(active in Florence during the first half of 16th century)
The Holy Family with John the Baptist and the Annunciation to the Shepherds in the background,
oil on panel, 99.3 x 86.6 cm, framed

Following the model of the great Tuscan masters of the High Renaissance and their popular compositions, a group of artists that are little known today established itself in the Florentine art market of the early 16th century. They worked for wealthy merchants and small churches, usually specialising in small-format paintings for domestic devotion, portraits and mythological scenes. The present painting, evidently influenced by Fra Bartolommeo, was executed by a master close to Andrea del Sarto. The composition is loosely based on a painting in the Galleria Doria Pamphilij in Rome that Andrea G. de Marchi – whom we thank for his assistance – identifies as a work by Andrea del Sarto and his workshop. More recently, an attribution of the present painting to Visino, a pupil of Franciabigio, has been suggested.

We owe the little biographical information that exists about Visino to a short mention in Vasari’s “Vite”. In the biographies of Mariotto Albertinelli and Franciabigio, Vasari mentions Visino as a student of both. Whilst Visino is only briefly mentioned in the 1550 edition, Vasari adds a long section in the 1568 edition in which he describes him as a promising artist: “migliore di tutti questi per disegno, colorito e diligenzia e per una miglior maniera che mostrò nelle cose che e‘ fece, condotte con molta diligenza [better than all of the above on the grounds of his drawings, colours and accuracy as well as a better manner that he was able to display in the works he always so diligently executed]”. According to Vasari, two of his works were at that time preserved in the collection of Giovanni Battista di Agnolo Doni: a small-format “mirror painting” depicting the Fall of Man with Adam and Eve, now lost, and a Deposition from the Cross, which can be very likely identified with a high-quality, small panel currently preserved in the Seminario Patriarcale in Venice. Visino is today ascribed to the group of painters for whom Federico Zeri created the term “eccentrici fiorentini”, a stylistically idiosyncratic group of Florentine painters in the first quarter of the 16th century, who were influenced by the style of the great Florentine masters of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo and Martiotto Albertinelli (see F. Zeri, Eccentrici fiorentini, I, in “Bollettino d’arte”, series IV, XLVII, 1962, p. 216–236).

In 2010, Susanne Wellen suggested a convincing identification of Visino by establishing a connection between Vasari’s Visino and the shimmering figure of the ‘merciaio’, art dealer and painter Migliore di Girolamo Visini (1500–1550) (s. S. Wellen: “Essendo di natura libero e sciolto”. A proposal for the identification of the painter Visino and an analysis of his role in the social and cultural life of Florence in the 1530s and 1540s, in: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. LIV, 2010-2012, no. 3, p. 479–504). Franciabigio, Visino’s master, was born in Florence and initially worked under Albertinelli until 1506. In 1505 he befriended Andrea del Sarto, with whom he subsequently founded a workshop on the Piazza del Grano. Was the present painting executed at the time when Visino was still completing his training with Franciabigio and the latter shared a workshop with del Sarto? Serena Padovani, a leading expert on del Sarto, attributed to Visino a small panel depicting Leda with the swan in the Uffizi (where it is catalogued as Circle of Andrea del Sarto), which belongs to a large group of small-format paintings influenced by Leonardo’s famous composition. The Uffizi panel displays the same inconsistencies in the scale of its figures as the present painting, as well as the interesting detail of a sleeping child in the lower left corner of the picture that looks almost identical to the Christ Child in the present panel.