Rosso Fiorentino

Madonna and Child, St. John the Baptist, St. Elizabeth and St. Joseph

Artist
Giovanni Battista di Jacopo di Gasparre called Rosso Fiorentino
(Florence, 1494-Paris, 1540 )

Details
Oil on canvas 132.7×93.3 cm

Description
Oil onpanel 92×71.8 cm Approved by : Keith Christiansen, Curator, European Painting, MetropolitanMuseum of Art; Everett Fahy, Sir John Pope-Hennesy Director of European Painting, MetropolitanMuseum of Art; Larry Feinberg, Curator, Oberlin College, Allen Memorial Art Museum Sydney J.Freedberg, Chief Curator Emeritus, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Larry Kanter,Curator, Robert Lehmann Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sir John Pope-Hennessy, formerDirector, European Painting, MetropolitanMuseum of Art; Carlo Volpe, late Professor, University ofBologna.

Provenance
Possibly the work donated by Sister Lucrezia Barducci (d. 1574) to The Barducci Chapel, Santa Felicita,Florence during her lifetime; This was moved from the chapel to the convent and was recorded asstill in Santa Felicita in 1761; Sold by 1828.

Literature
E. Camesasca, “Dipinti manieristi in collezioni fiorentine” Il Vasari, Vol XXI, no. 2-3, July-Sept. 1963, p.91, pl. XLVI; F. Fiorelli Malesci, La Chiesa di Santa Felicita a Firenze, Florence, 1986, p. 159, 298.This work could well be the Rosso Fiorentino Virgin and Child referred to in a document of 21 March1573 (Florentine style, thus 1574) recording the death of Sister Lucrezia Barducci. It states the workwas given by herto the Barducci Chapel, Santa Felicita, many years before. Although the work hasnot been included in the major studies of the artist in recent years, it represents an invaluableopportunity to show the stylistic similarities and characteristics it shareswith other works executedat an early stage in the artist’s career. The detailed comparisons with works such the Assumption ofthe Virgin and Madonna and Child with St. John, show unequivocally the hand of Rosso in his veryearly years in Florence.Even if Rosso was perhaps not a formal apprentice in the del Sarto studio and was self-taught asVasari implies, he was aware that this was the most innovative workshop in Florence, and there aremany references to the master’s work in those pictures that are accepted to be Rosso’s from early inthe second decade of the century. Pictures like the Madonna and Child with St. John in theStädelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main (fig. 1), show how he shakes up the relative symmetryof Sarto’s figures, with tremendously engaging children whom one forgives for their naughtiness. TheFrankfurt painting can be seen as a reaction to the Andrea del Sarto composition Madonna and Childwith the Infant St. John the Baptist (fig. 2), especially in colouring and in the poseof the St. John, andso must date slightly later from around 1514. Rosso was among those followers of Andrea del Sarto who had access to the cartoon for the Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist. Theimaginative way he used the design (inthe work exhibited at Colnaghi’s in 1983, Discoveries from theCinquecento) included adding a couple of cupids on either side of the Madonna.The present work is a fascinating example of Rosso’s early style when he came into the orbit ofAndrea, and it must date among the earliest of his productions. The Christ Child is standing, as in theFrankfurt panel, while the artist uses the profile pose from the seated St. John in that design; theadded figures of St. Joseph and St. Elizabeth mean that there is thatsense of crowding that Rossooften manages, as in the Uffizi altarpiece referred to above. There is a sense, in the kneeling St. John,that the concentration in the del Sarto workshop in obtaining the greatest variety in pose, and theability to link allthe figures together in a complicated rhythm, is a common Florentine ambition. Asin the Frankfurt composition, these are challenging problems, especially when the artist is essentiallyrelying on a great intuitive genius rather than many years of study ofanatomy. This is the reason whyfeatures like the extended hand of the Christ Child is essentially repeated verbatim in the Uffizialtarpiece done for the hospitaller of Santa Maria Nuova, which was painted later in 1518. The handsand feet, too, are seenagain in the other early works, understood with a growing familiarity oflanguage. St. Joseph’s elongated fingers exhibit much of the eccentricity of Rosso, seen slightly laterin works like the Madonna and Child with Four Saints, Uffizi, Florence (fig. 3). The hand and arm ofSt. John are posed exactly as that of the putto in the Hermitage Assumption of the Virgin (fig. 4), andthe features and treatment of the hair of the two children seems to be without question the samehand; as does the model of the Virgin correspond to those in both the Assumption and the Frankfurtpanels. The design as a whole has echoes of the 1513 grisaille of Charity that del Sarto painted in thecloister of the Scalzo, as does the Pontormo Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist(fig. 5), but the group of figures is naturally not so cohesive, and there are other stylistic ingredients,like the employment of the arms (of St. Joseph and the Madonna) to bracket the entire composition,which is the product of Rosso’s fertile imagination.