Madonna and Child

Luteri Giovanni called Dosso Dossi

(Tramuschio? 1487 ca - Ferrara 1542)

This painting entered the collection through the marriage of Paolo Borghese to Olimpia Aldobrandini, partial heir of Lucrezia d'Este, who acquired it in turn through her grandparents Alfonso I and Lucrezia Borgia. The unusual gestural expressiveness of the Virgin and Child – the only painting of this subject in the artist’s oeuvre – reveals Dossi’s immense skill in handling traditional themes with originality and compositional freedom. The intense colouring of this painting, embellished with bright filaments of gold, merges with the sculptural structure of the figures, expressing Dossi’s interest in contemporary Roman painting and Raphael in particular, suggesting a date for the work during the period just after his probable trip to Rome, which likely took place at the end of the 1510s.

Object details

Commentary

Although it would be quite challenging to securely trace this small painting in the Aldobrandini inventories, it was in all likelihood in the collection of Lucrezia d’Este d’Urbino and seems to be described in one of the inventories: ‘Above the frame to the left there are two small paintings, one of the Madonna with Our Lord in her arms by Mondino Scarsella and the other of a similar Madonna by Dosso’ (Della Pergola 1959). This work was therefore displayed in the collection of the Ferrara noblewoman as a pendant to the Madonna and Child with St Joseph and the Young St John the Bapstist by Scarsellino, which is also in the Borghese collection (inv. 222) and of similar size. This provenance has not been accepted by all scholars, who either find it not especially convincing (Romani in Ballarin 1994-1995), or propose that it was commissioned by Alfonso I and Lucrezia Borgia (Humphrey 1998) or think that its path might be traceable through the Aldobrandini documents up to arrival at the Villa Borghese after Paolo Borghese married Olimpia Aldobrandini in 1638 (Herrmann Fiore 2002).

This small, invaluable painting was particularly admired by Adolfo Venturi (1893) for its luminosity and especially exuberant and intense brilliance and sparkle. The scholar was a bit perplexed by the dark background on the right, which recent X-rays (Coliva 1998) have revealed originally contained a preparatory sketch of St Joseph, which the painter then covered up with dark paint that allows us to glimpse its shape when backlit.

The clear, confident forms of the Virgin and Child, while marked by a few perspectival problems, especially in the rendering of Christ’s blessing arm, stand out against an uneasy, foggy natural backdrop, defined with just a few brushstrokes and highlights used to describe the leaves on trees, the clouds and a group of grazing sheep all in the same way. The composition, in which we find the influence of Dürer in the rendering of Mary with the small Christ Child in her arms and close observation of nature starting with Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, inv. 1942.9.1), together with the uncertain handling of foreshortening and proportion, support Vittoria Romani’s dating of the Borghese painting to around the time of the Melissa (inv. 217), which was painted in about 1517 (Romani in Ballarin 1994-1995; Humphrey 1998; Herrmann Fiore 2002). Previously proposed dates for the work include the early 1510s (Mendelsohn 1914), by 1510 (Longhi 1927; Lazareff 1941), between 1519 and 1525 (Puppi 1965), during the years 1520-1522 (Mezzetti 1965), by the early 1520s (Freedberg 1971) and in the mid 1520s (Gibbons 1968).

Lara Scanu