School of Titian, (Pieve di Cadore, 1488/1490 - Venice, 1576)

School of Titian, (Pieve di Cadore, 1488/1490 - Venice, 1576)

Madonna with Child and San Giovannino

Oil on canvas, cm 158 x 78

The work in question represents a half-figure of the Madonna holding up the Child Jesus, who tenderly supports his head to hers. San Giovannino emerges from one side taking the hand and foot of the child. On the bottom appears a host of cherubim that highlight the divine character of the representation. 

The composition of the examined work repeats, but specularly, that of the Madonna with Child and Saint Giovannino present at the Uffizi that until the second half of the nineteenth century was remembered in the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo as a work by the Venetian master Tiziano Vecellio (1488/1490-1576). Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe consider the painting in the Uffizi a work of art. Some scholars place the version of the Uffizi to the sixth decade of the sixteenth century, based on a similarity between the face of the Virgin and that of Venus and Amorino, also known as wife of Titian. Harold Wethey approaches the painting of the Uffizi that was remembered until the middle of the eighteenth century at Palazzo Barberini in Rome. A painting depicting the same subject is preserved and recorded already in the seventeenth century and attributed to Titian in an inventory of 1638 in the collection of Palazzo Giustiniani, but with the variant of Saint Giovannino that does not grasp the foot of Jesus, and different are also the position and hairstyle of the Virgin. From this work is also an engraving by the Dutch designer and engraver Cornelis Bloemaert (1603-1692), published in the Giustiniana Gallery. Another example of this painting is at the Fesch Museum in Ajaccio. The existence of many replicas of this painting, including several that have long been considered to be autographs of the master, suggests the existence of a prototype made by Titian, now gone, and for which it is difficult to establish a chronological indication. The attitude of mother and son can recall that of the Madonna with Child by Andrea Mantegna at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, also surrounded by a rich group of cherubim, which may suggest that the authentic work of Titian can also be a youth work. 

It has already been said that the painting in question reproduces the composition of the aforementioned versions, but in a mirror-like way; this element indicates that the artist was based on an engraving, probably not that of the Bloemaert which takes up a slightly different composition in the relationship between Saint Giovannino and Jesus child. The gaze of the Madonna also varies, not facing an undefined point, but straight towards the viewer. the work is distinguished by the rendering of the fabrics, particularly illuminated so as to give an idea of the material of which they are made, taking up the ways of Titian at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1510, or of the Madonna and Child, John the Baptist and a saint at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, 1514. 

The array of cherubim is comparable to that which Titian inserts in Apparizione di Cristo alla madre, 1554 at Medole, church of the Assumption of the Virgin.

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