Canvas, 96x123 cm + frame 11 cm, Inv. n. 8

As Marco Ciampolini wrote in the notes on the work lent to the exhibition "Caravaggio and Europe" held in Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2005, in this painting <<the reality and incidence of light is examined, a light that in the painting not only reveals the truth, but defines above all the volumes of the Madonna and Child, two statuesque figures but with an evident rustic air>>. The <<St. Joseph is an old man bearing the signs of the merciless passing of time: and it will be this ostentation of the truth that suggested the old attribution to Ribera>>. This is a composition, continue Marco Ciampolini's notes, that is <<clear and balanced>> with <<the powerful personages shaped like statues by a precise light source, typical of Rutilio Manetti from the late 1620s>>. <<These were the years when the master - concluded Marco Ciampolini's notes - after the interest in the structured forms of the classicists, in particular for Guercino, and the in-depth studies on contrasted luminism and the artificial light sources of Gherardo delle Notti waned, he turned more scrupulously to the sounding of reality introduced by Caravaggio>>.