(Florence 1502–1576)
The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist,
oil on panel, 76.5 x 58 cm, framed

Provenance:
D´Atri collection in Paris, 1967;
European private collection

Literature:
A. Pinelli, Pier Francesco di Jacopo Foschi, in: Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1967, p. 101, fig. 19

We are grateful to Vilmos Tátrai and Laura Pagnotta for confirming the attribution on the basis of a digital photograph.

The present painting was published as a late work by Foschi by Antonio Pinelli (see literature) when it was in the D’Atri Collection in Paris, on the basis of information supplied by Federico Zeri. The composition was almost certainly conceived as a private devotional painting and relies on the prototype of the Madonna del Latte (nursing Madonna). However, an unusual note is added here to the treatment of the theme through the unexpected parallel direction of the gazes of the Christ Child and the Infant Saint John the Baptist. The Madonna’s garment is also unusual. Instead of the typical red tunic and blue coat, she wears a plain mauve coloured dress and bluish grey coat over a white undergarment. The linen cloth wrapped around the child is lemon yellow, not white, as is most frequently the case. The triad has been moved closely towards the viewer and they are placed within a confined space flanked by a tree on the left-hand side. On the right is a view of distant mountains shrouded in haze and a high sky.

Foschi spent many years in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto as a student and collaborator, tirelessly copying the compositions of the leading master of the High Renaissance in Florence. Although the principal structure of the models is maintained in these replicas and variants, they show a high degree of independence in terms of colour and form. Among the artist’s surviving original pictorial inventions (which include the present Madonna), the ones best known are probably the three altarpieces for Santo Spirito in Florence, which are all still in sitù: The Resurrection of Christ (1537), The Transfiguration of Christ (c. 1545), and The Immaculate Conception (c. 1545).

Foschi was a contemporary of Bronzino and Vasari, and practiced a style of painting informed by Mannerism, with smoothly polished forms, angular draperies, and the fantastic, unnatural colours. He was not so much in search of a formula for perfect profane beauty, but rather of a style that would allow him to express religious feeling.

The present painting is an accomplished example of Foschi’s personal achievements during the Florentine Cinquecento. He sought to fuse Mannerist abstraction with a religious sense of purism and puritanism that already anticipated the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and which was ultimately rooted in Savonarola’s world of thought.

The significance of Foschi and his art in 16th century Florence is also reflected by the numerous portrait commissions the artist received. Occasionally he collaborated with his colleagues in projects for the grand ducal family. In 1539 he participated in the decorations for the wedding of Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo and in 1565, in the decorations for the wedding for Francesco de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria. In 1562 he was among the founders of the first European art academy, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, where he held important positions. Paintings by his hand are preserved in the Uffizi, in the Galleria dell’Accademia, and in the Museo dello Spedale degli Innocenti in Florence, in the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome, in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chambéry, in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia.

We are grateful to Vilmos Tátrai for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot.