MASP

A typical theme in Florentine painting of the years around 1480, this The Virgin Adoring the Child with an Angel is conceived in two basically contrasting spatial registers. On the rst plane, the space is enclosed by a manger constructed on an ancient ruin; heteroclite architecture but semantically signicant inasmuch as it represents the possibility of the concordance between Christianity and classic Antiquity which suited late 15th-century taste. On the other side, Florence is viewed at a distance, surrounded by its 14th-century walls, within which the Brunelleschian dome of Santa Maria del Fiore and possibly the tower of Palazzo Vecchio and the characteristic steeple of the Florentine Abbey can be distinguished. Between the sacred and profane scenes winds the Arno river with its twofold “humanistic” mission of conrming the harmony between these two spheres of experience and fusing the di­ering visual planes into one coherent space unied by perspective. Thee work came to the Masp collection from Studio d’Arte Palma, the Roman gallery owned by P. M. Bardi, and was attributed to Francesco Botticini (Florence 1446-1498), a poorly documented painter to whom several works were previously attributed that have now been given to Biagio d’Antonio. In 1946, Pietro Toesca, in a letter to P. M. Bardi, still attributed the work to Botticini, rightly observing that it was by a “strict follower of Andrea Verrocchio”. However, in 1945, Roberto Longhi proposed the name of Biagio d’Antonio as an alternative to Botticini in a written communication to Bardi regarding this work, and this suggestion has been conrmed by recent scholars. In 1976, Everett Fahy published a study of Biagio d’Antonio and in a letter to Bardi the following year declared his agreement with “Longhi’s suggestion that this was a work by Biagio d’Antonio”, an attribution now conrmed by L. Bellosi (verbal communication, 1996) and by M. Boskovits (verbal communication, 1996). One could also pose an argument ex silentio against attributing the work to Botticini: the fact that Venturini in his recent monograph on this artist did not include the Masp altar among his works. Fahy furthermore identied the Masp work as that belonging to the Acton’s Collection in Florence from 1921, which can be conrmed by a photograph in the Kunsthistorisches Institut photo-collection in Florence. The transfer of attribution does not invalidate the fact that the work of Biagio d’Antonio is based on a model of Verrocchio, both in the likeness between the angel in the Masp work and the one in the famous Uzi Baptism of Christ, and in the overall composition identical to the Madonna Ruskin, at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh which is generally taken to be from Verrocchio’s atelier (Sutton 1985, p. 105; Adorno 1991, pp. 254-255). Biagio was also inspired by models from this studio in other works such as those in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Strasbourg (almost identical to ours), the collection of Sir Everard Radcliffe, in Ringling Park, England, Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida, the Johnson’s Collection in Philadelphia, and in 1924 in the Burnath Collection’s in Florence (Fahy, 1977).

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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