PIER FRANCESCO DI JACOPO FOSCHI 

(Florence, 1502-1567)

Madonna and Child with Two Angels

Oil on panel

37 ¼ x 29 3/8 inches

(94.5 x 74.5 cm)

Provenance:   

Private Collection, United Kingdom (late 19th century – 2015), as Andrea del Sarto

Exhibited:

“Wealth and Beauty: Pier Francesco Foschi and Painting in Renaissance Florence,” Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, 29 January – 24 April 2022.

Literature: 

Simone Giordani, Madonna and Child with the Young St John the Baptist by Pier Francesco Foschi, Florence, 2019, pp. 20-22, fig. 19.

Nelda Damiano, Wealth and Beauty: Pier Francesco Foschi and Painting in Renaissance Florence, exh. cat., Athens (forthcoming).

A new addition to the oeuvre of the Florentine painter Pier Francesco Foschi, this majestic Madonna and Child is the finest example of one of the artist’s most prized compositions. Foschi was the son of Jacopo di Domenico, a pupil of Sandro Botticelli so closely linked to his master that he was often referred to as “Jacopo di Sandro.” Although born to a painter trained in the Botticellian idiom, Foschi began his artistic formation in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto. He must have remained associated with Andrea del Sarto’s workshop until the latter’s death in 1530, although he began his independent artistic activity in the late 1520s and is known to have rented a studio jointly with his father in 1529.[i] Throughout his career Foschi remained indebted to his master’s legacy, drawing on Sarto’s compositions while reworking them into novel and highly successful devotional images.

When Giorgio Vasari entered Andrea del Sarto’s workshop as a young boy in the mid-1520s, Foschi must have already been among the master’s principal assistants. Although Vasari planned to include a biography on Foschi in his Lives of the Artists—as attested by the inclusion of his name in a list of artists that Vasari compiled in preparation for the second edition of his seminal text, completed in 1568—he ultimately did not.[ii] Nonetheless Foschi is mentioned several times in the Lives, which records several prominent commissions that he undertook for the Medici, including collaborations with Pontormo on fresco cycles at the Villa di Careggi in 1535 (now lost) and at the Villa di Castello in 1536. Vasari also reports that Foschi was a founding member of the Accademia del Disegno and was involved in the creation of the decorations for Michelangelo’s funeral in the Basilica di San Lorenzo in 1564, evincing Foschi’s privileged position in the artistic community in Florence. Nevertheless, the fact that Vasari did not include a life of Foschi in his Lives relegated him to relative obscurity, from which the artist has emerged only in the last 75 years. Contributions by Roberto Longhi, Antonio Pinelli, and most recently, Simone Giordani have now brought his artistic personality and career into greater focus.[iii] Foschi’s authorship of the present work has been confirmed by Dr. Giordani, to whom we are grateful for his observations on the placement of the painting in the artist’s oeuvre.[iv]

Although he was engaged to paint several monumental altarpieces over the course of his long career—including those in the Oratorio di San Sebastiano dei Bini (1525) and in the family chapels of the Bettoni, Torrigiani, and the Bini families in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence (all 1540s)—Foschi was, to borrow the words of Luigi Lanzi, a “pittor di private cose,” a painter of private works.[v] He remained in Florence throughout his life, painting many portraits of Florentine patricians and religious works intended for domestic settings. While he was somewhat influenced by the formal experimentation and stylistic aberrations of Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo, Foschi remained largely resistant to the dominant mannerist style of the 1550s and 1560s.

Simone Giordani considers our Madonna to be “one of Foschi’s most successful compositions,” and has noted how the artist skillfully translates Sarto’s chiaroscuro effects and naturalism with a palette of brilliant colors, at times enhanced by iridescent effects, which serve to articulate the volumes of the artificial and monumental forms.[vi] This painting depicts a heavenly apparition of the Virgin and Child supported by two angels in the sky. The Virgin is seated on a cloud, holding the standing Christ Child tenderly in her arms. The principal figures are bookended by two angels—one bathed in light who looks up at Christ and the other cast in shadow who turns away to the right. The bright clouds that serve as the backdrop are fluidly painted with broad and quickly applied brushstrokes, contrasting with the tightly controlled application of the paint that Foschi employed in the principal figures. The faces of Christ and Virgin are rendered with great sensitivity, and Christ’s hair is highlighted with a thick, golden impasto that is typical of Foschi’s refined technique (Fig. 1).

Foschi here synthesizes elements from several works by Andrea del Sarto. The upper portion of the Virgin, shown in three-quarter profile looking downwards with a shawl wrapped around her head and shoulders, derives from her counterpart in Sarto’s tondo of the Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre (Fig. 2).[vii] Additionally, the face of the playful cherub emerging from the clouds to left of the principal figures is adapted directly from Sarto’s Gambassi Altarpiece.[viii] Beyond these specific borrowings, other elements more generally recall Sarto’s works, attesting both to Foschi’s deep familiarity with his master’s compositional inventions and his unparalleled ability to transform them. Giordani has compared the studied pose of our Virgin to that found in two altarpieces by Sarto—the Panciatichi and the Passerini Assumptions of the Virgin, both in the Galleria Palatina in Florence.[ix] He also notes the similarities between the angel on the right and the cherub who peers out of the shadowy niche in the Madonna of the Harpies (Florence, Uffizi),[x] although here Foschi cleverly depicts the angel grasping protectively at the Virgin’s mantle, as if preventing her from falling off her cloud. The works that Foschi took as reference points in our Madonna and Child were all executed by Andrea del Sarto in the last decade and a half of his career, exactly the period in which Foschi was active in his workshop. Rather than copy his sources, Foschi masterfully reworked them into a fluid composition that appears both natural and entirely original.

The popularity of Foschi’s composition is confirmed by its repetition in three autograph works, two of which are found in public collections in Italy. Giordani proposes that a version in the Gallery of the Ospedale degli Innocenti is the earliest in date, from roughly the middle of the 1530s, though he notes that it has suffered from areas of old repaint. Another version, in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Vittorio Veneto, was painted somewhat later. Giordani considers our painting to be the best-preserved example, roughly contemporary with that in the Ospedale degli Innocenti, though possibly executed shortly afterward. Another version, which is somewhat damaged and difficult to judge from photographs, appeared on the art market a decade ago.

The painting is presented in a superb sixteenth-century gilt wood cassetta frame ornamented with a foliate punchwork design.

[i] Louis Waldman, “Three Altarpieces by Pier Francesco Foschi: Patronage, Context and Function,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 137 (2001), p. 22.

[ii] Simone Giordani, Madonna and Child with the Young St John the Baptist by Pier Francesco Foschi, Florence, 2019, pp. 11–12. This autograph list of artists is now in the British Museum.

[iii] Roberto Longhi, “Avvio a Pier Francesco Toschi,” Paragone, vol. 43 (1953), pp. 53–54. The correct spelling of the artist’s surname was established by: Donato Sanminiatelli, “Foschi e non Toschi,” Paragone, vol. 91 (1957), pp. 55–57. The catalogue of works attributed to Foschi was first assembled by: Antonio Pinelli, “Pier Francesco di Jacopo Foschi,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 109 (1967), pp. 87–108. For the most recent treatment of the artist, see: Simone Giordani, Madonna and Child with the Young St John the Baptist by Pier Francesco Foschi, Florence, 2019.

[iv] A catalogue entry on our painting authored by Dr. Giordani is available upon request.

[v] Luigi Lanzi, Storia Pittorica della Italia, vol. 1, Milan, 1824, p. 270.

[vi] Giordani, Madonna and Child, p. 20.

[vii] Giordani, Madonna and Child, pp. 20–22. For the Holy Family in the Louvre, see Antonio Natali and Alessandro Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto: Catalogo Completo dei Dipinti, Florence, 1989, pp. 70–71, cat. no. 29.

[viii] Giordani, Madonna and Child, p. 22. For the Gambassi Altarpiece, see: Natali and Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto, pp. 112–113, cat. no. 52.

[ix] For the Panciatichi and the Passerini altarpieces, see: Natali and Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto, pp. 92–93, cat. no. 42 and pp. 110–111, cat. no. 51.

[x] For the Madonna of the Harpies see: Natali and Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto, pp. 74–75, cat. no. 31.