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拍品专文
This panel showing the Madonna and Child was painted by a close but, as yet, unidentified associate of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, arguably the most gifted of Leonardo da Vinci’s Milanese pupils. The panel has been the subject of long-standing attributional debate, with scholars ascribing the work to various artists from Leonardo’s studio, including Giampietrino and Boltraffio, the latter receiving Everett Fahy’s endorsement at the time of the 1992 sale.
The picture can be compared with two further works of the same subject; the first, now catalogued as by a ‘Follower of Boltraffio’, in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1); and the second in the Brooklyn Museum (c. 1500; Ac. no. 1999.76.2), where it is described as ‘Attributed to Boltraffio’. The National Gallery panel was given by William Suida to the Pseudo-Boltraffio (Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich, 1929, pp. 288, no. 223), the anonymous artist responsible for a distinct and heterogeneous group of over twenty pictures painted in Milan in the early-sixteenth century. The group had previously been regarded by some scholars as representing the early oeuvre of Boltraffio, before he entered the workshop of Leonardo in circa 1491, and displaying the influence of Vincenzo Foppa and Bernardo Zenale. Suida instead proposed that they were by a separate hand, strongly influenced by Boltraffio himself, a solution that was rejected by Maria Teresa Fiorio in her 2000 monograph on the artist (op. cit., pp. 71-74), but subsequently supported by Cristina Geddo, who argued for the Pseudo-Boltraffio’s reinstatement to ‘the ambit of Milanese leonardeschi’ (‘Un trittico ricomposto e il problema dello Pseudo-Boltraffio’, Arte Cristiana, XCI, 818, September–October 2003, pp. 345-55).
Both the present panel and the National Gallery picture share a similar composition with the Madonna’s head framed by two open windows, leading onto extensive mountainous landscapes, an arrangement clearly borrowed from the celebrated Madonna Litta (fig. 2; St. Petersburg, The Hermitage Museum), a picture that has also been the subject of energetic debate, with some scholars, including Fiorio, believing it to be by Boltraffio (op. cit., pp. 81-83, no. A3). However, it is in the treatment of the finely rendered landscapes in both the National Gallery picture and the present panel that the two works compare most closely stylistically.
Charles Brinsley Marlay was the grandson of two notable collectors, James Tisdall of Bacon and his wife, Catharine Maria Dawson, who married secondly Charles Bury, 1st Earl of Charleville. Although little of his grandparents’ collections passed to Marlay, the valuable estates he inherited in Ireland enabled him to form a remarkable collection of his own, which included pictures, drawings, manuscripts and 240 illuminated cuttings dating from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Marlay bequeathed his entire collection, which had been housed at his London home, St. Katharine’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, to the University of Cambridge to benefit the Fitzwilliam Museum. Although not specified in his will, his nephew and executor, the Duke of Rutland, approved Marlay’s written agreement that any work below museum standard could be sold, provided that the funds be used to acquire other works in his name. This precipitated sales at Christie’s in 1916 and 1924, however, it was not until 1966 that the present picture left the Fitzwilliam. In his introduction to the catalogue of the collection, W.G. Constable notes Marlay’s taste for ‘well-preserved and characteristic work by secondary painters of the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italy’ (W.G. Constable, Catalogue of the pictures in the Marlay Bequest Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, Cambridge, 1927, p. 6). The bequest included a number of the Fitzwilliam’s outstanding masterpieces, including Cima da Conegliano’s St. Lanfranc enthroned between St. John the Baptist and St. Liberius (1515-16).
We are grateful to Antonio Mazzotta for his assistance with the cataloguing of this picture.
The picture can be compared with two further works of the same subject; the first, now catalogued as by a ‘Follower of Boltraffio’, in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1); and the second in the Brooklyn Museum (c. 1500; Ac. no. 1999.76.2), where it is described as ‘Attributed to Boltraffio’. The National Gallery panel was given by William Suida to the Pseudo-Boltraffio (Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich, 1929, pp. 288, no. 223), the anonymous artist responsible for a distinct and heterogeneous group of over twenty pictures painted in Milan in the early-sixteenth century. The group had previously been regarded by some scholars as representing the early oeuvre of Boltraffio, before he entered the workshop of Leonardo in circa 1491, and displaying the influence of Vincenzo Foppa and Bernardo Zenale. Suida instead proposed that they were by a separate hand, strongly influenced by Boltraffio himself, a solution that was rejected by Maria Teresa Fiorio in her 2000 monograph on the artist (op. cit., pp. 71-74), but subsequently supported by Cristina Geddo, who argued for the Pseudo-Boltraffio’s reinstatement to ‘the ambit of Milanese leonardeschi’ (‘Un trittico ricomposto e il problema dello Pseudo-Boltraffio’, Arte Cristiana, XCI, 818, September–October 2003, pp. 345-55).
Both the present panel and the National Gallery picture share a similar composition with the Madonna’s head framed by two open windows, leading onto extensive mountainous landscapes, an arrangement clearly borrowed from the celebrated Madonna Litta (fig. 2; St. Petersburg, The Hermitage Museum), a picture that has also been the subject of energetic debate, with some scholars, including Fiorio, believing it to be by Boltraffio (op. cit., pp. 81-83, no. A3). However, it is in the treatment of the finely rendered landscapes in both the National Gallery picture and the present panel that the two works compare most closely stylistically.
Charles Brinsley Marlay was the grandson of two notable collectors, James Tisdall of Bacon and his wife, Catharine Maria Dawson, who married secondly Charles Bury, 1st Earl of Charleville. Although little of his grandparents’ collections passed to Marlay, the valuable estates he inherited in Ireland enabled him to form a remarkable collection of his own, which included pictures, drawings, manuscripts and 240 illuminated cuttings dating from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Marlay bequeathed his entire collection, which had been housed at his London home, St. Katharine’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, to the University of Cambridge to benefit the Fitzwilliam Museum. Although not specified in his will, his nephew and executor, the Duke of Rutland, approved Marlay’s written agreement that any work below museum standard could be sold, provided that the funds be used to acquire other works in his name. This precipitated sales at Christie’s in 1916 and 1924, however, it was not until 1966 that the present picture left the Fitzwilliam. In his introduction to the catalogue of the collection, W.G. Constable notes Marlay’s taste for ‘well-preserved and characteristic work by secondary painters of the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italy’ (W.G. Constable, Catalogue of the pictures in the Marlay Bequest Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, Cambridge, 1927, p. 6). The bequest included a number of the Fitzwilliam’s outstanding masterpieces, including Cima da Conegliano’s St. Lanfranc enthroned between St. John the Baptist and St. Liberius (1515-16).
We are grateful to Antonio Mazzotta for his assistance with the cataloguing of this picture.