RAFFAELLINO DEL GARBO
(San Lorenzo a Vigliano ca. 1466 – 1524 Florence)
Madonna and Child
Fresco, mounted on board, tondo
35 ¾ inches diameter (90.8 cm)
Provenance:
Casa Ulivi, Borgo la Croce, Florence
Giuseppe Toscanelli, Pontedera, Pisa; his sale, Sambon, Florence, 9–23 April 1883, lot 79, as Filippino Lippi
Bertha Caroline Jennings-Bramly, n.e Larking, acquired in Italy ca. 1900; by descent to her daughter:
Amy Constance Akers-Douglas, Viscountess Chilston, Chilston Park, Maidstone, Kent; her sale, Sotheby’s, London, 9 June 1955, lot 96, as Filippino Lippi (reported as purchased by A. L. Johnson, but evidently unsold); reoffered Sotheby’s, London, 26 June 1957, lot 40, as Raffaellino del Garbo (purchased by Twining)
with Wildenstein & Co., Paris and New York, by 1960
Private Collection, USA, 1992–2019
Exhibited:
“The Christmas Story in Art,” IBM Gallery, New York, 13 December 1965–8 January 1966, no. 13, illustrated on the cover.
Literature:
Collection Toscanelli: Album Contenant la Reproduction des Tableaux et Meubles Anciens, Florence, 1883, plate XVIIa, as Filippino Lippi.
Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de peintures du moyen âge et de la Renaissance (1250–1580), Paris, 1905, vol. 1, pp. 102, 699, no. 1, illustrated.
Carlo Gamba, “Dipinti ignoti di Raffaello Carli,” Rassegna d’arte, vol. 7, no. 7 (July 1907), p. 104, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy from the II to the XVI Century, ed. Edward Hutton, London and New York, 1909, vol. 2, p. 439, no. 1, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Roberto Papini, Catalogo della Galleria Comunale di Prato, Bergamo, 1912, p. 40, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Raimond Van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, The Hague, 1933, vol. 12, pp. 444, 470, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Alfred Scharf, Filippino Lippi, Vienna, 1935, p. 115, no. 113, under workshop and school paintings, as in the style of Filippino Lippi.
Mortiz Hauptmann, Der Tondo: Ursprung, Bedeutung und Geschichte des Italienischen Rundbildes in Relief und Malerei, Frankfurt, 1936, p. 221, no. 14B, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
“Forthcoming Sales,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 97, no. 627 (June 1955), p. 192.
Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, London, 1963, vol. 1, p. 186, vol. 2, pl. 1164, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Maria Grazia Carpaneto Bianchi, “Raffaellino del Garbo, pt. I,” Antichità viva, vol. 9, no. 4 (July–August 1970) p. 23, footnote 52, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Maria Pia Mannini, Il Museo Civico di Prato: Le Collezioni D’Arte, Florence, 1990, p. 88, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Hildegard Buschmann, Raffaellino del Garbo: Werkmonographie und Katalog, PhD dissertation, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993, pp. 74, 129, cat. no. 4, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Laura Martini, Museo Civico Pinacoteca Crociani, Siena, 2000, pp. 72–73, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Rita Balleri, in Filippino Lippi; un bellissimo ingegno; origini ed eredità, Prato, 2004, p. 53, as Raffaellino del Garbo.
Danilo Barsanti, “I Toscanelli: Da Impresari Edili a Famiglia Aristocratica. Dimore, Abitudini, Mentalità,” in Le Dimore di Pisa: L’Arte di Abitare i Palazzi di una Antica Repubblica Marinara dal Medioevo all’Unità d’Italia, ed. Emilia Daniele, Florence, 2010, p. 306.
Barbara Bertelli, “Sulla formazione della collezione Toscanelli e il mercato antiquario pisano negli anni dell’Italia unita,” in Pisa Unità nelle Arti: Un Profilo di Città, ed. Stefano Bruni, Florence, 2011, p. 172, footnote 29.
Umberto Raggozino, Lettere familiari inedite di Ubaldino Peruzzi ed Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi ed altri documenti dai manoscritti dell’archivio Ragozzino-Adami, Florence, 2013, p. 584.
This compelling tondo of the Virgin and Child is one of the few surviving frescoes by Raffaellino del Garbo, arguably the most eclectic painter of the Italian Renaissance. Raffaellino began his career as an assistant to Filippino Lippi, and his earliest known work is a frescoed vault adjacent to Filippino’s Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, painted around 1493. Five years later, he is recorded as an independent painter in Florence and the following year he matriculated in the painter’s guild. Raffaellino’s style underwent several significant transformations throughout his career, revealing responses to the work of Filippino, Piero di Cosimo, and Perugino. Rather than following a linear development, Raffaellino’s style is also refreshingly inconsistent, so much so that art historians once separated his oeuvre into two groups. His early works were once associated with his nickname, Raffaellino del Garbo—derived from the street on which his workshop was located, the Via del Garbo in Florence—and his later works with his actual name, Raffaellino de’ Carli. This detached fresco, which was formerly in the celebrated collection of Giuseppe Toscanelli, dates from the height of Raffaellino’s career and portrays one of his most successful compositions.
This fresco presents a powerful, iconic image of the Virgin and Child isolated against a dark background. The Christ Child sits in his mother’s lap, wrapped in a soft pink veil and holding a small cross. He looks out of the painting towards the viewer, his resolute expression contrasted by the sadness and tenderness in the Virgin’s downcast gaze as she holds him protectively within her mantle. The figures are situated close to the pictorial plane and the Virgin’s great stature nearly fills the frame, creating a graceful and balanced depiction of the holy figures. The tondo format, which is likely original to the fresco, rose to prominence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and was frequently employed for private devotional imagery. Raffaellino produced numerous works of this type throughout his career, and, given that most tondi were intended for domestic settings, it is no surprise that this fresco was detached from the interior wall of a home.
Fig. 1. Raffaellino del Garbo, The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, Prato, Museo Civico.
When this fresco was sold from the Toscanelli collection in 1883, it was considered a work by Filippino Lippi. It retained this attribution while in the collection at Chilston Park, and it was first offered by Viscountess Chilston at Sotheby’s London in 1955 as a work by Filippino before being reoffered in 1957 with the correct attribution to Raffaellino.[1] Raffaellino’s authorship of the painting had by this point already been long established in the scholarly literature. Following the dispersal of the Toscanelli collection, all scholars from Carlo Gamba on have rightly recognized it as by Raffaellino.[2] The composition of our Virgin and Child is related to that in Raffaellino del Garbo’s high altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Siena, signed and dated 1502.[3] Executed in Raffaellino’s eccentric and highly personal style, our fresco successfully distills the central figures from his altarpiece into an intimate composition that brings the viewer into close proximity with the Virgin and Child. Rather than providing a window into their world, the work’s intense focus on the object of the viewer’s devotion gives the impression that the holy figures are physically present before us, sharing the same space. Raffaellino repeated his design for the Virgin and Child in a second tondo in the Museo Civico di Prato (Fig. 1), which is generally dated around 1511, the year of his Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre.[4] Each of these three works display slight variations in the positions and attributes of the principal figures. Whereas the Virgin’s hair is covered in the Siena altarpiece, her golden locks flow freely in the present painting and in the Prato tondo. There are also differences in the arrangement of her beautifully described hands between the three works. The Christ Child appears nearly identically in the Siena altarpiece and in this fresco—draped with a veil (referring to the shroud he would be wrapped in after his crucifixion) that wraps around his leg—whereas in the Prato tondo he is depicted with curly hair and dressed in a white cloak, holding a book. Our fresco dates after Raffaellino’s Siena altarpiece of 1502 and was likely executed around the same time as the Prato tondo of ca. 1511 given the compositional and stylistic similarities.
The existence of several variations on this composition of the Virgin and Child in Raffaellino’s oeuvre suggests that he was most likely working from a cartoon, or at the very least drawn designs, first executed for his Siena altarpiece that he retained after the completion of that project. Raffaellino was an expert draughtsman, and although no drawings that can be directly associated with the present work have survived, his studies of the head of the Virgin in Berlin and Stockholm,[5] as well as his spirited studies of hands in various positions in Vienna and London,[6] give us an indication of both the detailed planning that went into his works and the large stock of motifs kept in the workshop that he was able to draw from. The popularity of this composition and the probable former existence of a cartoon (or other preparatory drawings) for this figural group are furthermore attested by two tondi from the workshop of Raffaellino del Garbo, which are based on his designs: a damaged tondo in the Museo Civico di Montepulciano[7] and an untraced tondo sold in the sale of the contents of the Villa Salviatino outside Florence in 1891.[8]
The present painting formed part of the exceptional collection of medieval and Renaissance paintings assembled by the Pisan businessman and politician Giuseppe Toscanelli, which was sold in Florence in 1883. The importance of the collection was such that the sale catalogue was authored by the art historian Gaetano Milanesi[9] and a lavish album containing photographic reproductions of the most significant paintings, including this one, was produced for the sale (Fig. 2).[10] The entry on our fresco reports that it was detached from the wall of a house belonging to the Ulivi family on the Borgo la Croce in Florence that was demolished in order to widen the street, which runs between the Church of Sant’Ambrogio and the Piazza Beccaria. However, an alternative provenance for the painting should also be considered. Barbara Bertelli recently noted that one of Toscanelli’s earliest documented acquisitions was a Quattrocento fresco depicting the Virgin and Child, which he commissioned the Pisan restorer Guglielmo Botti to detach from a country house outside Siena in 1856.[11] Given that the sale catalogue for the Toscanelli collection is known to have inaccurately reported the origins of several paintings, it is worthwhile to entertain the possibility that the present work may been acquired from outside Siena.[12] The presence of this fresco in a home outside Siena would fit a pattern of patronage observed throughout the history of early Italian painting, and one especially common in Siena, in which a patron commissioned a smaller work based on a revered model.
Fig. 2. Photograph of the present painting in the Toscanelli Album.
Following the sale of the Toscanelli collection, the painting reappeared at Sotheby’s London in 1955 from the collection of Viscountess Chilston. According to an unpublished typewritten note sent by the English writer and Italophile Edward Hutton to Bernard Berenson in October 1955, this work was purchased in Italy around 1900 by Viscountess Chilston’s mother, Bertha Caroline Jennings-Bramly.[13] The note further indicates that the conservator Mauro Pellicioli, perhaps best remembered for conserving Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco of the Last Supper in the 1950s, had treated the tondo for Mrs. Jennings-Bramly. While Hutton stated that the fresco had been transferred to canvas, it is in fact mounted on board, and it seems likely that it was Pellicioli who removed the passages of rather crude overpaint visible in the 1883 Toscanelli photograph.
[1] The attribution to Filippino Lippi was apparently confirmed by the art historian and collector Frederick Mason Perkins, as well as by Ettore Modigliani, director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan from 1908 to 1934. See footnote 13 below. Modigliani presumably encountered the painting in England through his role in organizing the exhibition of Italian Painting at the Royal Academy at Burlington House in 1930. This painting was not shown in the exhibition, but Viscount Chilston was one of the Honorary Committee Members.
[2] In addition to the scholars cited in the bibliography above, Federico Zeri’s unpublished opinion is recorded in an annotation on the reverse of a photo of this work in the Frick Art Reference Library (Raffaellino del Garbo Supply File, “Raffaellino del Garbo / F Z / Feb 20 1962”), as well as on a photo in the Fondazione Zeri photographic archive, entry number 13924.
[3] Hildegard Buschmann, Raffaellino del Garbo: Werkmonographie und Katalog, PhD dissertation, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993, pp. 161–162, cat. no. 26, illustrated.
[4] Cristina Gnoni Mavarelli, in Filippo et Filippino Lippi: la Renaissance à Prato, Milan, 2009, cat. no. 30, pp. 166–167.
[5] Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, inv. no. 5026; and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. no. 52/1863: For a discussion of both the Berlin and Stockholm drawings, see: Per Bjurström, Italian drawings from the Collection of Giorgio Vasari, Stockholm, 2001, cat. no. 1034.
[6] Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 4858: http://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/?query=
Inventarnummer=[4858]&showtype=record; and British Museum, London, inv. no. Pp,1.14: https://www.
britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=713481&partId=1&searchText=garbo&page=1. For a discussion of these drawings, see: Carmen Bambach, in The Drawings of Filippino Lippi and his Circle, New York, 1997, under cat. no. 113, pp. 342–343.
[7] Buschmann, Raffaellino del Garbo, p. 183, cat. no. A50.
[8] Fondazione Zeri photographic archive, entry number 13926. Sold by Sangiorgi, Florence, 8-25 April 1891, lot 552, as Gerino da Pistoia, illustrated in the catalogue.
[9] For a transcription of Gaetano Milanesi’s letter to Toscanelli, which included a draft of the completed catalogued in the original Italian before its translation into French by Auguste Riblet, see: Umberto Raggozino, Lettere familiari inedite di Ubaldino Peruzzi ed Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi ed altri documenti dai manoscritti dell’archivio Ragozzino-Adami, Florence, 2013, pp. 577–591.
[10] Collection Toscanelli: Album Contenant la Reproduction des Tableaux et Meubles Anciens, Florence, 1883. Only 35 of the 236 paintings offered at the sale were illustrated in this album.
[11] Barbara Bertelli, “Sulla formazione della collezione Toscanelli e il mercato antiquario pisano negli anni dell’Italia unita,” in Pisa Unità nelle Arti: Un Profilo di Città, ed. Stefano Bruni, Florence, 2011, pp. 168–169, 172, footnote 29. This episode has also been discussed by Stefano Renzoni, who reports Botti’s description of the painting as the Virgin “with the divine son in her lap” (“col divin figlio in grembo”). See: Stefano Renzoni, Pittori e Scultori attivi a Pisa nel XIX Secolo, Pisa, 1997, p. 47.
[12] Bertelli, “Sulla formazione della collezione Toscanelli,” pp. 167, 169. The only two frescoes of the Virgin in Child present in the 1883 Toscanelli sale are the present work and an unillustrated tondo, lot 84, attributed to the school of Lorenzo di Credi (untraced). No other fresco with this subject is known to have been at any point in the Toscanelli collection. Bertelli speculated that the fresco Botti was engaged to detach may have been Toscanelli’s Lorenzo di Credi, based on Botti’s description of the work in his receipt: “by a very expert hand, from the school of Pietro Perugino” [“da mano molto esperta della scuola di Pietro Perugino”]. See: Bertelli, “Sulla formazione della collezione Toscanelli,” p. 172, footnote 29. Bertelli’s suggestion is presumably based on the fact that Lorenzo di Credi worked alongside Perugino in Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio in Florence in the 1470s and was notably influenced by his contact with the Perugian painter. However, Botti’s description of the fresco applies equally well to the present painting, which was painted by Raffaellino at the height of his so-called Peruginesque period.
[13] Fototeca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, Fiesole, filed under Raffaellino del Garbo, Homeless Paintings. “Att. to Filippino Lippi [struck through] / It belongs to Lady Chilston of Chilston Park, in Kent, and was bought by her mother in Italy about 50 years ago. The attribution is that of M. Mason Perkins and Modigliani of the Brera. It is a fresco and Pelliccioli of Milan transferred it to canvas for Lady Chilston’s mother.” Annotated in Berenson’s hand, “R. del Garbo” with a note “to be listed” in Berenson’s Italian Pictures of the Renaissance.