Mannerist School, 16th Century

Collection Neger, Paris, in 1952;

Acquired in the 1950s by the father of the present owner.

Naples, Fontainebleau e la maniera italiana, July-October 1952, no. 110 (as Anonymous, early 17^th Century);

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Fem Sekler Fransk Konst [Cinq siècles d'art français], 1958, no. 30 (as Anonymous, second half of the 16^th Century).

Known in several versions, in particular the example in the Bob Jones University Museum in Greenville (inv. P 59.156), this composition has been attributed to various Mannerist painters active in the second half of the sixteenth century, including Joos van Winghe –under which name it still appears in the American museum – and Aert Mijtens. Giuseppe Fiocco (according to a note on the back of a photograph of the work in the Fondazione Zeri) also suggested an attribution to Lelio Orsi, which does not seem to have become accepted either.

Out of all the known versions, the present example is the largest and the one whose quality seems to be the highest, suggesting that it is the prototype. In relatively good condition, it nevertheless still partly preserves the mystery surrounding its precise authorship.

When it was displayed at the major exhibition ‘Five centuries of French art’ in 1958 in Stockholm, the writer of the catalogue entry echoed the opinions of Herman Voss and François Pariset, who both related the work’s style to French art of the late sixteenth century, as much to Quentin Varin in Voss’s view (which no longer seems current) as to the art which became established at Fontainebleau.

The hypothesis associating the painting with Fontainebleau remains, in our view, the most probable, with the inclusion of Italian elements close to Primaticcio and Nicolo dell’Abate, especially in some of the figures.