Madonna and Child

Vannucci Pietro called Perugino

(Città della Pieve 1450 - Fontignano 1524)

We can identify this work with certainty in the Borghese Collection only from 1833. The panel attests to the great success met with in central Italy by this type of devotional painting made by Perugino, to whom the work has been attributed after much debate. It depicts the Madonna and Child, portrayed here against a broad landscape which harmonises well with the entire composition, in keeping with that dolce stile which the young Raphael learned during his apprenticeship under Umbrian master.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this panel is still unknown, as are the exact circumstances of its entrance into the Borghese Collection. In spite of the fact that 17th- and 18th-century family inventories list a number of works by Perugino, the work can only be identified with certainty from 1833, when the description of a ‘Madonna and Child by Pietro Perugino, 1 span 8 inches, on panel’ appears in the Inventario Fidecommissario of that year.

Although this initial attribution to Umbrian master was rejected by both Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1864) and Adolfo Venturi (in Storia 1913) in favour of Gian Battista Bertucci and Marco Meloni, respectively, it was unhesitatingly confirmed by Giulio Cantalamessa (1884) and by most subsequent critics (Williamson 1900; Gnoli 1923; Longhi 1928; De Rinaldis 1948; Della Pergola 1955; Herrmann Fiore 2006; Zalabra 2014). Not all scholars, however, were persuaded: Bernard Berenson (1968) and Ettore Camesasca both maintained that the Umbrian painter did not execute the work alone (1969); likewise, Pietro Scarpellini (2004), in his monograph on Vannucci, doubted that the Borghese panel was a Perugino autograph, an opinion that had already been expressed by Chiara Stefani, who in 2000 labelled it a workshop replica, and that would be repeated by Claudia La Malfa, who in 2011 claimed the work was by an anonymous Umbrian artist influenced by Perugino’s production, dating it to the turn of the 16th century. This scholar further noted that the figures of the Virgin and Child are the mirror images of those painted by Perugino in the Gonfalon of Justice (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, inv. no. 278), in which, however, Mary’s gaze is not directed outward, in contradiction of the typical motif of his workshop’s production for private worship (La Malfa 2011). In addition, in La Malfa’s view Vannucci’s collaborators probably used a drawing by the master – today in the Louvre (Département des Arts Graphiques, inv. no. 4370) – for this work, given that it reproduces those typical traits of his figures, such as the Virgin’s pose and hairstyle, which is here characterised by a delicate parting and a mass of hair tied in knots over her ears.

The first critic to point to the similarities between the Borghese panel, the Madonna in Frankfurt (formerly in the Mumm collection, today at the Städel Museum, inv. no. 843) and the Madonna in the Louvre (inv. no. 720) was George C. Williamson, who considered all three to be originals (1900). From this comparison, Williamson concluded that the painting in question was not only an autograph work but was also the first to be executed. His opinion, though, did not persuade Enzo Camesasca (1959; 1969), who judged the Borghese exemplar to be of a slightly poorer quality compared to the composition in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow (formerly in the Stroganov collection, inv. no. 2665) but close to the Madonna and Child with the Young Baptist in Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. no. 1484). The existence of these versions – to which we must add that in the Fitzwilliam Museum di Cambridge (inv. no. 120) – attests to the popularity of this subject, painted by the master on a number of occasions during his career. In this context we must also mention two earlier altarpieces, the Decemviri Altarpiece in Vatican City (1495-96; Pinacoteca Vaticana, inv. no. 40317) and that in Fano (1497; church of Santa Maria Nuova). In these works, Perugino perfected a particular model for the Virgin, with the Child in her lap holding onto the collar of his mother’s garment.

Certain weaknesses visible in the panel in question, such as the rendering of the hand and the heaviness of the mantle, justify the hypothesis of the participation of members of Perugino’s workshop, which from the beginning of the 16th century was typically involved in creating new compositions based on cartoons and drawings by the old master. On the other hand, we do not have valid reasons to categorically exclude this panel – which can be dated to the first half of the 1510s – from Perugino’s oeuvre.

Antonio Iommelli