The Holy Family

This Holy Family is recorded in the Farnese collection at Parma by 1693. It then went south with the rest of the Farnese pictures when the family's heir, Charles of Bourbon, became king of Naples, and it hung in the palace of Capodimonte there.

In 1801, under the peace Naples made with France, it was among the pictures handed over to the French, and from 1803 it was on show in the Musée Napoléon, as the Louvre was then called. Many works taken in those years went back after 1815. This one stayed.

The scene is quiet. Joseph stands at the left with his staff, and the Virgin in her blue mantle holds the standing Child beside an open book. The Louvre dates it only to the first quarter of the 17th century, and it is usually placed around 1610 to 1612, in Schedoni's last years in Parma.