Adoration of the Christ Child

Piero di Lorenzo called Piero di Cosimo

(Florence 1461-62 - 1521)

This panel was first mentioned in connection with the Borghese Collection in 1693. What makes it particular is the section of landscape appearing at the end of the corridor that moves into the background. Jesus is depicted in the foreground as he leans on a cushion, his regal attribute. With him are his mother, the infant John the Baptist and two angels. Jesus holds a small cross in his arms, which clearly evokes his Passion; similarly, the white drape alludes to the shroud that covered his body. The scene is enriched by several other details, not necessarily visible at first sight: a white dove perches on a beam of the roof, a mouse sits on a shelf behind the Virgin, and the figure of Joseph grazing a donkey and an ox appears in the distance in the landscape.

Intended for private worship, this work was executed after 1510 by the Florentine painter Piero di Lorenzo di Chimenti, student and collaborator of Cosimo Rosselli, from whom the name is taken by which he is primarily known today. Piero was the son of a goldsmith: his training in this art under his father is evident in certain details of his paintings, such as, in this case, the refinement of the depiction of the jewels and gemstones that embellish the angel’s garment and the star-shaped brooch on Mary’s mantle, which recalls the verses of a popular prayer: Ave Maris Stella (‘Hail, Star of the Sea’).

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this painting is still unknown. In 2000 Kristina Herrmann Fiore cautiously proposed that it was one of the works confiscated from Cavalier d'Arpino in 1607 (in Caravaggio e la Luce 2000); yet several years later she rejected this possibility (Herrmann Fiore 2003-04; 2006). Our first certain mention of the work dates to 1693, when the panel was listed in the Borghese inventory of that year with the following description: ‘Next to those, a large tondo above the door with a round frame with gilded inlays, with the Virgin, Child, the Infant John the Baptist and two angels playing  flutes, no. [sic], by Giovanni Bellini’ (Inv. 1693). Although the work cannot be precisely identified in the next inventories, it appears again in the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario with an unlikely attribution to Raphael. Giovanni Piancastelli (1891) repeated this name, although it had already been rejected by Platner (1842), who proposed Fra’ Bartolomeo as the artist, and by Frizzoni (1880), who ascribed the tondo to the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo, an attribution accepted by a number of subsequent scholars (Morelli 1897; Venturi 1911; Berenson 1904; Roberto Longhi 1928); Della Pergola 1959). Yet not all critics were persuaded, beginning with Fritz Knapp (1899), who believed the work to be by a follower of Piero. For his part, Robert Langton Douglas (1946) pointed to certain similarities with the tondo by Fra’ Bartolomeo, also in the Borghese Collection (inv. no. 439), ascribing both works to the ‘Master of the Borghese Nativity’. Raimond Van Marle (1931), finally, maintained that the panel was executed by Piero under the influence of Lorenzo di Credi.

The first scholar to link the Borghese Adoration to the one in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (inv. no. 54) was Adolfo Venturi (1893), who initially believed it to be a copy of the Russian composition. His thesis of the connection between the two works was accepted by Fritz von Harck (1896), Lionello Venturi (1912) and Paolo Morselli (1958); yet these critics maintained that the Hermitage tondo was a copy of the Borghese panel. Nonetheless, two prominent critics later cast doubt on this theory. While confirming that the work in question was in fact by Piero, Federico Zeri (1959) found several thematic similarities with the Cini Madonna in the Uffizi (inv. no. 3885). For his part, Luigi Grassi (1963) noted likenesses with both the Kress tondo in the National Gallery of Washington (inv. no. 1939.1.371) and The Nativity by Piero della Francesca in London (National Gallery, inv. no. NG908). Grassi in fact suggested that Piero di Cosimo showed interest in the last works of the painter from Borgo Sansepolcro. In addition to that influence – which was of course mediated by Perugino, who was active in Florence from the 1480s (see Forlani Tempesti, Capretti 1996) – scholars have noted others, in particular that of Fra’ Bartolomeo with regard to the backlighting effect (Forlani Tempesti, Capretti 1996) and of Leonardo da Vinci for the adoption of the dark background of the hut, the blurred use of colour, and the rendering of the landscape and faces of the angels (Herrmann Fiore 2003-2004).

With regard to the date of the work, critics agree that it is a product of Piero’s later career, probably from the period 1510-12 (Bacci 1976; Forlani Tempesti, Capretti 1996; Herrmann Fiore 2003-04). This chronology becomes evident from a comparison of the work in question with the composition held at the National Gallery in Washington, which Piero executed around 1507. The particularly thin layering of colour for the flesh of the figures has led some scholars to propose that the work in unfinished (Bacci 1966); yet this hypothesis was rejected by Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2003-2004), who in 2003 reported the findings of a restoration operation conducted by Laura Ferretti. These revealed that the damaged appearance of the faces for the most part results from the heavy-handed restoration work which the panel underwent over the centuries, which permanently compromises an objective assessment of the work.

Two drawings by Piero di Cosimo related to this Adoration are held at the Uffizi in Florence (Inv. no. 343E) and at the Gabinetto dei disegni in Rome (inv. no. F.C. 130507; see Herrmann Fiore 2003-2004).

Antonio Iommelli