Bartolomeo Schedoni

Small, devotional works were a cornerstone of Bartolomeo Schedoni’s career, with depictions of the Holy Family among his most successful. Schedoni explored several iterations of this particular theme, each known in a few autograph versions, with the present composition undoubtedly his most popular.¹ Here, the Madonna lovingly rests her cheek on the forehead of Christ. A young Saint John the Baptist looks on eagerly from the left, while Saint Joseph stands steadfastly attentive in the far right foreground. Another autograph version of this composition is today in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (inv. no. 4058).²

Bartolomeo Schedoni was born in Modena in 1578 and showed considerable artistic talent from a young age. After training for a brief period of time in Rome with Federico Zuccaro, Schedoni returned to Emilia where he was largely active for the rest of his career. His style, however, was influenced not by the artists he encountered in Rome, but rather those from his native region, including Correggio, Parmigianino, Dosso Dossi, and the Carracci. As a young artist, Schedoni welcomed great success and quickly became the favored artist at the ducal courts of two of the most important families in Emilia, the Este family in Modena from about 1600–1607 followed by the Farnese family in Parma from about 1607 until his premature death in 1615. While such courtly patronage led to important commissions, Schedoni’s small religious paintings found a ready clientele outside of the court and provided him with supplementary income. Such works were perhaps an easy way for him to raise funds to cover the debts incurred from gambling and fighting—tumultuous characteristics of his personal life that were seemingly at odds with the sweetness and delicacy of his artistic production. 

Schedoni settled on a few variations of the theme of the Holy Family, repeating each quickly but with a high level of technical and painterly prowess, a testament to his prodigious skill. It is probable that he had a workshop that also executed a number of less refined replicas, mostly all of which, as Dwight Miller has observed, were on canvas. Miller further noted that the best examples, particularly those painted by Schedoni himself rather than his workshop, were executed on panel, and he was among the first to recognize the hand of Schedoni in the present Holy Family.³ Emilio Negro and Nicosetta Roio, to whom we are grateful, have more recently endorsed an attribution to Schedoni on the basis of digital images. That this painting was rendered on a fruitwood panel, like Schedoni’s Holy Family in the Dennis Mahon collection in the National Gallery in London, a work that is unanimously accepted as by Schedoni, lends further support to its autograph status. 

Schedoni’s repetition of compositions precludes any precise dating of his paintings, though the present composition has been dated by scholars to about 1605-1610. While some would date this picture to the later end of that range, John Marciari has proposed a dating of circa 1605 for the present panel, noting that it is “characterized by a more painterly application of paint, by a lighting scheme that is dramatic but without the preternatural brightness of the late works, and by a tendency for a softer focus than is seen in the crisp forms of the late pictures.”⁴

1. One variant of this theme showed the Holy Family with the Virgin teaching the Christ Child and sometimes a young John the Baptist to read, autograph examples of which are today found in the Mahon Collection in the National Gallery, London (inv. no.NG6644), and in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WZ1950.74). Another variant illustrated the Holy family with the Madonna embracing a standing Christ child, the best version of which is today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 661, see E. Negro and N. Roio, Bartolomeo Schedoni, Modena 2000, p. 85, cat. no. 30.1 reproduced), while another comes close to the present composition except Joseph is in the background behind the Virgin, rather than in the foreground from Joseph being in the background on the right behind the Virgin (Negro and Roio 2000,p. 67, cat. no. 5, reproduced).

2. Negro and Roio 2000, p. 83, cat. no. 27, reproduced.

3. Dwight Miller, private correspondence with Richard L. Feigen, 15 September 1993. 

4. Marciari 2010, p. 136.