Giuseppe Maria Crespi Bologna 1665 - 1747

M. Pajes Merriman, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Milan 1980, p. 243, cat. no. 30, reproduced fig. 30 (as location unknown).

This tender image of the Madonna and sleeping Christ Child shows the natural intimacy between a mother and her child and if it were not for the small cross held in Christ’s left hand, a symbol of the cross on which he would later be crucified, the picture’s religious connotations might not be grasped. The rose, gently resting on Christ’s chest, is also a symbol: it is a flower especially associated with the Madonna who, like a ‘rose without thorns’, was considered to be without sin. A single light source strongly illuminates the Christ Child in an almost supernatural way, from somewhere outside the picture space. The marked chiaroscuro and use of a dark background, against which all the lighter tones are freely brushed, are characteristic of Crespi’s works in the second decade of the 18th century. Their loose painting technique is almost certainly inspired by the art of Giovanni Antonio Burrini (1656-1727), Crespi’s friend and contemporary in Bologna, whose characteristically energetic style was used for greater theatrical effect than Crespi’s ever was. At the time of writing her monograph on the artist Merriman, who knew the present painting only from an old photograph, described it as “one of the loveliest of Crespi’s private religious works”. A painting that is particularly close to it - in style, mood and subject matter – is the small Madonna and sleeping Christ Child in the Tinozzi collection, Bologna.¹ That small canvas, unlike the present work, was later re-used by Crespi as the central part of a larger composition, known in a number of versions, the prime one being in the Art Museum, Seattle.² Merriman dates the present painting to the artist’s maturity, that is to the latter half of the 1710s or early 1720s.

This painting was once in the collection of Dr. Rudolf J. Heinemann (1901-1975), a renowned connoisseur and dealer of old master drawings and paintings. Born in Germany, Heinemann studied in Munich, Berlin, and Florence with some of the most famous scholars of the period (Wilhelm Bode amongst others). From the mid-1920s he acted as principal advisor for the Thyssen Collection and after moving to the United States in 1935, he was associated with some of the leading old master galleries, such as Seligmann, Knoedler and Agnew’s, and was responsible for a number of significant acquisitions made by American museums around the middle of the last century. Together with his wife Lore, he formed a highly distinguished private collection, particularly famous for its Tiepolo drawings, which was the subject of a special exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in 1973. Following Mrs. Heinemann’s death in 1996, their collection was broken up and for the most part bequeathed to American museums, the Morgan Library and the National Gallery of Art in Washington being the prime beneficiaries.

1. Oil on canvas, 44 by 57 cm.; Merriman, see Literature, p. 243, cat. no. 31, reproduced fig. 31; and more recently reproduced in colour by G. Viroli, in Giuseppe Maria Crespi 1665-1747, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, 7 September - 11 November 1990, pp. 132-33, cat. no. 66.
2. For the Seattle picture and its versions, some of which are attributed to Giuseppe Maria Crespi whilst others to his son Luigi, see Merriman, op. cit., p. 241, cat. no. 23, reproduced fig. 23, or more recently Viroli, op. cit., pp. 130-31, cat. no. 65.