B. Daprà in Micco Spadaro. Napoli ai tempi di Masaniello, exh. cat. Certosa di San Martino, Naples, 2002, pp. 136–37, nos. 56a, 56b.

Published by Brigitte Daprà in 2002, the Holy Family’s Departure to Egypt, with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, and Saint Anne, and its pendant, Holy Family with Saints Anne and Matthew the Evangelist, with an Angel holding the Cross, are rare examples of Domenico Gargiulo’s mature production due to their large measurements and their subjects, which show two moments absent from the Gospels. In the former painting, the Holy Family is gathered by a river; Saint Anne offers the Infant Saint John to the Christ Child for a farewell while an angel berths a boat. In the latter painting the Holy Family is with Saint Anne; the Christ Child gazes at a flying angel holding the Cross, an allusion to the Passion. In the shaded foreground one can identify Saint Matthew the Evangelist, whose Gospel tells the story of the Flight into Egypt.

In the Holy Family’s Departure to Egypt, the angel’s torso can be compared to that of the same kneeling figure in the Baptism of Christ (private collection, Naples, see B. Daprà in G. Sestieri and B. Daprà, eds., Domenico Gargiulo detto Micco Spadaro. Paesaggista e “cronista” napoletano, Milan, 1994, p. 321, n. 168). The figure of Saint Joseph is similar to that of the same saint in the Circumcision by Gargiulo (Molinari Pradelli Collection, Marano di Castenaso, see G. Sestieri in ibid., p. 322, n. 170). Furthermore, the group of the Virgin and Child is based on a drawing of the same figures found in the Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Massimo Stanzione (John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida).

The composition of the Holy Family with Saints Anne and Matthew the Evangelist is repeated in the so-called Rest on the Flight to Egypt in the Valentini collection in Fermo, though this work is horizontal in format (see G. Sestieri in op. cit., p. 310, n. 159). In the Fermo Rest on the Flight to Egypt, the figures of Saints Anne and Joachim, and that of the angel, derive from the same drawing used for our Holy Family with Saints Anne and Matthew the Evangelist, with the angel in the place of Saint Joseph, who has been removed to the background of the scene. The Fermo painting, it might be noted, has a pendant, the Baptism of Christ.

Sestieri (1994) considers the pair in Fermo “sicuramente tra le più rappresentative del catalogo di Gargiulo, e in particolare delle sue tematiche del Nuovo Testamento, per l’ampia spazialità delle impaginazioni e il perfetto equilibrio tra figure e paesaggio” [“surely among the most representative works in Gargiulo’s catalogue, either for the New Testament episodes and for the vast spatiality, and for the perfect balance between the figures and the landscape”]. Daprà (2002) notes that in the present pair “il tipo di paesaggio e la qualità cromatica della vegetazione suggerirebbero una datazione della seconda metà degli anni Quaranta” […] “Ma la tipologia delle figure fa propendere verso una datazione più avanzata” [the type of landscape and the palette of the vegetation suggest a dating in the mid-1640s […] But the figures’ types seem to indicate a later dating”].