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Lot Essay
Trained with Perugino, Bacchiacca was profoundly influenced by his Florentine Mannerist contemporaries, in particular Pontormo, Bronzino and Andrea del Sarto - indeed, as Vasari noted, the latter assisted Bacchiacca in matters of art. Bacchiacca is best known for his small panels either of a horizontal frieze-like format or upright of a similar size to the present work.
Set against a softly-painted Tuscan landscape that recedes in blueish tones, reminiscent of those of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto, with delicate trees and a city in the background, the brightly coloured, figures, presented as if frozen in time, create a mysterious, fairy-tale atmosphere. The eccentricity of Bacchiacca's style which makes his work easily recognisable is also in part due to the influence of Northern art, and in particular prints by Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, references to whose figures and compositions are made in several of his early works.
The soldier and a cloaked man behind him, to the left, also appear in the artist's Joseph's Brethren arrested (Borghese Gallery, Rome) which together with another three panels in the same museum and two panels in the National Gallery, London, are part of Bacchiacca's most famous series depicting The Life of Saint Joseph, commissioned for the bedroom of the Florentine banker and collector Pierfrancesco Borgherini on the occasion of his wedding in 1515. The horse and figure of the Saint's father, Dioscuros, are similar to that of the protagonist in Saint Acasio defeating the Rebels, which is part of a series depicting the life of the Saint, painted in circa 1521 (Uffizi, Florence). Nikolenko dates the present panel to the third decade of the sixteenth century (loc. cit.).
Set against a softly-painted Tuscan landscape that recedes in blueish tones, reminiscent of those of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto, with delicate trees and a city in the background, the brightly coloured, figures, presented as if frozen in time, create a mysterious, fairy-tale atmosphere. The eccentricity of Bacchiacca's style which makes his work easily recognisable is also in part due to the influence of Northern art, and in particular prints by Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, references to whose figures and compositions are made in several of his early works.
The soldier and a cloaked man behind him, to the left, also appear in the artist's Joseph's Brethren arrested (Borghese Gallery, Rome) which together with another three panels in the same museum and two panels in the National Gallery, London, are part of Bacchiacca's most famous series depicting The Life of Saint Joseph, commissioned for the bedroom of the Florentine banker and collector Pierfrancesco Borgherini on the occasion of his wedding in 1515. The horse and figure of the Saint's father, Dioscuros, are similar to that of the protagonist in Saint Acasio defeating the Rebels, which is part of a series depicting the life of the Saint, painted in circa 1521 (Uffizi, Florence). Nikolenko dates the present panel to the third decade of the sixteenth century (loc. cit.).