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Pier Francesco Bissolo - THE HOLY FAMILY WITH A DONOR IN A LANDSCAPE

Pier Francesco Bissolo (active 1492–1554)
THE HOLY FAMILY WITH A DONOR IN A LANDSCAPE
Early 1520s
Oil on wood panel
31 1/2 x 39 3/4 inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by the John Berry Family, The James F. Dicke Family, and the Deaccessioned Works of Art Fund
1998.41

Pier Francesco Bissolo

THE HOLY FAMILY WITH A DONOR IN A LANDSCAPE

This spectacular High Renaissance painting of the Venetian school from probably the early 1520s by Pietro Franceso Bissolo, who was a student of the great Italian painter Bellini, is as fine an example of High Renaissance painting as you will find. The balance of the figures, the use of these vibrant primary colors and the really warm, wonderful display of human emotions. You can feel the emotion, especially of the patron who sits with his hands clasped in a manner of prayer, looking at the baby Jesus and his mother, and thinking thoughts that a patron obviously should be thinking. This was, at the time it was acquired, the most expensive single work of art ever acquired by the Art Institute. This work came to us very providentially from a collection in England and had been published and well known since the nineteenth century. In fact, it had been included in a number of volumes by Bernard Berenson. Berenson was the noted scholar of Italian Renaissance painting on which we rest many of our ideas of the Italian Renaissance. But we were quite lucky to be able to acquire it because this kind of work, being in private hands for this long, is highly unusual and it was fortunate because it filled a major gap in the collection of The Dayton Art Institute with respect to our European painting collection.

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