Manner Of Pieter Van Avont (mechelen, 1600 - Deurne, 1652), Holy Family With San Giovannino

Manner of Pieter van Avont (Mechelen, 1600 - Deurne, 1652)

Holy Family with San Giovannino and a lamb

Oil on panel, cm 34 x 27

With frame, cm 50 x 40

Our painting takes, in counterpart, a successful composition by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Pieter van Avont, experimented for the first time by the painter in a painting currently in private collection at a Lempertz auction held in Bonn in December 1978. The work, by a painter who, between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, faithfully reproduces the dictates of the painting of the ideal master, presents a Holy Family with Saint John and a lamb, this last foreshadowing the death and resurrection of Christ. Jesus receives from the little Saint John a bunch of grapes, an allegory of the Eucharist and his blood shed to redeem the sins of humanity.

In the painting of the follower of Van Avont are visible many of the key features of the vast pictorial production of the master. Regarding the formation of Van Avont, born by Hans van Avont and Anna le Febure and baptized in Mechelen on 14 January 1600, we have no information. But he was accepted as master of the guild of Mechelen in 1620. Two years later, in 1622, the painter is registered with the guild of San Luca in Antwerp: this shows that the artist had settled in a larger center and with a fervent cultural life. The artist, particularly appreciated by his contemporaries, also received commissions from Archduke Leopoldo Guglielmo, as well as from several prestigious clients.