Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Viterbo 1587 – Rome 1625), Holy Family

The painting appeared at the Finarte auction in Rome in December 1973 as belonging to Cavarozzi. It made its way into a Roman collection, and it then became the object of discussions by Maurizio Marini (1979, p. 74, note 25) and Benedict Nicolson (1979, p. 42); in the revised edition of the Anglo-Saxon scholar’s listing (1990, I, p. 96) the curator Luisa Vertova reports the painting’s provenance as being the Spinola collection in Genoa (she being the one to sell the painting in 1973, as she tells the scholar in 1988). The painting was subsequently kept at the National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola for a few years from 2001, before it was returned to the Zerbone collection and the Giamblanco Gallery. The above-mentioned Spinola provenance has no documentation supporting it, despite Zanelli reporting in his extensive file in the Catalog of 2005 (Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, pp. 50-61) the possibility of an error in Alizeri attributing a painting of the “Holy Family” to Simone Cantarini at Palazzo Doria Spinola in 1875 (p. 241).

Click HERE for a full description in the Catalogue of Italian painting from the 17th to 18th century 2014, pg. 12-15