Sold Without Reserve | BARTOLOMEO RAMENGHI, CALLED BAGNACAVALLO | MADONNA AND CHILD WITH THE INFANT SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST

Anonymous sale, Venice, Finarte-Semenzato, 19 December 2004, lot 165;

There acquired. 

M. Minardi, in The Alana Collection: Italian Paintings and Sculpture from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century, M. Boskovits, ed., vol. II, Florence 2011, pp. 38-40, cat. no. 6, reproduced.

This beautiful and softly lit scene of the Madonna warmly embracing her son and the young Saint John the Baptist is consistent with the mature output of Bartolomeo Ramenghi, named Bagnacavallo after his native town, and likely dates to circa 1530. The pyramidal arrangement of figures set before a curtain that opens upon a distant landscape—in the present case a fortified town at the foot of a mountain—appears also in other works by Bagnacavallo of circa 1520-1530, in particular his Madonna and Child with Saint Francis in the Musei di San Domenico in Forli [1] and in a Holy Family in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna [2].

Bagnacavallo trained as a young artist in Bologna in the thriving workshop of Francesco Francia, whose influence is apparent throughout much of the younger artist's career. The standing Christ Child in the present painting, for example, arose from Francia's visual vocabulary. The loose rendering of the poses, the intimate arrangement of figures, and the balanced composition, however, are a testament to the Raphaelesque tradition that characterized much of Bagnacavallo's work from 1520 onward. The delicate rendering of the figure's forms, particularly in the highlights and shadows, also sheds light on the influence that Giralamo da Treviso's Bolognese activity of the 1520s and 1530s had on Bagnacavallo, and it is of no surprise that many of his mature works have in the past been mistakenly ascribed to Girolamo.  

While the present panel is a clear testament to Bagnacavallo's continued response to his artistic environment, it also highlights his distinctly individual style. It illustrates his ability to capture the relationship among figures through an intimate visual dialogue, and, at the same time, suitably exemplifies Baruffaldi's description of Bagnacavallo's "soft and tender pictorial manner according to the Lombard model" [3]. 

1. Oil on panel, 51.5 by 41.5 cm. See C. Bernardini, Il Bagnacavallo Senior, Rimini 1990, pp. 101-103, cat. no. 24, reproduced p. 102.  

2. Oil on panel, 61 by 48 cm.  ibid., p. 103, cat. no. 25, reproduced p. 103 and plate XIII.  

3. As translated from G. Baruffalde, Vite de' pittori e scultori ferraresi (1697-1722), Ferrara 1844-1846, vol. I, p. 168, vol. II, p. 492.