The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
After Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), Italian
Holy Family, undated copy
OIL ON CANVAS, 56 x 40 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
This reproduction of Andrea del Sarto's 1529 composition reflects both the subdued palette and large size of the Renaissance master's original painting, which hangs today in Florence's Pitti Palace, The scene shows Mary and Jesus at the right with the infant John the Baptist and his elderly mother, St. Elizabeth. Del Sarto painted several versions of this composition during his career, but this particular one was given special treatment by one of the artist's earliest admirers, the biographer Giorgio Vasari, for the exceptional, life-like realism in the figure of St. Elizabeth. Although del Sarto's reputation has waned since Vasari's day, the immediacy and directness of his later style had a lasting impact on Tuscan painters working in the mid-sixteenth-century mode known as mannerism.