Roman school, late 16th - early 17th century
Meadonna in prayer
Oil on canvas, cm 81 x 69
with frame cm 83 x 95.5
A divine candor reverberates with vibrant shine on the Virgin's maphorion. The palpable iridescence structuring her thin rosy dress, woven with the same fresh light, produces a slight rustle as her hands rise. The Madonna is in a praying pose, opening her palms to emphasize the fervent ecstatic intention; her white neck is rendered with skilled fullness of pigments, as are her perfectly alive hands and very bright eyes. With fine care, the artist of the present work arranges the Virgin's hair with thin white ribbons, indicating purity. An evocative glow falls gently on the half-bust, materialized sign of divine glory.
The present work can be traced back to the late Mannerist climate that dominated the capital in the aftermath of the promulgation of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The late Mannerist licenses that are still visible, such as the intense lyricism in the stylistic code adopted by the artist, are grafted into the new underlying catechetical intent, which at the end of the century produced a certain figurative rigor. The present work, however, still reflects that extraordinary Roman dynamism that elevated the capital to a bulwark for the entire Mannerist lesson, matched only by a second artistic center, that of Florence. The engaging transport of the Virgin reflects the contemporary examples of Giuseppe Valeriano (1542-1596), a Jesuit painter, restoring in the Marriage of the Virgin of the Roman Church of the Gesù, as well as in the Madonna Addolorata of the Pala di Recanati, equal ardor. But it is in the Assumption of the Virgin painted four-handedly with Scipione Pulzone (1540/2-1584) that the present work reveals greater consonance. Valeriano waited for the decoration of the Chapel of the Madonna della Strada within the Church of the Gesù, together with Pulzone, with seven paintings relating to the Stories of the Virgin; the Presentation at the Temple, in particular, offers the same brilliance of garments that also belongs to the present work, of very bright liquefaction on the outstretched arms of the priest. The Virgin's gestures, of explicit immediacy, are also equal to those of the agitated Virgin Annunciate by Marcello Venusti (1512/5-1579) of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is still up to a work by Scipione Pulzone, the Immaculate Conception for the Church of S. Francesco di Ronciglione (now the Museo di Palazzo Doebbing) the weavable reference, with the painting under examination, for the full face of the Madonna. The significant plurality of addresses that occurred in the pontifical area at the end of the century, encouraged by the need to disseminate the cultural program of new confraternities and religious orders, also justifies the memory of Federico Barocci (1528-1612), significantly akin to Raffaellino Motta called da Reggio (1550-1578) in colorism. The lively modulations of the chromatic range, here with dominant pink tones, were in fact sought, first of all, by Barocci, champion of the Counter-Reformation age; examples include Barocci's very famous Madonna delle ciliegie, while for Motta we have the Tobiolo and the angel (Galleria Borghese, Rome), of noble and immediate brightness like the present Madonna.
The item is in good condition.
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