The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist

Sassoferrato was a proponent of an archaizing style of Baroque painting, copying many of his compositions fromm the masters of earlier generations. Sassoferrato favored the style of Raphael, and copied many of his works including The Annunciation from the Oddi Altarpiece (the Church of San Francesco al Prato, Perugia) and The Entombment (Galleria Borghese, Rome). The present work is a copy after Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), which Sassoferrato must have known from a print, as the composition is a mirror image of the original.

We are grateful to Professor Francesco Petrucci for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs.