Madonna and Child with the Young St John the Baptist and an Angel

The painting depicts the Holy Virgin according to a traditional iconography: she is dressed in red with a blue mantle and presents the blessing Christ Child to the viewer. Next to her is the young St John the Baptist, recognisable by his tunic and staff surmounted by a cross, supported by an angel as he climbs over a balustrade to indicate Christ. The composition is tied together through the play of tender and melancholy gazes, which involves the viewer in the scene and, at the same time, presages the Passion of Christ. Behind the figures we glimpse a rural landscape, which stretches as far as the eye can see to the blue mountains in the background. The panel has been known to critics as a work by Francesco Raibolini since the 19th century, when it was in one of the most important private collections of the period, which was started in Paris by the Swiss count and banker James- Alexandre de Pourtalès, then expanded by his son Edmond. In an article on the Italian works in the Pourtalès Collection written in 1865, Émile Galichon refers to two paintings attributed to Raibolini: a Madonna and Child with St Joseph and the Madonna now in the Cerruti Collection, which is generically stated as being of Spanish provenance.¹

The panel was still owned by the count’s heirs at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was mentioned by Adolfo Venturi in a note of his Storia dell’arte italiana.² Later it was bought by the American magnate Clarence Mackay, entering his collection where Valentiner was able to study it.³ The work appeared on the antiques market again in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1976 it was purchased by the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, then resold at auction in 1983.⁴ When the painting entered the Cerruti Collection it had an ornate neo-Renaissance frame, apparently dating to the beginning of the 20th century, which the collector replaced with something less elaborate. The original frame, decorated with grotesques featuring dragons, cherubs, coats of arms and candelabra, has a Chrysler Museum label on the back.

Former passages of ownership are attested by wax seals on the back of the panel, which are now unfortunately illegible. Similarly the symbol of a circle surmounted by a cross and containing the letters “I.O.E.” is no longer visible, due to a modern parquetry support, and still has to be deciphered.⁵ According to Emilio Negro and Nicoletta Roio, the work is part of Il Francia’s late production, which dates it to the first half of the first decade of the 16th century and places it stylistically between the St Sebastian identified in the collection of Duke Fernan Nuñez in Madrid – the saint’s delicate features closely resembling those of the angel in the Cerruti panel – and the frescoes in the Oratorio of Santa Cecilia in Bologna. The painting attests to the artist’s familiarity with contemporary Tuscan artistic production, but also a receptiveness to Veneto and Flemish painting, as suggested by the Nordic style of the landscape in the background and the meticulous rendering of the fabrics and jewels: a talent that clearly stems from his training as a goldsmith. In 1505 the Elders of Bologna commissioned from the artist the fresco with the Virgin Mary, the protectress of the city, also known as the Madonna of the Earthquake, for the Sala d’Ercole in the City Hall. During the same period, Il Francia’s workshop multiplied its output of devotional paintings of the Holy Virgin, also thanks to the collaboration of his sons Giacomo and Giulio, both of whom were goldsmiths and painters like their father, and often reprised and replicated his models. However, the high quality of the Cerruti panel has led scholars to classify it as an autograph work by Il Francia.⁶

[Serena D’Italia]

¹ Galichon 1865, pp. 16-17.

² Venturi 1914, vol. VII, p. 952 note 1.

³ Valentiner 1925, p. 345, ill. on p. 342; Id. 1926,

no. 8, fig. 7.

⁴ Harrison 1987, p. 3, no. 5; Sotheby’s, New York, The Estate of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. Old Master and 19th Century Paintings, 1 June 1989, lot 7.

⁵ Negro, Roio 1998, p. 219, cat. 112; on the success of the artist and his workshop with critics and collectors, see also in the same volume E. Negro, “La fortuna dei Francia”, pp. 61-67.

⁶ Negro, Roio 1998, p. 219, cat. 112; p. 158, cat. 29 for the fresco of the Madonna of the Earthquake.