The Madonna and Sleeping Child with the Infant Baptist (‘Il Silenzio’)

This intimate drawing is a study for Annibale’s Madonna and sleeping Child with the infant Baptist in the Royal Collection (fig.; see Levey, op. cit., no. 432, ill.; Posbner, op. cit., no. 122, ill.). The small devotional painting, also known as Il Silenzio, was made between 1597 and 1601, when Annibale was completing the ceiling of the gallery at Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The painting was presumably also a Farnese commission as is recorded for the first time in the family’s Palazzo del Giardino in Parma in 1678. The seventeenth-century biographer Giulio Cesare Malvasia affectionately described the painting as a ‘Small Madonna who with her finger to her mouth cautions Saint John not to touch the sleeping Lord’ (Felsina pittrice, Bologna, 1678, I, p. 508: ‘una Madonna picciola, ch’accenna col deto alla bocca a S. Giovanni, che non tocchi il Signore che dorme’). The Virgin’s gesture has been interpreted as a sign of caution to John not to awaken Christ to his Passion before his time (Posner, op. cit., p. 53). The style of this study, freely drawn in black chalk and then reworked with rapid strokes of pen and ink, anticipates the highly expressive drawings of the artist’s last years (C. van Tuyll van Serooskerken, Annibale Carracci. Drawings from the Artist’s Last Years, New York, 2020).

Fig. Annibale Carracci, The Madonna and Sleeping Child with the Infant Baptist (‘Il Silenzio’). Royal Collection, Hampton Court.