The Holy Family with the Young St. John the Baptist and an Angel

These two paintings had a varied attributive history before they were finally given to Girolamo Negri (see Casadei 1991). They were initially assigned to Luca Giordano by F. Argnani in 1881, then to Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole by Corbara in 1951. Roli, in a verbal communication to Sauro Casadei in 1989, pointed to the influence of Pasinelli, and Torri put forward Negri’s name, though two years later, in 1991, Casadei himself argued the case for a looser attribution to a ‘Bolognese painter active in the second half of the 17th century’.

In Christ and the Samaritan Woman Boccia follows the style of Pasinelli, an artist to whom he was very close in this central moment in his artistic career. The woman’s features, for example, owe a debt to the female figures painted by his master. Yet in both works the figures’ faces are already peculiar to Boccia, the adult Christ’s face closely echoing that in the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, one of a set of four canvases now in a private collection in Reggio Emilia but originally from Villa Gandini (Formigine, Modena), while the Samaritan woman could be the twin sister of the Sibyl in the Purification of the Virgin discussed by A. Mazza (2016) and also now in a private collection. Similarly, the facial features of the figures in The Holy Family with the Young St. John the Baptist are typical of the painter’s style, particularly the figure of St. Joseph which sits well in the series of ‘character heads’, or heads without any particular aspiration to portraiture, which were so popular in Bologna as early as the beginning of the 17th century and which Negri was to paint throughout his career. The two pictures were probably painted together with the Sibyl, now in storage in the Pinacoteca Comunale di Faenza, when Negri was in Faenza c. 1682, working on the decoration of the Celestine Fathers’ (now destroyed) church.