The Holy Family with Saint Jerome

When this painting first came to light in 1999, Everett Fahy suggested an attribution to the Sienese artist Ventura Salimbeni (1568-1613) on the basis of photographs. Fahy considered it a mature work by the artist, datable to the first decade of the seventeenth century, and drew particular comparison with the artist’s Madonna and Child appearing to Saint Roch of 1603 (Contrada della Lupa, Siena). In recent years, Marco Ciampolini has correctly identified it as the work of the contemporary Milanese painter Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli, il Morazzone.

Born in the Lombard town of Morazzone, from which his nickname derives, Pier Francesco moved with his father, a master mason, to Rome before 1592. It was in Rome that he first encountered the work of Salimbeni, who may also have been his master. By 1598, Morazzone had relocated to Varese in northwest Lombardy and soon gained recognition throughout the region. In 1602, he received commissions for two paintings from a cycle depicting the life of Saint Carlo Borromeo for the cathedral in Milan (both in situ). In subsequent years, his style increasingly oriented itself away from Roman Mannerism in favor of a more characteristically Lombard approach, derived in large part from his knowledge of the work of Gaudenzio Ferrari (c. 1471-1546) and Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625), with whom Morazzone collaborated on several occasions in the early 1620s. On account of its close association with the work of Salimbeni, the present painting probably dates to Morazzone's Roman period or the years immediately following his departure from the Eternal City.