Madonna and Child with a Little Bird

Tisi Benvenuto called Garofalo

(Garofalo or Ferrara 1476 - Ferrara 1559)

Manilli reported this painting in the collection in 1650, describing it as a work by Garofalo, an attribution questioned by later scholars. The features of the Virgin are rendered in an almost academic classicising style that derives from the development of Raphael’s example through the formal approach of Lorenzo Costa and Boccaccio Boccaccino, the latter’s workshop having been where Garofalo began his activity.

Object details

Commentary

This simple painting, which creates an intimate devotional connection through the device of looking directly at the viewer/faithful, has all the features of the prefiguration of the fate of Jesus as Salvator Mundi, showing the Christ Child playing with a cardinal, which is a symbol of the Passion.

The first mention of this painting in the Borghese collection was made by Jacopo Manilli (1650), who reports that it was in a space used for the cardinal’s private devotion. The next attestation is found in the inventory of 1693, in which it is described as a ‘Madonna and Child, holding a little bird in his hand, no. 367, on wood, gilt frame, by Garofalo’.

The authorship of the painting has always been agreed almost unanimously and the first date proposed for the work was 1517, on the basis of comparison with the altarpiece for the parish church of San Valentino in Castellarano, which was painted in that year (Venturi 1893; Longhi 1928; Della Pergola 1955). Considered by Berenson to have been painted in the artist’s youth (1907), it was subsequently likened to the style of Boccaccio Boccaccino and proposed to precede the Neptune and Minerva in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, which was painted in 1512 (Gardner 1911; inv. Gal.-Nr. 132). The ability to hold together the Giorgionesque palette, Raphaelesque anatomy and distant echoes of Boccaccino make this painting one of the most important stages in the transformation of Garofalo’s language, confirming the dating proposed by Venturi (Herrmann Fiore 2002).

Lara Scanu