Attributed to Annibale Carracci

In a letter written in 1609, the year Annibale Carracci died, the churchman and art theorist Giovanni Battista Agucchi mentioned a Madonna that the painter had made in secret shortly before a trip to Naples. Annibale, the Bolognese master of the painted gallery ceiling in Palazzo Farnese in Rome, had by then almost stopped working. In 2001 the scholar Denis Mahon proposed that a small Holy Family at the Galleria Borghese was that very picture.

The label explains the caution. Attributed to means the museum thinks the hand is probably Annibale's and stops short of saying so outright. The canvas shows the Christ Child asleep between Mary and Joseph, in a deliberately narrow range of colour. Other scholars have linked it instead to a painting that the physician and art writer Giulio Mancini saw with Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and in 2018 it was proposed for Innocenzo Tacconi, a pupil who followed Annibale to Rome and worked with him in Palazzo Farnese. The museum dates the canvas to 1598 to 1600 and keeps it in storage.