The Holy Family with St. Anna and the Infant St. John the Baptist

Bronzino was the polished court painter of Medici Florence, portraitist to Duke Cosimo the First and the people around him, and this Holy Family carries all of that cool, enamelled finish. He had worked out a composition close to this a few years earlier for the Panciatichi family, in a picture now in Florence, and came back to the arrangement more than once. Here the Virgin holds the Christ child, Saint Anne, her mother, leans in from behind, and the infant John the Baptist crowds close at the left. Everything is firm and sculptural, the colours hard and bright. The flesh is worked so smoothly it reads almost like carved stone.