(Antwerp active 1520-30)
The Madonna and Child, with Saint Eligius and an Angel,
oil on panel, 50.5 x 36.1 cm, framed

Provenance:
Lomellini family, Genoa, 17th Century;
Marchesa Barbara Brignole, early 19th Century;
Private European collection

We are grateful to Peter van den Brink for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a digital photograph.

This composition represents the Virgin holding the Christ Child who stands on a surface, with one arm around his mother’s neck, as he turns to face in the opposite direction, towards an elderly man who caresses the Child’s head. Owing to the ring held by the angel on the right, this man can be identified as Saint Eligius, the patron saint of goldsmiths. This refined panel depicts the Virgin dressed according to the latest elegant Flemish fashion of the renaissance period, with the cuffs of her sleeves trimmed with fur.

The present composition is from an oeuvre first identified and grouped together by Max Friedlander in 1948. and conventionally identified as the ‘Master of the Parrot’ owing to the presence of this exotic bird in many of these paintings, as may be seen in the Madonna and Child in the Museum of Fine Arts of San Diego, California. In the present panel certain elements recall features from this oeuvre, particularly the rounded faces, the oval rendering of the finger nails and the elongated and slender hands formed according to the then reigning mannerist taste for distorting the proportions of the human figure.

The Master of the Parrot workshop was active in Flanders during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, probably in Antwerp and Bruges, but the names of the artists who worked therein remain unknown. These works are close to those of other Flemish artists of the period who had likewise absorbed the influence of Italian art, such as Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Coecke moved to Antwerp in 1527 where he established a flourishing studio, and associations between Coecke’s workshop and the ‘Master of the Parrot’ group have often been made.