Artworks

In this striking painting, the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist are portrayed against a dark yet luminous sky, their bright, white skin lighting up the composition. When analysing this work in March 2009, Carlo Falciani recognised the hand of Leonardo da Pistoia and proposed to date it to the artist’ early career. According to Falciani, the features of the Virgin are highly similar to those in the Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Galleria Borghese in Rome or the Annunciation in the church of San Martino in Lucca, another of Leonardo’s masterpieces . Both works present the Madonna with the same tender face; oval, with lucid and arresting features. Leonardo deftly sculpts the shapes light and shadow - as with the beam of light outlining the shape of the Virgin’s neck, forehead and supple chin, lingering on the soft folds of her golden sleeve and red dress, and illuminating the sheer veil cascading from her head. The richness of the palette is highly typical of the artist, with cold- and warm-toned colours skilfully juxtaposed and strengthened by shafts of light. Beyond the use of lighting, the Child and Saint John in the present work - with their solid, polished, sculptural bodies - are strikingly similar to those in the Borghese composition.
According to Falciani, the work exhibits clear influences of the San Marco School, although with an added hint of Raphael. This culminates in a new, updated stylistic language that blends local and transalpine elements common among the artists of Tuscany in the mid-Cinquecento. Also discernible is a considerable northern influence; endowing the book in the lower left corner of the work with special prominence, for example, is typical of German painting of the period. The book emerges vibrantly from the shadows, every detail magnified, from its pages to the leather bookmarks. Leonardo also seems to grant special attention to each leaf of the ivy splayed on the rocks, a nod to transalpine masters and the style of artists such as Piero di Cosimo. The landscape in the background - with its unusual details such as the fisherman and his dog under the bridge on the right side of the composition - also indicates northern influence, not to mention the lakeside architecture.
Giorgio Vasari mentions a ‘Lionardo detto il Pistoia’ in his account of the life of Leonardo’s master, Giovan Francesco Penni, where the former is inferred to have spent time in Rome at the beginning of the 1530s . This hypothesis would provide further support for the very clear echoes of artists such as Raphael and Giulio Romano in Leonardo’s panels in the Galleria Borghese and in the Annunciation by Perino del Vaga in San Martino in Lucca. Leonardo is documented back in Pistoia in 1528 - nonetheless, his inscription into the Comagnia di San Luca in Rome already in 1534 effectively marks the end of his life in his native city. He is last documented as living in Naples, where it appears he resided until his death around 1548. It was in Naples that Leonardo established his own flourishing bottega, during which time he was commissioned to execute several works of great importance, such as the enormous altarpiece in Altamura, Puglia, the work that lead him to style himself, ‘lo nobile maestro Leonardo Gratia da Pistoia’ .
In contrast to his Annunciation in Lucca - datable between 1528 and 1530 - and the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John and Saint Elizabeth in the Galleria Borghese - whose fundamental architecture was inspired by Giulio Romano’s Fugger altarpiece - the present piece differs in that it is, to a much greater degree, rooted in a reinterpretation of Raphael’s motifs, as well as illustrating a mediation between the diverse Florentine artists of the beginning of the Cinquecento, from Mariotto Albertinelli to Fra Bartolomeo. These artists inspired the tranquil atmosphere of Leonardo’s painting; the thick quality of the yellow fabric, the solidity of the bodies and the shapeliness of the Child and Infant Saint John. On the whole, the work is reminiscent of paintings such as The Holy Family (1516) by Fra Bartolomeo in the Galleria Corsini in Rome, and the works in the Galleria Palatina in Florence from the bottega of the San Marco friar Paolino, who was also active in Pistoia around the same time. However, Leonardo da Pistoia seems to have enriched and added to Fra Bartolomeo’s innovations by using colder and more shimmering colours which, when combined with the austere Savonarolan subject matter, reveal a careful yet precocious deviation from the generation of painters Federico Zeri designated the ‘eccentric Florentines’.
Carlo Falciani suggested dating this work during the period of the artist’s relatively limited output while working in Tuscany, a highly important phase in Leonardo’s career, particularly in regard to its nuanced, updated interpretation of the most advanced trends within painting - an aspect in which the artist was far ahead of his time. Furthermore, the presence of features typical of Fra Bartolomeo - accompanied by more eccentric elements - points toward a dating to the second half of the 1520s, prior to the artist’s execution of the panel of San Martino in Lucca, generally dated to before 1530. Furthering this hypothesis, there is minor evidence of elegant Perinesque torsions in the panel, adding to the sense of the passion of the angel before the shyness of the Virgin.
Later in Leonardo’s career - after 1534, during his second stay in Rome - the artist appears to have developed a preference for more transparent paint in order to define figures with simpler draftsmanship; two examples being the Lucrezia in the Galleria Borghese and the Ebe in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini. This Madonna and Child is thus a vastly valuable addition to the otherwise scarce corpus of Leonardo’s early production, revealing - through its precocious disposition towards a multitude of influences - the artist’s adhesion to some of the most progressive parts of the Florentine artistic realm of the beginning of the sixteenth century.