A putto in prayer,
tempera and oil on panel, 45 x 27 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Christie’s, Paris, 26 June 2008, lot 1 (as attributed to Domenico Beccafumi)

The present painting is a product of the Sienese school from the first half of the sixteenth century, when influences from Florence renewed the city’s local pictorial language. Pandolfo Petrucci, the Signore of Siena until 1512, called artists from outside of Siena to work for him, including Luca Signorelli, Girolamo Genga and Pinturicchio. During this period Giovanni Antonio Bazzi called Il Sodoma was also active and he provided a vital focal point to the Sienese community of artists.

The present panel can be compared stylistically to the production of Domenico Beccafumi (1486–1551), in whose work it is also possible to detect the influence of the Florentine classicism of Mariotto Albertinelli and Fra Bartolomeo, unified with a Raphaelesque echo and a sculptural quality derived from Michelangelo, whose work Beccafumi must have seen during one of his journeys to Rome.

The present work may have originally been part of a larger altarpiece. The painted space of this panel is occupied by the figure of an angelic putto, its hands united in prayer, kneeling towards the right and gazing heavenward, perhaps towards the Madonna at the centre of a now lost composition. Warm tones predominate and the forms are defined by softly modelled brush strokes.