Madonna and Child with St. John Oil on canvas School of Titian

Madonna with Child and San Giovannino

Oil on canvas, 105 x 78 cm

The work under consideration depicts a half-figure of the Madonna holding the Child Jesus, who tenderly rests his head on hers. St. John emerges from the side taking the child’s hand and foot. A host of cherubim appears in the background, highlighting the divine character of the representation.

The composition of the work examined, however, mirrors that of the Madonna and Child with St. John present in the Uffizi, which until the second half of the nineteenth century was recorded in Cardinal Leopold’s collection as the work of the Venetian master Titian Vecellio (1488/1490- 1576). It is Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe who consider the Uffizi painting a workshop work. Some scholars place the Uffizi version in the sixth decade of the 16th century, based on a similarity between the face of the Virgin and that of Venus and Cupid, also known as Titian’s wife. Harold Wethey approximates the Uffizi painting to the one remembered until the mid-eighteenth century at Palazzo Barberini in Rome. A painting depicting the same subject is preserved and recorded as early as the seventeenth century and attributed to Titian in a 1638 inventory in the collection of Palazzo Giustiniani, but with the variant of St. John not grasping Jesus’ foot, and the position and hairstyle of the Virgin are also different. An engraving by Dutch draughtsman and engraver Cornelis Bloemaert (1603-1692), published in the Justinian Gallery, is also derived from that work. Another specimen of such a painting is in the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio.

The existence of many replicas of that painting, including several long considered to be autographs of the master, suggests the existence of a prototype made by Titian, which has now disappeared, and of which it is difficult to fix a chronological indication. The attitude of mother and child may recall that of Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna and Child at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, also surrounded by a rich group of cherubs, which may suggest that the authentic work by Titian may also be an early work.

It has already been mentioned how the painting under consideration repeats the composition of the above versions, but in a mirror-image manner; this element indicates to us that the artist relied on an engraving, probably not that of Bloemaert, which takes up a slightly different composition in the relationship between St. John and the infant Jesus. The Madonna’s gaze also varies, not turned toward an indefinite point, but straight toward the viewer.The work is notable for its rendering of the fabrics, which are particularly luminized so as to give an idea of the material of which they are made, echoing the manner of Titian’s 1510 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Madonna and Child, John the Baptist and a Saint at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, from 1514.

The array of cherubs can be compared with the one Titian inserts in Apparition of Christ to His Mother, 1554 in Medole, Church of the Assumption of the Virgin.