Virgin and Child with Young Saint John and Saint Elizabeth

Berruguete Alonso

(Paredes de Nava c. 1486 - Toledo 1561)

This painting, first documented in the Borghese Collection in 1790, is by Alonso Berruguete, a Spanish painter active in Rome from 1508, where he became acquainted with the painting of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, reworked in the light of the early Florentine mannerist experiences. The painting depicts the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, portrayed in a typically Florentine landscape in the company of the Infant Jesus and the young John the Baptist.

Object details

Commentary

The provenance of this painting remains unclear to this day. According to an outdated hypothesis by Paola della Pergola (1959), the work came from the collection of Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati, owner in 1634 of a painting with a similar subject, but whose description in the inventory lacks the author’s name. Considering, moreover, that the Salviati painting collection only merged into the Borghese Collection in 1794 (Costamagna 2001), there is no reason to continue along the track beaten so far by critics.

The first certain information regarding this panel dates back to 1790, the year in which it was listed among the possessions of the House of Borghese as a painting by Andrea del Sarto, an attribution that was destined to change over the centuries, ranging from Fra’ Paolino da Pistoia (see Della Pergola 1959) to Bartolomeo della Porta (Venturi 1893), from Piero di Cosimo (Berenson 1932; Id. 1936; Gamba 1936–1937) to Pontormo (Longhi 1928). In 1953, returning to the subject (see Fontainebleau 1952), Roberto Longhi attributed the painting to Alonso Berruguete, a Spanish artist active in Italy between c.1508 and 1518, a period in which he got to know Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The scholar, in fact, comparing this painting with the additions made by the Spaniard to The Coronation and Four Saints altarpiece currently in Paris (Louvre Museum; Vasari 1550 [1971]), had no doubts in dating the Borghese work between 1508–1510 and 1514, an opinion confirmed by Paola della Pergola (1959) and unanimously accepted by all critics (see, most recently, Mozzati 2013; Hermann Fiore 2011).

The painting depicts Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, portrayed in a typical Tuscan landscape with Jesus, seen in profile, and the young John the Baptist. The painting, a major example of the Tuscan-Roman culture of the second decade of the sixteenth century, skilfully combines Michelangelo’s sculptural plasticity with Leonardo’s theory of figurative contrasts and Raphael’s graceful renditions (the debt to his Holy Family in Munich is evident in this regard), while mitigating Pontormo’s liquid painting with Andrea del Sarto’s solidity of structure.

Following a major restoration completed in 2011, revealing the brilliant colours and the rendering of some details that had long been illegible, the panel has been dated to 1516–1517 (Mozzati 2013).

Antonio Iommelli