The Holy Family

The museum dates this canvas to about 1700, which places it inside the five years its painter spent in Venice after 1699, studying Italian painting and the theory behind it. What he put together is a Holy Family of the Italian sort. Scholars trace its parts to the Holy Families of Leonardo and Raphael, and to the Sienese painter Rutilio Manetti.

The scene is domestic. The Virgin and the two infants, Christ and John the Baptist, hold the light, two angels stand behind them, and Joseph sits further back in the middle ground, watching the children. A deep blue darkness surrounds all of it, and the skin is built up in pinkish creams.

The canvas measures 70 by 59 centimetres and reached the National Gallery with the Koutlidis Foundation collection of Greek painting. It hangs in the main building in Athens.