This Virgin and Child is an early echo of a much-loved composition of the 1460s by Filippo Lippi, one of the most prominent painters in Florence during the Renaissance, housed in the Palazzo Medici, Florence. No doubt commissioned by someone who wished to have a more intimate version of Lippi’s picture, our painting is a devotional image combining the liveliness of the striding Christ Child (though he still needs the Virgin’s help, as he grasps her veil and neck) with a sense of introspection, as when a mother’s protective instincts in caring for her child are touched by a wistful, almost melancholy mood. In Western Europe this gesture of affection derives from Byzantine iconography, and specifically that of Mary Eleousa (the Virgin of Tenderness); this was expressed in notable paintings ranging from the Cambrai Madonna of c. 1340 to Raphael’s Tempi Madonna of 1508 in Munich, by way of Quattrocento variations of the kind presented here, in which the Child is represented in a dynamic, full-length pose rather than cradled in the Virgin’s arms. 

Sculptural examples of such a variant include the Donatellesque Kress Madonna, a polychrome terracotta of the early-to-mid 1400s and the later small gilded bronze relief , with Mary steadying the standing Child. In about 1455 the same wistful, abstracted attitude of our Virgin occurs in Pesellino’s Madonna (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts), as in a panel by the Master of the Castello Nativity (Harvard, Fogg Art Museum 1943.1840); while Fra Carnevale’s treatment in the later 1440s is particularly lively

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The description of space in our panel is more complex than in Lippi’s prototype, enhanced by the presence of a small pergola with flowers and foliage – specifically white roses, symbolic of Mary’s chastity – emerging through the trellis-like gaps in its architecture. Early fifteenth-century depictions of the Holy Couple contained within this sort of structure include Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna of the 1420s in New Have. It is worth noting that our masters’ choice of a very similar setting could also have come from Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement of c. 1440, almost identical in size, though in the painting studied here it is the beholder (rather than the portrayed sitter) who gazes into the enclosure, now made sacred by the divine figures within.

 

The great Italian writer and art historian Roberto Longhi filed a photograph of this work together with those by Central Italian painters, nicknaming its author a “Familiare del Boccati” as he saw in this hand echoes of the work of Giovanni Boccati, active in the Marches and Umbria in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. More recent studies have superseded that view, and Prof. Andrea De Marchi believes that a group of similar paintings could be associated with Baldassare di Biagio, a Florentine painter active in Lucca in the 1460s until his death in the early 1480s. In our case, beyond the obvious compositional prototype of Lippi, there are certainly features such as the snub-nosed Christ Child that reflect the manner of Baldassare di Biagio. Ongoing scholarship by Dr. Christopher Daly on Tuscan painting in that period is shifting away from a traditional approach of “centre vs. periphery” (that is, Florentine vs. provincial) in the study and appreciation of local artistic movements, and it is precisely works such as this Virgin and Child that prompt us to take a more balanced view of individual masters, challenging as it may be to pin down their names.

In both Lippi’s model and here, the setting is silent, with the muted but powerful emotions playing their part in a reminder of how time could be stopped, five centuries ago and now.