The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria by José de Ribera

The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria by José de Ribera (1648)

A kiss on the hand

The Virgin sits at the right in a red dress under a great sweep of blue mantle, holding the Christ Child on her knee on a white cloth. The Child is wide awake. He sits up, looks out of the picture, and stretches his right arm across to the young woman kneeling in front of him, who bends her head and kisses his hand, her own hands raised and pressed together. She wears a golden-yellow skirt with full white sleeves, and her auburn hair is gathered at the back.

Behind her, half in shadow, an old woman in a headscarf holds a basket of fruit in the crook of one arm and offers a rose with the other hand. Saint Joseph stands behind the Virgin at the upper right, bearded, in a brown cloak, turned towards the group. The rest of the picture is dark: a plain interior with a tiled floor. At the lower right, beside the Virgin's feet, is a basket with a pillow and a piece of white cloth in it.

Who is who

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalogue identifies the kneeling woman as Saint Catherine of Alexandria. According to the Golden Legend, Catherine had a vision of Christ and was mystically married to him, a subject Italian Renaissance painters often showed with the Child giving her a ring. Here there is no ring, only the kiss. The old woman has been read either as a servant or as the Virgin's mother, Saint Anne; the Met notes that her basket holds peaches and grapes. The basket next to the Virgin holds a pillow used for embroidery.

None of the figures has a halo. The Met points out that Ribera kept the Holy Family on the ground, in an ordinary room with a terracotta floor, and that the background figures in particular show his habit, learned from Caravaggio, of painting directly from posed models. The simple, strong colours, it says, come from his study of Raphael and Guido Reni. The same model was used for the Virgin's head in a smaller Virgin and Child of the same year now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Signed as a Spaniard

Ribera signed the canvas at the right: Jusepe de Ribera español / accademíco Ro.no. / F.1648. He calls himself a Spaniard and a member of the Roman academy, the Accademia di San Luca.

He was baptised on 17 February 1591 at Játiva in Spain. By June 1611 he was in Parma, where he was paid for a painting for a church; he is documented in Rome by October 1613 and stayed until the middle of 1616. Late in 1616 he moved to Naples, then ruled by Spanish viceroys, and married Caterina Azzolino there that November. He worked in Naples for the rest of his life and died there on 3 November 1652. From the early 1630s his lighting moved away from strong Caravaggesque darkness to a more diffused light; this picture was painted four years before his death.

From Genoa to New York

The canvas is large, 209.6 by 154.3 centimetres, and the Met suggests it was made as an altarpiece, for a church or a private chapel, though its original location is unknown. The first record is a private collection in Genoa. The Paris dealer Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun acquired it in Italy around 1807–8. By 1824 it belonged to Sir Thomas Baring at Stratton Park in Hampshire, and it passed down the Baring family to the Earls of Northbrook until the 2nd Earl's sale at Christie's, London, on 12 December 1919. It then went through Colnaghi to Viscount Lascelles, later 6th Earl of Harewood, who owned it from 1921 to 1934. The Met bought it in 1934 through Seligmann and Rey, with the Samuel D. Lee Fund (accession number 34.73).

About this print

Made from the museum's public-domain photograph of the whole canvas, in its tall upright format, so the dark room and the basket at the Virgin's feet keep the space Ribera gave them.

Sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 34.73 (metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437455), overview, catalogue entry, inscription and provenance · Wikimedia Commons, File:La_Sagrada_Familia,_por_José_de_Ribera.jpg · Wikipedia, "Jusepe de Ribera"