Madonna with Saint Zacharias

Which Zacharias

The name in this title carries the same hazard as Catherine. There is Zacharias the priest, father of John the Baptist, struck silent in the temple and given back his speech at the naming of his son; and there is Zechariah the prophet, a different man from a different book. The first is conventionally shown as an old priest with a censer, a scroll or a writing tablet — the tablet being the object on which the tradition has him write the child's name. The second belongs to a different set of pictures entirely. The record gives a name and a spelling, and nothing that decides between them.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1530 and gives the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy as its location. The dimensions are 60 x 75.5 cm, slightly wider than tall. It is filed under group portraiture, Religion, religious cultural heritage and Architectural, with Mannerism Late Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

The architectural heading

That last category is the unusual one for a Madonna subject. An index that files a devotional group under Architectural is recording built structure as part of the picture's content — ruins, an arch, a column — which in a sixteenth-century Italian composition is a normal component and a genuine part of what the work contains. His is the only title in this catalogue carrying the name Zacharias.