Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Sassoferrato

In the collection of the Condesa de Zurgena, Madrid;

Private collection.

As was common practise in Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries, Sassoferrato was named after his home town, which lies within the Eastern Apennines, between Florence and Rome. Although he received his early training under the Bolognese master Domenichino, it was the work of Guido Reni and above all Raphael that exerted the greatest influence over Sassoferrato's work, as clearly exemplified in the present work, which derives from Raphael's large-scale altarpiece of ‘Madonna di Foligno’, today in the Vatican Museums, Rome.¹

The altarpiece was commissioned by Sigismondo Conti, secretary to Pope Julius II, for the high altar of the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli in Rome, but in 1565 was moved by the commissioner’s heirs to the Franciscan church in his home town of Foligno, from which its name derives. Although Sassoferrato may have seen Raphael’s original in Foligno, it seems likely that the present work derives from an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after the original, as the pose of the Madonna and Child is reversed.

Sassoferrato's output includes little in the way of ecclesiastic commissions, but rather he specialised in the production of private devotional works, employed by his patrons as the ideal focus for spiritual contemplation, in keeping with the spirit of the Counter Reformation, following the Council of Trent in 1545-63. The present work is a particularly beautiful example of a votive work by the artist, in which he has adapted Raphael’s original full-length design of the Madonna and Child in a celestial setting and re-arranged them in half-length format in a domestic interior, far more suited to its function within the home or small family chapel of a private patron.

Whilst many of Sassoferrato's works are known in multiple versions, the present specific design, with the interior setting, appears to be unique within the artist's oeuvre. Other variants however include a full-length depiction of the Madonna and Child in the heavens (see Fig. 1, oil on copper, 49 by 38 cm.), which was sold in these rooms on 3 July 2013, lot 33, for £386,500, and another version (oil on canvas, 104 by 75 cm.) in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.²

The attribution to Sassoferrato has been endorsed on the basis of photographs by M. Macé de Lépignay, to whom we are grateful, and the painting will be published in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work.

 

 

1. See K. Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings,Milan 1999, p. 131, reproduced figure 118.

2. See the exhibition catalogue, Giovanni Battista Salvi, Il Sassoferrato, Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici e Storici delleMarche, Comune di Sassoferrato, 29 June – 14 October 1990, pp. 70-71, cat. no. 20, reproduced