Holy Family and John the Baptist.

This engraving - with etching - is based on the painting widely attributed to Caravaggio in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, formerly in a private collection in Belgium. Other versions are in the Musée des Beaux-Art, Tours and the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Given that this is a print made close in time to Caravaggio by a skilled and prolific artist, remarkably little material has been published on its French engraver French Pierre Daret de Cazeneuve, often known simply as Pierre Daret (c. 1604-78). The print has inscriptions identifying both Caravaggio and Daret as the artists involved, but only once, in an article by Hermann Voss of 1923, has it been cited by a major art historian.

The eminent Caravaggio scholar John T. Spike writes: 'Pierre Daret was a skilled engraver with a considerable corpus of works. Because he was active only a few decades after Caravaggio’s death in 1610, Daret’s attribution would be considered a significant early confirmation of this. We can’t say that any witness is reliable at all times: there is documentary evidence that copies after Caravaggio were already circulating as originals close to his lifetime and a painting by his follower Bartolomeo Cavarozzi was already being offered for sale as a Caravaggio in 1613'. (John T. Spike to Mark Stocker, 12 April 2017).

Dr Mark Stocker      Curator, Historical International Art        April 2017