Gaetano Gandolfi

With Fabrizio Moretti, London;

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 8 December 2010, lot 35;

Where acquired by the present collector.

Gaetano Gandolfi, the leading painter in eighteenth-century Bologna, executed this intimate depiction of the Madonna in the mid-1770s. Although Gandolfi worked almost exclusively in his native Bologna, echoes of his 1760 trip to Venice still reverberate here, especially in the contrasting red and blue tones and the vigorous brushwork. Presumably conceived in conjunction with a pendant depicting the Archangel Gabriel, the present work bears particular affinities with Gandolfi’s Marriage at Cana (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale), signed and dated 1775.¹ In both, the artist’s handling of paint is swift and confident.

Until the work’s rediscovery in 2010, it was known only from a black and white photograph of its now-lost bozzetto, or preparatory sketch (in the Galleria Davia Bargellini, Bologna, prior to World War II).²

¹ See D. Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin 1995, p. 370, cat. no. 103, reproduced fig. 112.

² Biagi Maino 1995, p. 371, cat. no. 103, reproduced fig. 115.