Onorio Marinari (Florence, 1627 – 1715)

Onorio Marinari (Florence, 3 October 1627 - Florence, 3 January 1715)

Baby Jesus with bouquet of flowers

Oil on canvas, cm 32 x 40

With frame, cm 58 x 51

Son of the painter Sigismondo Marinari, but also cousin and pupil of Carlo Dolci (Florence, 1616-1687), together with Agnese Dolci, he took up the legacy of the master, carrying on his school for a period. He worked mainly in Florence for Florentine and Tuscan clients, but he did not only work as a painter. He was also a leading intellectual in the field of science: for example, he published an extraordinarily successful astronomy essay entitled Factory and use of the universal astronomical ring instrument to outline solar orifices. The first scholars to present the figure and activity of Onorio Marinari are Pellegrino Orlandi, who praises the painting skills of the Tuscan artist in the Abecedario pictorial 1733, and the Abbot Lanzi, who refers widely to the artist in the History of Italy’s Pictorial, Published in Milan in 1831. In the official catalogue of the Uffizi Gallery of 1833 it reads: "He painted with good taste, and with very finished and correct manner in his drawing, seeing in his homeland not a few paintings at private homes, and in public, and particularly in churches. The most esteemed of the first way preserved in the Badia, and in Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, to judgment of the Orlandi. After the imitation of the master, which is the first exercise of the new painters, and often still, because of the diversity of the natural, the first one was formed, as Lanzi also observes, a second style following his own talent, more grandiose, more ideal, and of greater stain, as the artists exprímono: of which we have several essays in Santa Maria Maggiore, in S. Simone and in various Florentine quadreries."To Onorio Marinari are attributed various works currently held in museums and public and private collections, national and international, including the female figure of the civic Pinacoteca di Forlì, the beautiful Annunciation of the parish church of San Biagio di Lucignano, the Salome with the head of the Baptist of the Institute of Art of Minneapolis, the Judith with the head of Holofernes from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Find of Moses from the Civic Museums at Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza.

This Jesus Child with a bouquet of flowers is based on a famous composition by the master of Marinari, Carlo Dolci. The painting of Dolci, described by Baldinucci at the beginning of the eighteenth century ("Jesus, about six years old, sitting on the entrance to the garden, which is in the Sacred Cantici, and with a wreath of beautiful flowers in hand, almost inviting the soul to become full of healthy virtue") and was made for the Tuscan collector Giovanni Domenico Correggio, is almost unanimously identified with the specimen currently on display at the Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid (inv. 129). The subject of the Christ with garland or bouquet of flowers, designed by Carlo Dolci, was particularly lucky in Florence of the mid-seventeenth century, as shown by the autograph and workshop replicas kept at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This version of the Child Jesus, certainly elaborated in the workshop and attributable to the brush of the Marinari, embodies and shows all the key features of the painting of Marinari, among which stand out the predominant role of drawing, the use of vivid and bright colors and the sweet and serene appearance of the subject. The artist, who grew up in the workshop of Dolci, He shows that he has learned the teachings of the master not only in terms of technique but also in terms of intention, sharing similar religious feelings. The characterization of the ductus and the soft characterization of the face of the child Christ closely recall other works by Marinari, first of all the Saint martyr of the Alte Pinakothek in Monaco (inv. 281). 

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