The Madonna and Child

This panel, depicting a beautifully serene Madonna and Child, was painted by a close but, as yet, unidentified associate of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, arguably the most gifted of Leonardo da Vinci’s Milanese pupils. The first known owner of the painting, Giuseppe Colbacchini, even believed it to be a work by Leonardo himself. In his 1887 publication, he went so far as to describe it as a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, famously the Lady with an Ermine, in the guise of the Madonna (op. cit., p. 130). Subsequent art historians, writing in the first half of the twentieth century, tended to ascribe the painting to Boltraffio, though the nature of scholarship concerning the artist’s oeuvre as a whole is complex and subject to longstanding debate.

A second version of the Madonna and Child is in the National Gallery, London, where it is described as a ‘Follower of Boltraffio’. The National Gallery panel, also known as the Löser Madonna, was given by William Suida to the Pseudo-Boltraffio (Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich, 1929, pp. 128, no. 223), the anonymous artist responsible for a distinct and heterogeneous group of over twenty pictures, including the present work, painted in Milan in the early sixteenth century. The group had previously been regarded by some scholars as representing the early oeuvre of Boltraffio, before he entered the workshop of Leonardo in circa 1491, and displaying the influence of Vincenzo Foppa and Bernardo Zenale. Suida instead proposed that they were by a separate hand, strongly influenced by Boltraffio himself, a solution that was rejected by Maria Teresa Fiorio in her 2000 monograph on the artist (op. cit., pp. 71-74), but subsequently supported by Cristina Geddo, who argued for the Pseudo-Boltraffio’s reinstatement to ‘the ambit of Milanese leonardeschi’ (‘Un trittico ricomposto e il problema dello Pseudo-Boltraffio’, Arte Cristiana, XCI, 818, September-October 2003, pp. 345-355).

The clear-cut profile of the Madonna set against the dark wall pierced by bright windows is clearly influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated Madonna Litta (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), a picture that has also been the subject of energetic debate, with some scholars, including Fiorio, believing it to be by Boltraffio (op. cit., pp. 81-83, no. A3). Interestingly, the choice of colors in the present painting follows that of the Madonna Litta almost exactly, while the National Gallery version more closely resembles Marco d’Oggiono’s Madonna of the Violets (Collection De Navarro) of circa 1498-1500, with the inclusion of the green rather than gold edging in the Madonna’s cloak. The London panel also copies d’Oggiono’s choice of flower, a variety of violet, symbolic of innocence. However, here the Madonna carries a sprig of jasmine, a flower that symbolized motherhood. Considered alongside the book in the Madonna’s left hand, which is to be understood as the ‘word made flesh’ and the apple held by the Christ Child, a reference to the Fall of Man, this change in flower marks a small but important iconographical shift between the two versions. Where the National Gallery painting places symbolic emphasis solely on Jesus, the present panel encourages greater consideration of Mary’s role. This is further underlined by the inclusion of the inscription ‘Ave Gratia Plena,’ the opening of the Hail Mary, on the white collar of the Madonna’s robe, which is absent from the Löser Madonna.

A study for the Madonna’s head is in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle (inv. no. 12509), where it is currently catalogued as ‘Circle of Leonardo da Vinci’. It is also possible that the Body of a child turning to the left, also described simply as ‘School of Leonardo’ and now in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 5635) is a preliminary drawing for the Child’s body.