Holy Family with Saints Anne, Catherine of Alexandria, and Mary Magdalene

The Virgin sits on the floor — a sign of her humility — and suckles the infant Christ while Mary Magdalene and Saint Catherine of Alexandria look on in adoration; behind them Joseph stands talking with the Virgin’s mother, Saint Anne, and two cherubim peer in timidly from the upper right. The figures are pressed into a loose pyramid and twisted into the compressed, contorted poses that mid-sixteenth-century painters had learned from Parmigianino and the Roman mannerists, while the faces of the three young women are classically idealised and dressed in the jewelled, brilliantly coloured brocades that set them apart from the simpler garments of the Virgin, Joseph and Anne. Nosadella, one of the leading Bolognese painters in the circle of Pellegrino Tibaldi, made the panel in the 1560s. It is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum.