Madonna and Child with The Infant Saint John the Baptist

Lorenzo di Credi

(Florence c. 1457 - 1536)

---

Now agreed to be a masterpiece of Lorenzo di Credi, the work was long considered to have been by Leonardo. Despite the evident adherence to Leonardesque schemes, visible above all in the triangular compositional structure and in the background landscape, the painting displays the typical features of Credi’s art. Rather than focusing on creating atmosphere, he favoured a clear-cut and incisive rendering of the design and an analytic approach to reality.

---

Object details

---

Commentary

The painting appeared in the Borghese collection only after the fideicommissary document recorded it in 1859 as a work belonging to the family’s unencumbered estate and chosen by Venturi as compensation for the sale of the alleged Portrait of Cesare Borgia by Raphael and sold to Baron Rothschild. The composition originally belonged to the Salviati collection, and is probably traceable in the cardinal’s inventories (1612-1613) as the “painting with the Madonna, Child and St John with a gilded frame”.

Amoretti (1804) and Frizzoni (1891) associated this panel with the painting of Clement VII mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in his Life of Leonardo da Vinci (1568 ed. 1879, IV, p. 25). In fact, most critics consider it to be one of the paintings by Lorenzo that owes the most to the genius of Da Vinci. This is especially true for the landscape in the background, where the winding streams of water and sharp rocks are pervaded by a bluish atmosphere, and for the transparency of the glass in the vase to the left of the Virgin. These typical Leonardesque characteristics are echoed in Di Credi’s detailed drawing (Lemorlieff 1866, Venturi 1911), visible in the robes, the folds of plump flesh in the Child and St John, in the flowers in the vase and the open book on the right, where the passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah “Ecce Virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel” (7:14) is legible.

Bernard Berenson, in his repertories of Florentine Renaissance paintings, dated the painting to a period after 1490. In his view, at that time, artists in the city of the Medici began to depict the infant Jesus in the act of blessing John the Baptist. This theory is also supported by Gigetta Dalli Regoli (1966), who compared it to the figure of the infant Christ in the Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist preserved in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden (inv. Gal.-No.13). The dating proposed by Berenson is generally accepted by critics and van Marle (1932) partially agrees, narrowing the chronological range of the work’s creation to within 1493.

Numerous replicas of the composition are found in the Borghese collection and are documented (Dalli Regoli 1966) in Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland and in Cremona, at the Museo civico Ala Ponzone, as well as other various schools based on the master’s original.

Lara Scanu

---