Madonna with Child and John the Baptist

The Virgin Mary is depicted sitting on the ground and breastfeeding Jesus. Baby John the Baptist is standing next to them and looks at the child. The scene is situated in landscape which also creates a contrasting background; it vertically divides the painting into two even halves, thick vegetation on one side and an opening stretching into the distance with a veduta on the horizon on the other. The humble Madonna sitting on the ground and the breastfeeding Madonna were popular iconographic types whose joining and combination with other figures represented another extremely popular scene: the Holy Family at rest during their flight to Egypt.

The conventional pyramidal outline of the figures is less obvious than the tangle of crossing diagonals of robust shapes. The figures are depicted in unnatural motions; their contrived poses are the result of a re-evaluated interest in naturalism or narrative logic. Madonnas in paintings prepared for the free market are understandably depicted as impersonal and objectivized. But if the complex shortcuts had other than a formal sense, it was undoubtedly an attempt to present the event with emotional content. The distinctive three dimensional depiction of the mother showing the child and the child establishing communication with the spectators through eye contact could have had an expressive visual symbolism in the plot of the painting. The creator thus updated the usual theme of the painting; perhaps he was striving for an expressive aspect and offered an evocative scene instead of a descriptive one.
 
Madonna Barberini by Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto was the template for the derivate known from various replicas. They constantly presented the breastfeeding Madonna in the same three-quarter cut. One of them was attributed to Florentine painter, Francesco Ubertini, called Bachiacca (1494–1557), at first in the New York collection of Florence and George Blumenthal. A related painting of Madonna with Child and John the Baptist was offered for sale through the D’Atri auction house in Paris; another was offered by the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna. At least two more paintings belong to the series of breastfeeding Madonnas with identical motions; in Dijon (Musée des Beaux-Arts) they administer the Holy Family with John the Baptist publicized as the work of a student of Andrea del Sarto and an almost identical painting is in Stuttgart (Staatsgalerie). The unidentified painting in Bratislava is the closest to the New York version in style and format.

Based on the style criticism, this circle of Madonnas was attributed to Pier Francesco Foschi and his Florentine workshop. They are far from the sweet grace and classical
idealism of the template. When comparing the Madonnas of Del Sarta and Foschi we can see the formal and psychological alliterations, but Foschi’s expression is far from the effects of chiaroscuro. Only complicated silhouettes, rigid physiognomies and contrasting matter remained in other derivatives. The more distorted versions can perhaps be considered as earlier works.

The painting in the SNG is certainly a workshop replica. The New York and Bratislava versions were probably derived from the same cartoon. Spolvero points, which were created by using perforated cartoons for the multiplication of the template by pressing through the pigment are visible in the infrared luminescence of the Bratislava painting.
 

Zuzana Ludiková ● LUDIKOVÁ, Zuzana - BURAN, Dušan. Talianska maľba = Italian Painting. Bratislava : Slovenská národná galéria, 2013. 242 strán. ISBN 9788080591748.