Sacra Famiglia con san Giovannino

In May 1527, the unpaid army of Emperor Charles the Fifth broke into Rome and spent months looting it. Parmigianino, still in his twenties, was among the artists who fled, and he settled for a while in Bologna. This Holy Family comes from those unsettled years, when he was trying something unusual for him, painting in egg tempera on canvas rather than oil. The softness shows it. Mary, the infant Christ and the young John the Baptist are worked to a warm, polished finish, their gestures tender rather than grand. The picture later passed into the Farnese collection, the family that assembled much of what now hangs in Naples, and it travelled south with them to Capodimonte.