Madonna lactans with the Last Supper

The large and impressive woodcut is one of a few surviving popular, devotional prints of its period. It depicts the Virgin nursing the Child, enthroned and turned to the right, at half-length, attended by Saints Anthony and John the Baptist on the left and Saints Lucy and Catherine on the right, smaller and at three-quarter length. The Saints are identified by the names written in their halos, Saint Catherine is holding her attribute, the wheel. The Annunciation is depicted in roundels in the upper corner, with the Virgin seated by a lamp at left and the Angel at right. Below this, in the place of a predella, is a depiction of the Last Supper. Seen from a slightly raised perspective, the Apostles are seated around a long, square table, Christ at the centre to the left, with Saint John seated close to him and sleeping with his arms and head resting on the table. Judas, seen gesticulating at lower right, is the only one without a halo. While the others are once again identified with their names written in the halos, Judas' name is in a small box in the lower left corner. All this is shown in a lively manner with relatively broad, simple lines, with some diagonal hatching to suggest shading. The figure of Christ stands out with his cloak shaded entirely with close cross-hatching. The background in the upper part is densely decorated with a floral drapery behind the Virgin and Child, a cross-hatched, seemingly dotted back wall of the throne, with foliate spandrels at the top.

With it's Byzantine influences, both stylistically and in composition, the print seems clearly rooted in a popular Venetian tradition of the 15th century. Due to paper evidence there can be little doubt that it was printed around 1530, but we can't say with certainty whether it is a later impression printed from blocks cut in the previous century or from newly cut blocks after an older model. The closest comparable is a damaged woodcut kept at the British Museum of the Virgin and Child with four Saints (Schreiber 1158), depicting the Virgin and Child three-quarter length, without the Last Supper. Here the Virgin is turned towards the left and the position of the saints and of the two roundels with the Annunciation at the top is reversed. The relation between the two compositions is so close that even decorative elements, such as the foliate spandrels at the top of the throne, correspond. Cut with greater precision and finer in detail, it seems that this stencil-coloured fragment, dated around 1450 and removed in the early 20th century from a door in the town of Bassano in the Veneto, precedes the present woodcut and probably served as a model for the upper part of its composition.

Another fragment of a closely related woodcut, again without the Last Supper below, is in Berlin. The British Museum owns a modern impression from the same block. Finally, the Victoria and Albert Museum has a very fragmented impression of a large woodcut pasted onto wood of the Virgin with the Child on her Knee, surrounded by a shining nimbus and stars, dated around 1450-75.
 
The earliest known example of a large devotional woodcut dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in fact one of the earliest securely documented woodcuts, is the famous Madonna del Fuoco in Forlí in the Emilia-Romagna, which was miraculously rescued from a fire in 1428. This woodcut, displayed and still an object of devotion in the Cathredral at Forlí, is on stylistic grounds also considered to be of Venetian origin or influence. What little evidence we have seems to attest to the existence of an enduring tradition, perhaps even one or several specific workshops, in the Veneto, where these devotional woodcuts would have been printed.

What sets the present woodcut apart is the highly unusual iconographic inclusion of the Last Supper below. In fact, Aldovini, Landau and Urbini at the Fondazione Cini have been able to find only one example of the Virgin and Child with the Last Supper in a single picture plane, in a small painting at the Pinacoteca Civica, also at Forlí, thought to be Venetian School of the first half of the 14th century. 

Apart from the object offered here, the only other evidence for the existence of a woodcut depicting the Virgin and Child with the Last Supper is a fascinating entry in the inventory of the print collection of Ferdinand Columbus, which describes the present impression quite precisely.  Little inconsistencies, such as the detail described in the text of Judas holding a cup at left ('Judas tiene un vaso en la syniestra') could be explained by the fleeting observation and resulting small misunderstandings on the part of Columbus's cataloguer, as Mark McDonald has suggested in conversation. For example, the box with Judas' name is directly underneath Matthew at left, who does indeed hold a cup. Should this be the case, then Columbus would indeed have owned an impression from the very same block. This however now seems impossible to prove and it may well be that the description is accurately describing another, very similar print - a print which in any case Columbus would have acquired in Italy in the first quarter of the 16th century. (Mark P. McDonald, The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville, London, 2004, vol . II, p. 469-70, no. 2593).

For a period of time, the present print must have been in devotional use, displayed in an accessible place in a chapel or shrine, as the many pinholes testify. They are not pin pricks along the outlines (in order to transfer the composition), but are scattered across the bodies and the halos of the Virgin and the Child, sparing their faces, and along the borderline to the Last Supper, just below the Virgin and Child group. They are undoubtedly caused by the faithful pinning prayers or other devotional offerings onto the image, which was presumably pasted onto board. It is therefore all the more astonishing that this extraordinary object has been preserved in such good condition, as a majestic image and a fascinating example of the popular, devotional and visual culture and the use of prints in the 15th and 16th centuries in Northern Italy.
For their assistance in cataloguing this lot, we are grateful to Laura Aldovini, David Landau and Silvia Urbini, who are currently compiling, at the Fondazione Cini, Venice, the online Census of Italian Single-leaf Woodcuts before 1550.

We would also like to thank Richard Field and Suzanne Boorsch, Yale University, and Mark McDonald, Metropolitan Museum, for their help and advice.
The dating of the watermark has been confirmed by Peter Bower, London.