Madonna and Child between Saints Ignatius of Antioch and Onuphrius

Lotto Lorenzo

(Venice 1480 - Loreto 1557)

This signed and dated painting may have been part of Cardinal Scipione’s original collection. The panel, with its original frame, contains clear references to Venetian painters (Giovanni Bellini and Cima da Conegliano), and shows the strong influence of Dürer, who was active in Venice in 1506. Nothing is known about the provenance of the panel, which may have been painted during Lotto’s stay in Recanati (1506-08), or during his time in Rome, beginning in late 1508, when the artist was engaged in the Vatican Stanze. The presence of the two religious figures, Ignatius of Antioch and Onuphrius, has been linked to the reformist ideas of the time, which offered them as models for imitation.

Object details

Commentary

The painting was cited in the Borghese inventory dated 1693, no. 48, but, as De Giorgio (2019) suggests, it may have entered Scipione’s collection much earlier thanks to the friendly relations he had with Agostino Galamini, bishop of the city of Recanati from 1613 to 1620. Indeed, although we do not know the precise provenance of the panel, which is dated 1508, it would appear to date roughly from the time between the end of Lotto’s stay in Recanati, the Marche (1506-1508), and his early days in Rome. The Virgin, in a self-assured pose, holds the Child wrapped in a snow-white robe, who is leaning over, with a ‘very naive’ movement (Morelli 1897, pp. 238-239), to bless the heart brought to him by Ignatius of Antioch; while the Virgin’s eyes are turned towards the praying Onuphrius (see catalogue entry 2021).

The panel shows Lotto’s remarkable maturity. He was only 28 years old at the time and able to balance, with perfect harmony, the different cultural references identifiable in the work. The dark monochrome background not only allows the outlines of the figures to be clearly delineated, a typical feature of the German ‘calligraphy’ dear to the painter, but also highlights the signature and date (Laurent. Lotus M.D.VIII). He reveals familiarity with the great German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer, who was based in Venice between 1505 and 1507. Despite these distinctly North European elements, the symmetry and compositional balance place the young artist’s work firmly within the Venetian Renaissance tradition, with clear influences, ranging from Giovanni Bellini (Humfrey 2006) to Cima da Conegliano and Alvise Vivarini (Berenson 1932).

An allegorical reading of the scene would seem to indicate one of the painter’s favourite subjects, namely the contrast between the contemplative life, personified by the almost naked hermit Onuphrius, and the active life, symbolised by the opulently dressed Ignatius. The painter had already addressed this antithesis in the Asolo Altarpiece – Lotto’s images, indeed, affirm the impossibility of separating the two.

The painting, enhanced by its exquisite contemporary frame, is mentioned in a rather confusing payment note to the gilder Annibale Durante: the subject is wrong while the frame, ‘black with gilded rabbet’, and the dimensions seem to match (Della Pergola 1959, p. 117). The anonymous author describes a ‘Madonna with St John’ – the saint is absent from our composition. The panel did not appear in the Borghese inventory of the 1630s, nor was it mentioned by Giacomo Manilli in his 1650 Guide to Villa Borghese. As already mentioned, the painting appeared for the first time in the Borghese inventory of 1693, although even here the iconographic description is rather surprising: in fact, the pierced heart in which Christ’s trigram is engraved, an attribute of St. Ignatius of Antioch, is mistaken for a ‘loaf of bread’: ‘a painting of two and a half palms approximately oblong with the Madonna and Child blessing a loaf of bread to St Nicholas and with St Onuphrius of N. 193 with letters Laurentius Lotus with 1508 in a gilded frame’ (inv. 1693, no. 48). The heart, engraved here with letters in red and not gold, as is traditional, is thus the focal point of the composition as well as being an iconographic innovation for the time, since its being offered to the Child seems unprecedented in the history of art (De Giorgio 2019).

The above-mentioned inventory also interprets the holy bishop as St Nicholas. It is difficult to identify the figure of the saint to the right of the Virgin: there are various theories, ranging from St Nicholas (Biagi 1942; Pignatti 1953) to St Flavian (Lattanzi 1985; De Giorgio 2019), a saint much venerated in Recanati, according to a thesis based mainly on literary theological arguments.  In recent years, however, the richly dressed saint has been recognised as the patron saint of the city of Antioch, St. Ignatius, because of the traditional symbols associated with him: principally, the pierced heart, but also the partially visible pastoral baculum, the palm in his right hand and the bishop’s habit.

The question of whether Lotto had direct acquaintance with Dürer’s work has not been fully resolved, although some strong connections can be detected.  The Borghese panel has certain similarities with the German artist’s Christ among the Doctors (see Dal Pozzolo 1999), especially in the graphic elements and partially in the colour tones. Moreover, Lotto’s St Onuphrius, as Berenson (1955 p. 25) and Della Pergola (1959, p. 117) previously noted, seems to be an ‘Italian’ version of Dürer’s scribe. The Child, moreover, shows similarities, both physically and dynamically, with one of the putti in Dürer’s engraving Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat Accompanied by Four Putti (c. 1505), but also with the St John in the Madonna with the Siskin (1506). Unlike Dürer’s painting, whose surface is almost entirely taken up by figures, Lotto's panel has an organically partitioned composition, albeit within the abstractness provided by the black background. The colours create broad, contrasting fields with cold, acid colours, demonstrating a certain closeness to the contemporary Polyptych of Recanati, completed in the same year 1508, further confirming the reference to the period spent in the Marche. The total absence of spatiality is ‘emphasised by the artist's signature [...] placed on the surface’ (Humfrey 1997), combining typically Venetian features with intense echoes of the Recanati experience: one wonders whether such expressive individuality might stem from the ‘quietness of a wild village’ in the Marche rather than the cultural hustle and bustle of Rome’, as hypothesised by Morelli (1897).

The painting, a direct bequest and not part of the fideicommissum, was included in the sale to the State in exchange, along with others, for the Portrait of Cesare Borgia.

Gabriele De Melis