MASP

Piero di Cosimo

Virgin and Child, Infant St. John the Baptist, and an Angel, 1500-10

  • Author:
    Piero di Cosimo
  • Bio:
    Florença, Itália, 1461-Florença, Itália ,1521
  • Title:
    Virgin and Child, Infant St. John the Baptist, and an Angel
  • Date:
    1500-10
  • Medium:
    Óleo e têmpera sobre madeira
  • Dimensions:
    132,5 x cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Companhia Antarctica Paulista S.A., 1951
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00011
  • Photography credits:
    Polo Museale del Lazio-Archivio e laboratório fotográfico, Roma

TEXTS



The first part of the name by which the artist is known refers to his father, Lorenzo di Piero d’Antonio, a blacksmith. The other part — Cosimo — is an inheritance of his association with Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507), whom he helped in various works, such as the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. After that collaboration, Piero assumed a central role in the Florence art world. The artist’s mature production evinces two overriding features: a wealth of detail coupled with equal treatment allotted to objects and people as seen in Flemish painting, and the expression of the landscape not as a background, but as a place of symbolism and imagination, as in the work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Piero studied meteorology and was interested in the changes of natural lighting during the day, with the variations of the bluish hue of the landscape. Both these characteristics can be seen in Madonna and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist and Angel (1500-10). The wide-open scenery recalls the Flemish panoramas, a world apart from classical ruins; the uncommon iconography of a standing Madonna is accompanied by other elements, such as the caterpillar, the crow and the sprouting plants — symbols of death and resurrection. The scene is being reverently observed by a young angel who is offering the Madonna a flower, a symbol of her sacrifice. MASP’s work recently underwent a restoration, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza di Roma.

— MASP Curatorial Team





Vasari states that Piero painted “an oil painting of Our Lady standing with her son in her arms, to the Novitiate of San Marco”. According to several scholars (Paatz 1940-1954; Ragghianti 1945; Forlani Tempesti and Capreti 1996, p. 131), this may be Madonna with Child, Infant St. John the Baptist, and an Angel conserved in the 19th century in the famous Harrach’s Collection of Vienna and now in the Masp. As pointed out by Forlani Tempesti and Capreti the presence of numerous references to the mistery of Incarnation, vividly sustained by the Dominicans, supplies another important argument in favor of this hypothesis. It should be observed that Piero’s predilection for the tondo is seen in the tiny catalog of works denitely by him or attributed to him, in which no less than eighteen tondi appear. However, the Masp Virgin is Piero’s only known composition in which the Virgin is shown “standing with her son in her arms”, which makes it more probable that Vasari is referring to the Masp tondo. Whatever the case, the fact stands out that, contrary to his contemporaries such as Botticelli, Signorelli, Michelangelo, and others, Piero was not tempted to make compositions of his tondi conform to the circumference of their supports. The composition of the Masp’s Virgin opens in a tentacular form and is crossed by a larger diagonal, counterbalanced only by the Virgin leaning in the opposite direction. The iconography of the work is also quite unusual, with the Virgin standing instead of sitting (on the oor or on a throne) or kneeling in adoration. The Child Jesus is pointing his nger upward, alluding to the divine sense of the text on which his other hand is resting. The tree trunk and the dry, truncated branch next to another in leaf, like the caterpillar at the left, are unusual, bizarre iconographic elements – very much in keeping with Piero di Cosimo’s taste. They are symbolic, of course, of metamorphosis and rebirth and may signify predictions of death and resurrection of Christ. The landscape, not at all Tuscan and lacking any classical reference, reveals a certain penchant for Flemish panoramas. When Dollmayer published the painting in 1899, it was already in a poor state of conservation in the storerooms of the Vienna museums. Once repainted, it entered Vienna’s Von Offenheim’s Collection; then it was temporarily warehoused in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum before moving on to São Paulo through the Matthiesen Gallery in London. Noting “a kind of ‘alla nazzarena’ purity” in the Virgin’s face, Bacci (1976, p. 94) dates the work close to the Cini Madonna, which Zeri (1959) dated as being between 1504-1507. Forlani Tempesti and Capreti notice the very bad condition of the painting and dated it “before 1515”.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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