The virtuoso brushwork, vibrant and harmonious palette and echoes of Venetian eighteenth century painting, mark the present Holy Family as a work of circa 1770, when Gaetano Gandolfi was reaching new heights of success in Bologna, receiving a series of important commissions from both religious institutions and private devotion.

Gaetano and his elder brother Ubaldo were the pre-eminent painters working in Bologna in the second half of the eighteenth century. They were extremely versatile artists, executing large-scale fresco cycles and altarpieces, as well as etchings, drawings, paintings of both Biblical and mythological subjects, genre scenes, portraits, and even sculptures in terracotta.

Gaetano was enrolled at the Accademia Clementina at the age of seventeen, where he excelled as a student, winning a number of awards, and by the mid-1750s he was already benefitting from several private commissions. His artistic horizons were widened by a year of study in Venice in 1760, made possible by the generous financial support of the Bolognese merchant Antonio Buratti (1736-1806). This marked a major turning point in Gaetano's career and the impact of contemporary Venetian masters was seen immediately in his work. His emerging style combined the rigours of Bolognese academic training with the lustrous colour and lively, fluid brushstrokes that he would have encountered in the work of Tiepolo, Ricci and Pittoni. He was also aware of French Rococo developments and was a friend of Jean Honoré Fragonard.

Gaetano painted several variations on this theme of the Holy Family throughout his career, exploring the tender relationship between the young mother and her son, which were often given this oval format: these range from his early Holy Family (Private collection), to the Holy Family with Saint John (Private collection, Bologna) dating from the 1780s and a small example of the same subject, previously exhibited in Bologna in 1935 (see D. Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin, 1995, figs. 80, 202, and 92). In 1773 Marcello Oretti noted a Blessed Virgin with the Christ Child and Saint Joseph by Gandolfi in oval format at the Cacciari house (ibid, p. 362).