Federico Barocci’s work is an exemplary product of the Counter-Reformation’s precepts for effective art: his paintings are accessible, intimate, and sweetly emotional, so that Catholic teachings are mediated through them to broad audiences.

The circumcision of Christ, in the representation by the painter from Urbino, is celebrated as a family event, and the special guests—shepherds and proto-baroque flying angels—are no strangers either but belong to the family circle.

And so do we, the prospective viewers (initially in the oratory in Pesaro for which the altarpiece was created). The composition invites us to approach, and our full attention to the ritual operation is expected, ideally modelled on the concentration of those represented within the painting.

Everything is characteristically soft and fluffy in this scene: there is no architecture properly speaking, and a landscape, seen through the opening of a theatrical curtain, opens up behind what seems to be a grotto where the figures are located. The baby Jesus is veritably babylike, if slightly too self-conscious for his age, as he intently looks us in the eye. The men surrounding him are tender and careful rather than solemn and intimidating. They wear no official garb and the one seemingly responsible for the circumcision itself is unceremonially bareheaded.

Barocci ingeniously circumvents the potential seriousness, not to mention bloody painfulness, of the circumcision—which doesn’t mean that sophisticated religious concepts are not conveyed in the process. Judith W. Mann notes that on the left, ‘an acolyte gestures toward the foreskin that floats in the bowl in the table, lined up with the trussed lamb so that its symbolic association with Christ’s eventual sacrifice is made clear’ (Mann 2012: 17), and that the still life in the bottom right corner is not only a precious effet de réel but also a reference to the eucharistic meal, ‘appropriate since both body and blood are associated with the Circumcision’ (ibid 18).

References

Mann, Judith W. 2012. ‘Innovation and Inspiration: An Introduction to Federico Barocci’, in Federico Barocci. Renaissance Master of Color and Line (New Haven: Yale University Press)