ROSSO FIORENTINO

Florence 1494 - Paris 1540

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

Oil on panel

92 x 71.8 cm

PROVENANCE

Possibly Sister Lucrezia Barducci d.1574;

to whom given to The Barducci Chapel, Santa Felicita, Florence some years before her death

LITERATURE

‘Dipinti manieristi in collezione fiorentine’ Il Vasari, Vol XXI, no. 2-3, July-Sept. 1963, p. 91, pl. XLVI;

F. Fiorelli Malessi, La Chiesa di Santa Felicita a Firenze, Florence, 1986, p. 159 & 298

This work could well be the Rosso Fiorentino “Virign and Child” refered to in a document of 21 March 1573 recording the death of Sister Lucrezia Barducci. It states the work was given by her to the Barducci Chapel, Santa Felicita many years before. Although the work has not been included in the major studies of the artist in recent years, this exhibition represents an invaluable opportunity to show the stylistic similarities and characteristics it shares with other works executed at an early stage in the artist’s career. The detailed comparisons with works such the Assumption of the Virgin and Madonna and Child with St John, show unequivocally the hand of Rosso in his very early years in Florence.

Even if Rosso was perhaps not a formal apprentice in the Del Sarto studio, and was self-taught as Vasari implies, he was aware that this was the most innovative workshop in Florence, and there are many references to the master’s work in those pictures that are accepted to be Rosso’s from early in the second decade of the century. Pictures like the Madonna and Child with St John  in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main, show how he shakes up the relative symmetry of Sarto’s figures, with tremendously engaging children whom one forgives for their naughtiness. The Frankfurt painting can be seen as a reaction to the Andrea Del Sarto composition in this show, especially in colouring and in the pose of the St John, and so 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 St John,  by him in this show, and the imaginative way he used the design (in the work exhibited at Colnaghi’s in 1983, Discoveries from the Cinquecento) 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 has come into the orbit of Andrea, and it must date among the earliest of his productions. The Christ Child is standing, as in the Frankfurt panel,  while the artist uses the profile pose from the seated St John in that design; the added figures of St Joseph and St Elizabeth mean that there is that sense of crowding that Rosso often 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 the ability to link all the figures together in a complicated rhythm, is a common Florentine ambition. As in the Frankfurt composition, these are challenging problems, especially when the artist is essentially relying on a great intuitive genius rather than many years of study of anatomy. This is the reason why features like the extended hand of the Christ Child is essentially repeated verbatim in the Uffizi altarpiece done for the hospitaller of Santa Maria Nuova, which was painted later, in 1518. The hands and feet too are seen again in the other early works, understood with a growing familiarity of language. St Joesph’s elongated fingers exhibit much of the eccentricity of Rosso, seen slightly later in works like the Madonna & Child with Four Saints, Uffizi, Florence.  The hand and arm of St. John are posed exactly as that of the putto in the Hermitage Assumption of the Virgin, and the features and treatment of the hair of the two children seems to be without question the same hand; as does the model of the Virgin correspond to those in both the Assumption and the Frankfurt panels. The design as a whole has echoes of the 1513 grisaille of Charity that Del Sarto painted in the cloister of the Scalzo, as does the Pontormo in this exhibition, but the group of figures is perhaps naturally not so cohesive, and there are perhaps 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.

Born in the same year as Pontormo, he came to painting altarpieces - perhaps the pinnacle of contemporary patronage - by a different route. For before he was almost twenty there is little to show for in Rosso’s name, except some coats of arms in the convent of the Santissima Annunziata, where his brother, it so happened, was a monk. And the absence of formal perspective, both as it concerns architecture and in the proportion of figures, shows that he was not trained in these arts like the other members of Sarto’s studio - so much so that it can be doubted if he was ever formally an apprentice there. We can perhaps read into this career that Rosso initially worked in a parallel profession of decorative design, rather than aspiring from the start to achieve the goals of Raphael and Del Sarto. Instead his intuitive talent is evident in all his works, but it is particularly mercurial in the very earliest productions. The business of the decorative painter is often ignored as being a prelude to greater things, but it obviously was possible to enter the profession from an unconventional background: Rosso paid the maximum level of tax when he entered the Arte degli Speziali (the guild that was responsible for the interests of painters) because his family had no associations with this profession. It is possible to agree with Vasari that he was essentially self-taught, and that his early sponsorship was essentially because he was seen in his parish as having exceptional gifts that were encouraged by the local authorities.

Another of his brothers was a Servite monk, and Vasari noted Rosso’s connections with a brother Jacopo from that order, for whom he apparently painted ‘a painting of Our Lady with the head of St John Evangelist, half length’. The description has been associated with the design of a work known from a copy in Tours (A. Natali, Rosso Fiorentino, 2006, Pl. 2),  the composition is a somewhat naif juxtaposition of the three figures, and while the artist shows an early talent in capturing lifelike details, and the extravagant kneeling pose of the Christ Child over-arching across the panel, it remains a curious assembly of attempted motifs. It could well be argued that this, and other works by this red-headed genius, are the product of an extremely gifted painter who was essentially self-taught, but who  found he had an ability to mimic the work of his contemporaries and progress into the mainstream without the conventional education that they went through. It was the patrons of one of the coats of arms that he supplied at SS. Annunziata, that of the the Pucci family, done in 1513/14 when Lorenzo Pucci was raised to the purple, who gave him the chance to prove himself as a painter of figures in the Assumption of the Virgin  at the convent. It was an important start, for the Pucci family were enthusiastic and generous patrons, soon giving the young Pontormo a chance to shine in the altarpiece for the family chapel at Santa Maria Visdomini: this was the heart of Rosso’s parish. The patron of the slightly later in date Madonna and Child with Four Saints  now in the Uffizi, the hospitaller at Santa Maria Nuova, was shocked when he first saw the design, thinking the saints were portrayed in devilish forms, and he seems to have rejected the work. The painting does indeed have that curious mix of extreme charm - the Child with his big eyes and too short an arm, a head much larger than His mother’s, but an extraordinary pair of angels in the foreground conversing as only angels by Rosso do.