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UnknownMadonna and Child with St. John, c. 1540-1560. Attributed to Carlo Portelli1500s
1500s
About the Item
The painting features Our Lady holding the Child, who extends his hand toward the wooden cross, the symbol of the future Passion, and St. John. Behind the three figures a rocky mountain acts as a diaphragm between the scene and the endless river landscape that fades into the horizon. The painter reinterprets the Sacred Conversation in a personal way and takes up the typical Florentine landscape characterized since the mid-15th century by a lush valley crossed by an "S"-shaped river.
The colors of the Virgin's robes are characterized by cold, metallic and iridescent colors, capable of creating a strong coloristic contrast. Particularly fine is the white-transparent veil over the Virgin's hair and the decoration of the Child's nimbus.
The panel is undoubtedly to be approached by Carlo Portelli, a Tuscan artist well-established within the Florentine patronage, as evidenced by, among others, the important commissions recorded by Vasari in 1539 and 1565, for the wedding of Cosimo de' Medici and for Francesco de' Medici, respectively.
The painter's stylistic features are strongly recognizable in the drawing that elongates the eyes and facial physiognomic details and in the draperies characterized by facets enlivened by light, metallic colors. There are many works that can be cited to enshrine this attributive proposal: see, merely as an example, the comparison with the Madonna and Child, St. John and St. Margaret preserved at the University Art Museum in Princeton.
Typical of Portelli is then a decorative detail within the crucigerous nimbus of the Child: a kind of double hooked curl that is found in the Villefrance-sur-Saône panel, in the above-mentioned Princeton panel, in the Nativity of the church of San Michele di San Salvi (Florence), in the Madonna and Child of unknown location 1, in the Madonna and Child, St. Anne and St. Joseph of the Muzeum w Nysie in Nysa, in the Holy Family of unknown location 2 and in the Holy Family of the Palais Archiépiscopal in Rouen.
The painter served his apprenticeship in the flourishing workshop of Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, as can easily be seen in the very detail of the landscape drawn with extreme rigor. But crucial to Portelli's painting activity was his relationship with other Florentine artists such as Francesco Salviati, Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Michele Tosini, and Rosso Fiorentino.
It was precisely through the reworking of these models that the painter was able to create his own stylistic signature that was recognizable and appreciated by his contemporaries: in the course of his activity, the color tones were increasingly charged and the poses of the figures increasingly suspended in a precarious balance and lacking 'academic' articulation. These are obviously not exclusive characteristics of our painter, but more generally of the Florentine painting moment of the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century that has taken the historical-critical designation of Mannerism.
Typical, on the other hand, of Carlo Portelli is the construction of chiaroscuro through dashed oblique lines found, for example, in the above-mentioned Princeton work, Portrait of a Young Man (Fontaine-Chaalis), Portrait of Duke Alessandro de' Medici (Venice, Antiquities Pietro Scarpa), Female Figure (private collection) 3 and Holy Family with St. John (private collection) 4.
The painting presented here seems correct to place it in the full maturity of the painter, i.e., between 1540 and 1550, in close relation to the panels dated in this chronological range: such as those in the University Art Gallery in Princeton 5, the Banca Popolare di Vicenza Collection 6, the Allegory of Charity in the Casa Vasari Museum in Arezzo 7, St. Catherine of Alexandria in a private collection 8 and two panels of unknown location that present a similar landscape characterized by the presence of the sinuous course of the river 9.
Carlo Portelli, an elusive artist with a complex figurative culture, capable of encapsulating and citing pictorial experiences dissimilar to each other-such as those of Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso, Salviati, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Tosini 10-to arrive at a unique and personal formal synthesis, was deepened in a recent exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Florence, where his figure was finally ennobled within the circle of contemporary Tuscan painters
- Creation Year:1500s
- Dimensions:Height: 34.06 in (86.5 cm)Width: 28.15 in (71.5 cm)Depth: 1.97 in (5 cm)
- Medium:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Milan, IT
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU680313993702
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