Below is the greeting card on the occasion of Christmas 2024 and the new year 2025 from the Grand Master of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, HRH Prince Pedro of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duke of Calabria, Count of Caserta, Head of the Royal House of Two Sicilies, and his wife, HRH Princess Sofía, Duchess of Calabria. Their Royal Highnesses wrote: “May these family celebrations fill your homes with joy and may all your wishes come true in 2025. With all our love and affection.” The card is embellished with the painting The Holy Family with the Lamb by Raffaello Sanzio. In an enchanting rural landscape, dotted with sloping hills, small trees and signs of human presence, the Holy Family is organised in a sideways pyramidal composition, with the Child on a little lamb at the bottom left, Mary bending down to take it and Joseph standing behind her, while he holds onto the stick, also bent over.
The work, signed Raphael Urbinas, oil on panel, 29×21 cm, painted by Raffaello Sanzio in around 1507, was in the Falconieri Collection in Rome, from where it passed, probably in the eighteenth century, to the Escorial, and then went to the Museo del Prado with the royal collections, in 1837. A preparatory drawing remains in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The work was quite successful, as evidenced by numerous ancient copies.
The lamb is a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, also present in other similar works, such as Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child with the Lamb by Leonardo da Vinci. After all, some details refer to Leonardo, such as the articulation of the composition or the botanical species in the foreground, on the ground. However, Raphael differs from da Vinci’s masterpiece by imparting greater dynamism, a more evident naturalness of gestures, glances and attitudes and a different preference towards rich and brilliant colours, spread in chiaroscuro backgrounds with depths that give a plastic and monumental breath to the subjects. The painting must be linked to the Canigiani Holy Family, the Madonna of the Goldfinch, the Beautiful Gardener, the Madonna of the Meadow. The work is the result of an experiment that Raphael conducted in the different organisation of the figures, which had now reached a monumental fullness and an intense beauty, strongly idealized and extremely natural. In fact, while the Canigiani Holy Family shows a pyramid compositional structure, the Prado painting is conceived according to a much more dynamic diagonal arrangement.
