The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elizabeth

Girolamo del Pacchia's Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elizabeth, painted around 1500 and now in Campion Hall at Oxford, is a devotional composition by a Sienese painter who was one of the most accomplished members of the Sienese High Renaissance alongside Sodoma and Beccafumi. The gathering of the Holy Family with John the Baptist as a child and his mother Elizabeth creates an extended family group that was popular in early sixteenth-century devotional imagery, humanizing the sacred narrative through domestic family warmth. Pacchia, influenced by Raphael and the Florentine High Renaissance, brings a refined elegance to this intimate composition that distinguishes him from earlier Sienese masters.

The extended family group is organized in a compact, intimate arrangement with careful attention to the interaction between the two children — Jesus and young John — as the compositional focus. Pacchia's Raphael-influenced figure style gives the figures an elegant refinement. The palette is warm and harmonious.