Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist

Perino del Vaga's Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1532 on panel and now in the Courtauld Gallery in London, is one of his finest surviving small-scale devotional works, demonstrating the high quality of his intimate panel painting alongside his better-known large fresco commissions. The Courtauld, holding one of the finest concentrations of Renaissance and Mannerist painting in Britain, places this panel in distinguished company. Perino's treatment of the Holy Family format drew on the great Florentine precedents — Raphael's Madonnas above all — while inflecting them with the personal elegance and refined surface quality that distinguished his own manner. The Baptist's presence as a child companion to the Christ child adds a layer of typological meaning — the meeting of the two infants who would meet again at the Jordan as adults — that enriches the devotional significance of the group.

The panel support and oil medium allow Perino the jewel-like surface quality that his finest small devotional works achieved. The composition balances the interlocking figures of Virgin, Child, Joseph, and Baptist in a compact group, with the smooth idealised flesh tones characteristic of his Roman manner creating a luminous figure surface distinct from the more atmospheric landscape background.