Scuola di Tiziano (1488/1490 – 1576) - Madonna con Bambino e San Giovannino

School of Titian, (Pieve di Cadore, 1488/1490 – Venice, 1576)
Madonna with Child and Saint John
Oil on panel, 158 x 78 cm

The work in question represents a half-length portrait of the Madonna holding the Baby Jesus, who tenderly rests his head on hers. St. John emerges from one side taking the child's hand and foot. At the bottom appears a group of cherubs which highlight the divine character of the representation.
The composition of the work examined repeats, however in a mirror image, that of the Madonna with Child and Saint John present in the Uffizi which until the second half of the nineteenth century was remembered in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo as a work by the Venetian master Tiziano Vecellio (1488/1490-1576) . It is Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe who consider the Uffizi painting to be a workshop work. Some scholars place the Uffizi version in the sixth decade of the sixteenth century, on the basis of a similarity between the face of the Virgin and that of Venus and Cupid, also known as Titian's wife. Harold Wethey brings the Uffizi painting closer to the one remembered until the mid-eighteenth century in Palazzo Barberini in Rome. A painting depicting the same subject is preserved and recorded already in the seventeenth century and attributed to Titian in an inventory of 1638 in the collection of Palazzo Giustiniani, but with the variant of the infant Saint John who does not grasp Jesus' foot, and the position and the hairstyle of the Virgin. An engraving by the Dutch designer and engraver Cornelis Bloemaert (1603-1692) , published in the Galleria Giustiniana, was also taken from this work. Another example of this painting is in the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio.
The existence of many replicas of this painting, including several considered for a long time to be the master's autographs, suggests the existence of a prototype created by Titian, now deceased, and for which it is difficult to establish a chronological indication. The attitude of mother and son may recall that of the Madonna with Child by Andrea Mantegna at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, also surrounded by a rich group of cherubs, which may suggest that Titian's authentic work may also be youth work.
It has already been said how the painting in question resumes the composition of the aforementioned versions, but in a mirror-like manner; this element indicates to us that the artist based himself on an engraving, probably not that of Bloemaert which takes up a slightly different composition in the relationship between the infant Saint John and the baby Jesus. The Madonna's gaze also varies, not directed towards an indefinite point, but straight towards the spectator. the work stands out for the rendering of the fabrics, particularly highlighted so as to give the idea of the material they are made of, recalling the methods of Titian at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1510, or of the Madonna with child, John the Baptist and a saint at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, 1514.
The array of cherubs is comparable to the one that Titian inserted in the Apparition of Christ to his mother, from 1554 in Medole, church of the Assumption of the Virgin.

The frame is provided free of charge, therefore it cannot be a reason for return or complaint.

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