Santi di Tito

Santi di Tito likely executed this impressive altarpiece in the mid-1570s for a Florentine church. Though during his lifetime he was celebrated for such large-scale devotional works, very few renditions of the Holy Family survive. This painting encapsulates the three most important strands of influence on the painter. The Madonna's visage, carefully delineated with subtle gradations of light and shadow, owes a debt to Bronzino, in whose workshop Santi had trained. The balanced compositional arrangement and naturalistic depiction of Saint Anne's wizened features draw inspiration from Andrea del Sarto, whose work Santi studied. Lastly, the painterly brushwork evident in the figures' hair and the Baptist's costume derive from Venice, where Santi had spent the early 1570s. Santi's pictorial reform, moving away from Mannerist artificiality and toward a naturalism inspired by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, reflects the Counter Reformation's emphasis on the affective power of images on the devout. 

Santi probably executed the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and a lamb (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 2012.451) at the same moment as the present work. In both, the painter used a palette dominated by pinks and purples and arranged the figures in lively poses—here, the reclining Christ Child raises his left hand in a gesture of benediction, seemingly presaging his future calling.

The work was apparently unknown to Jack Spaulding prior to the publication of his 1982 monograph on the artist. But a note accompanying a photograph of the present lot in the Frick Art Reference Library states that he endorsed the attribution in 1985.