Holy Family

Andrea painted this around 1525 or 1526 for the chapel of a country villa at Rovezzano, just outside Florence, which belonged to a Florentine named Zanobi Bracci. Vasari mentions it there. It was the second picture Bracci had from him within a short time, after the Madonna now in the Pitti Palace that still carries the family's name. The Child sits in his mother's lap, and Joseph, older, looks on from a little further back. Andrea worked out the boy first in black chalk. In that drawing, now in the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the child has a sulky look and rests his right hand on his mother's breast, and Andrea drew the left arm twice, once folded towards the face and once hanging loose. The panel left the family in 1580, when the Salviati acquired it, reached Rome in 1667 and later entered the Colonna collection, and passed to the Barberini in the 19th century. The Italian state bought it in 1935.