Madonna and Child with The Infant Saint John the Baptist
(Modena 1578 - Parma 1615)
The painting appears for the first time in the 1790 inventory as the work of Bartolomeo Schedoni, an Emilian artist whose career was closely tied to the ducal courts of Modena and Parma where the artist moved in 1607.
In his approach to handling the material quality of the paint, the work is very similar to a number of small devotional paintings made by the artist in Emilia, although critics are not unanimous regarding the autography.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
Dimensions
Provenance
Rome, Borghese Collection, 1790 (Inventory 1790, room X, no. 45); Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese 1833, p. 20. Purchased by the Italian State, 1902.
Conservation and Diagnostic
- 1903-1905 Luigi Bartolucci (disinfestazione dei tarli).
Commentary
This panel painting is first documented in the Borghese Collection in 1790, listed in the inventory for that year as a work by Bartolomeo Schedoni, an attribution accepted by both Giovanni Piancastelli (1891) and Adolfo Venturi (1893). This name was questioned for the first time by Vincenzo Moschini (1927), followed in 1928 by Roberto Longhi who instead favoured the idea of a master from Emilia who worked in a style close to that of Michelangelo Anselmi, Ercole Setti and Giambattista Tinti.
In 1955, agreeing with an opinion expressed orally by Luigi Grassi, who believed that the painting was made by Schedoni working in a style close to that of Parmigianino, Paola della Pergola published this Holy Family as a work by Schedoni, an attribution repeated by Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2006) although there is no mention of the work in the two monographs on the artist (Cecchinelli, Dallasta 1999; Negro, Roio 2000).
The painting is certainly close to Schedoni’s milieu, in that it is similar in composition and style to numerous small-format devotional paintings made by the artist in Modena and Parma, like the Holy Family in a private collection (Negro, Roio 2000), of which the panel painting has been considered a copy (Pallucchini 1945).
Antonio Iommelli
Bibliography
- M. Vasi, Itinéraire, Paris 1792, p. 396;
- G. Piancastelli, Catalogo dei quadri della Galleria Borghese, in Archivio Galleria Borghese, 1891, p. 100;
- A. Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Roma 1893, p. 159;
- V. Moschini, Bartolomeo Schedoni, in “L’Arte”, XL, 1927, p. 148;
- R. Longhi, Precisioni nelle Gallerie Italiane, I, La R. Galleria Borghese, Roma 1928, p. 207;
- R. Pallucchini, I dipinti della collezione Estense, Roma 1945, p. 65, n. 890
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese. I Dipinti, I, Roma 1955, p. 68, n. 120;
- C. Cecchinelli, F. Dallasta, Bartolomeo Schedoni pittore emiliano. Modena 1578 Parma 1615, Parma 1999; (assente)
- E. Negro, N. Roio, Bartolomeo Schedoni 1578-1615, Modena 2000, pp. 109-110; (assente)
- K. Herrmann Fiore, Galleria Borghese Roma scopre un tesoro. Dalla pinacoteca ai depositi un museo che non ha più segreti, San Giuliano Milanese 2006, p. 104.
