This small panel painting is typical of Giani\u2019s religious output, which consisted chiefly of small pictures designed for a select clientele of friends and admirers.<\/p>\n
The Holy Family, a subject of which the artist was especially fond and to which he turned on more than one occasion, allowed him to address the more human, universal side of a religion that was also deeply bound to the earthly dimension of life. In the Pinacoteca di Faenza\u2019s painting, the Virgin is feeding the Christ Child from a small cup while St. Joseph draws wine from a cask: everyday gestures and Christological symbology (the wine of the Eucharist) are set side by side very naturally and with good-natured irony. The setting and furnishings, midway between the domestic and the makeshift, suggest that the family is portrayed during a moment of rest whilst travelling.<\/p>\n
The technique, a very liquid tempera applied rapidly on the support almost without any primer, is exceptional. The figure of the Virgin in the foreground, in particular, is executed with extremely rapid brushwork, with colours applied in patches and modelled only with a hint of basic draughtsmanship. The result is an image in which the immediacy of the technique finds an effective match in the occasional nature of the scene, which has something of the quality of a live snap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5590,"template":"","tag-opera":[],"tecnica":[59],"class_list":["post-7882","opera","type-opera","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tecnica-tempera-on-wood"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/7882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opera"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/7882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7885,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/7882\/revisions\/7885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"tag-opera","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tag-opera?post=7882"},{"taxonomy":"tecnica","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tecnica?post=7882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}