop in several areas of the panel, after examination of the original.