Italian School (17th Century), a pair of oval garland paintings centering "The Birth of Christ" and "The Holy Family" respectively, oils on canvas, unsigned, each 15-1/4" x 20-1/4". Framed alike in 18th-century carved giltwood frames. Provenance: Collection of Henry Stern, New Orleans, Louisiana to his grandson Paul Rosenthal, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Still-lifes flourished in Northern Europe following the Protestant Reformation. In the absence of saints and religious iconography, artists, as well as their wealthy patrons, found worship and meaning in daily household objects. The bouquets of flowers, ripe fruits, butterflies, hourglasses and skulls that populate these paintings are symbols (memento mori), designed to allegorize the transience of life from the Ecclesiastics and Gospel of Matthew that warn people not to succumb to the false idols of materials: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven...For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also....You cannot serve God and money" (6:19-24). The Catholic Counter-Reformation responded to Protestant iconoclasm by encouraging artists to paint bigger, more dramatic religious scenes, characteristic of Caravaggio's or Giovanni Battista Gualli's work. In the paintings offered here, Catholic devotional scenes (painted a la mode Italian) are encircled and framed by Dutch-style lush floral garlands, creating a beautiful mix of religious ideologies and genres. According to Susan Meriam, art historian on Flemish garland painting, this style first emerged ca. 1607-1608, when the Archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo (a staunch Jesuit), commissioned two Flemish artists, Jan Brueghel and Hendrick van Balen, to paint floral garlands around depictions of the Virgin Mary because images of Mary had been desecrated and demeaned by Protestants, the Archbishop wanted Mary's effigy to be all the more honored by the inclusion of flowers as a framing device, thus combining the Archbishop's two greatest loves--church reform and the visual arts. In the century that followed, this genre gained wide popularity with Catholic Flemish and Italian patrons. These devotional bouquets, often found in decorative roundel or cartouche form, were greatly cherished and revered as they graced many parlor walls and altars within the home. Reference: Susan Meriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision and the Devotional Image, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012, p. 3-6.

In generally very good, restored condition. Both with scattered craquelure, darkening and surface soiling to varnish layer. Abrading to edges, pinprick-sized losses to paint surface. Scattered inpainting within the craquelure and touch-ups to some of the flowers. Other notable inpainting repairs include to the heads of the Virgin and Child in the "Holy Family" example; the other example with a possible old repair with inpainting in an area above the figures of Virgin and Child and to the heads of figures to the far left. Both relined some time ago. Both framed with some losses to gesso and carvings and surface flaking.