Visitation

copy after Luciani Sebastiano called Sebastiano del Piombo

(Venice c. 1485 - Rome 1547)

This painting, which may have belonged to Cavalier d'Arpino, depicts the meeting of the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, who are both pregnant, with Jesus and John the Baptist, respectively. The work is a high-quality copy of the Visitation painted by Sebastiano del Piombo for Filippo Sergardi. In the past some scholars attributed it to the Sienese artist Vincenzo Tamagni, although today not all critics concur.

Object details

Commentary

This work probably comes from the rich collection of paintings of Cavalier d'Arpino, who in 1607 was accused by Paul V’s fiscal police of illegal possession of firearms. As is well known, the artist was forced to cede about 100 works of art to the Apostolic Camera, including ‘a large painting of the Visitation of St Elisabeth, without a frame’. Critics have associated this work with the painting in question (della Pergola 1959; Hermann Fiore 2010).

While the 1693 inventory attributed the work to Pomarancio, Venturi (1893) justly ascribed it to the school of Sebastiano del Piombo. Roberto Longhi (1928) accepted this opinion, although with some reservations; Paola della Pergola (1959), on the other hand, rejected it, opting for an attribution to Vincenzo Tamagni, a Sienese artist who trained under Sodoma and who was active in Rome with Raphael’s workshop. Della Pergola in fact dated the work to no later than 1530, the year of Tamagni’s death, while Longhi (1928) had placed its execution between 1533 and 1538. Although Kristina Herrmann Fiore (2006) supported the attribution to Tamagni, not all critics agreed: the work in fact does not appear in Rossana Castrovinci’s monograph (2017) on the Sienese artist.

While scholars are still divided on the question of attribution, all agree that the work reproduces the Visitation by Sebastiano del Piombo for Filippo Sergardi, an oil painting executed on the wall of the Roman church of Santa Maria della Pace (Hirst 1965; for a different opinion, see della Pergola 1959), of which only several fragments have survived (Duke of Northumberland collection, Alnwick Castle; see Lucco 1980). The mural was in fact destroyed during work in the church carried out at the behest of Gaspare Rivaldi between 1611 and 1614; all traces of it were lost until 1841, when three fragments were identified in the collection of Cardinal Fesch. In an auction held in 1845, these were transferred to England, where they ended up in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland.

The painting of the Borghese Collection in fact provides us with the complete image of the mural before its destruction. It differs, however, from an engraving by Hieronymus Cock in both the landscape and the figure on the right (a child with a dog in the Borghese work, a woman in Cock’s rendition). According to Michael Hirst (1980), one of the most prominent scholars of Sebastiano del Piombo, there is a good reason for this discrepancy: while the Borghese replica exactly reproduced the painting by the Venetian artist, Cock worked from a preparatory drawing for his copper engraving.

As critics have suggested (Salvini 1959; Hirst 1965; Lucco 1980), the copy in the Borghese Collection should be dated to after 1550, close to the time of Sebastiano’s execution of the painting in Santa Maria della Pace.

Antonio Iommelli