Madonna and Child

Salimbeni Ventura

(Siena 1568 - 1613)

The panel is signed “Ventura Salim / beni”, an inscription that reappeared in 1936 following a restoration. In 18th-century inventories, it appeared under the name of Federico Barocci, an attribution that remained valid until the end of the 19th century. The composition is inspired by Raphael, an important cultural reference for Salimbeni in the last decade of the 16th century, when the painter was in Rome.

Object details

Commentary

The inscription on the back of the panel leads back to an ownership and inventory that has yet to be identified. The work is first mentioned in the Borghese collection as late as 1790 as a ‘Madonnina’ by Barocci. This attribution, through the Fideicommissary, continued up until Piancastelli’s listing (1891, p. 330). This comparison is not so far off, as Herrmann Fiore correctly points out, as it is determined primarily by compositional elements.

The protagonist of the scene is the daily, demanding gesture of the Child who, with outstretched hands and red cheeks, is grasping at his mother’s breast for milk. Although the group occupies the central part of the scene, the landscape itself is an important part, and dominates the composition’s background.

The painting is thought to be a translation of a drawing or painting by Raphael that no longer exists. In this sense, Vasari’s mention of a work painted for “some gentlemen from San Siro” is fundamental. The work was left unfinished shortly before his move to Rome in 1508, and the part with the drapery was completed later by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (Vasari, ed. Milanesi, IV, p. 328). According to Venturi, and then Della Pergola, Salimbeni’s painting is said to be derived from the drawing believed to be an autograph by Raphael conserved in the Louvre (inv. 3859, Recto). Riedl, Ferino, Cordellier and Py (D. Cordellier and B. Py, 1992, pp. 116-119) believed it could be derived directly from the painting by Raphael. According to Herrmann Fiore, the borrowing of the Virgin’s gesture of holding the infant’s head during breast-feeding, barely hinted at in the Parisian drawing, but clearly expressed in the Borghese collection’s work, would support Venturi’s proposal. Raphael’s invention was also used in a painting formerly in the Fesh collection and currently in the D.G. van Beuningen collection in Rotterdam. There, a different and less significant allegorical role is reserved for the landscape and the gesture of the Virgin’s hand, similar to the painting in the Vermeheren collection in The Hague, already mentioned by Paola Della Pergola (1959, p. 52).

In addition to these, the version in the Bonnat Museum in Bayonne and the group of drawings in Chantilly refer to the same compositional model. Herrmann Fiore also emphasises the variants in this copy, where the gestures and chiaroscuro are attenuated, as well as the elements of the landscape and the entire composition. These elements are typical of late Mannerist painting and therefore favoured an attribution closer to Barocci’s name in inventories between the 18th and 19th century (Herrmann Fiore 1992, p. 250). Venturi, on the other hand, presented the painting as a work of the “School of Carracci”, although he recognised it as “an exact reproduction of a Louvre drawing attributed to Raphael” (Venturi 1893, p. 158). Longhi’s intuition in 1928 was that “the translator in painting was, evidently, Ventura Salimbeni” (Longhi 1928, p. 207, no. 314). This proposal was confirmed a few years later (1936) by Carlo Matteucci’s cleaning of the painting, which revealed the Sienese artist’s signature in the lower part of the panel. 

Fabrizio Carinci