The Virgin and Child and Young Saint John

Master of the Kress Landscapes (Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani?)

(Florence 1487 - 1527)

Variously attributed in the Galleria Borghese inventories to Parmigianino and Beccafumi, this panel was long considered one of Rosso Fiorentino’s early works, only related in 1972 to the Master of the Kress Landscapes, a personality identified by critics with Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani. It depicts what is known as the Virgin of Humility, a subject widely explored by painters who, unlike in the Maestà, portray the Virgin sitting on the ground and not enthroned. Behind her, in a pleasing landscape, are Joseph and the young John the Baptist. 

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this panel is still unknown. The work, in fact, is only attested in the Borghese Collection from 1693 onwards, described in the inventory as follows: ‘a small panel painting measuring 4 palms with a Madonna and Child in her arms and Saint Joseph with Saint John with a landscape of no. 251 by Parmigianino with gilded frame’ (Inv. 1693).

The attribution to the Parma painter mentioned in the seventeenth-century document was abandoned in the following centuries (Inventario Fidecommissario 1833). The painting, in fact, was listed by Giovanni Piancastelli (1891) as by ‘an anonymous painter’, related by Adolfo Venturi to ‘a good Florentine master’ (Venturi 1893) and only with Ciaranfi (1934) attributed to the Sienese Domenico Beccafumi. This attribution, confirmed by Bernard Berenson (1936), was, however, discarded by Roberto Longhi (1928) who, for his part, maintained it could be a very early painting by Rosso Fiorentino, dating the Borghese Madonna to 1512 (Longhi 1928) and later to around 1514 (Id. 1953). This opinion, accepted by all critics (Becherucci 1944; Barocchi 1950; Freedberg 1961, Carroll 1964 [ed. 1976]; Borea 1965; Natali-Cecchi 1989; Conti 1995), was also confirmed by Paola Della Pergola (1959) who, in the catalogue of the Borghese Gallery paintings, published the panel as an autograph work by Rosso Fiorentino.

The first to question this interpretation was Carlo Gamba (1957), who suggested the painting could be attributed to the little-known painter Antonio di Donnino; he was followed in 1972 by Federico Zeri who, by thoroughly studying two landscapes from the Samuel H. Kress collection in the Washington National Gallery identified a ‘Master of the Kress Landscapes’, an anonymous artist to whom the scholar also proposed assigning the Holy Family with Four Saints of Fucecchio (Museo di Fucecchio), the Virgin and Child from the Museum of Arezzo, and the Virgin and Child with Saint John from Munich (private collection). The actual identity of this master, whose name was at first invented to overcome the absence of a true name to which a series of stylistically very close works could be assigned, was only identified in 1998 by Luis Waldman.

The scholar, in fact, following the discovery of some documents relating to the commission of the Fucecchio altarpiece, came across the name of its true author, namely Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani, to whom critics decidedly attributed all the paintings that had been so far assigned to the Kress Master, including the Borghese panel (Waldman 2006; Sambo 2009). It is interesting to emphasise how the personality of this artist, whose production has recently been emerging in a rather consistent manner (Palmieri 2011; Aquino 2013; Del Rosso 2017), adheres perfectly to that outlined by Zeri several years earlier: active in the Florentine area in the first half of the sixteenth century, he was in fact very close to the group of the ‘Florentine eccentrics’ (Waldman 2001), with whom he shared that intolerance for rules, reflected both in his bright rendering of colours and in the use of a fluid but at the same time angular line.

Antonio Iommelli