Madonna and Child with St Joseph and the Young St John the Baptist

Scarsella Ippolito called Scarsellino

(Ferrara c. 1550 - 1620)

This was probably one of the paintings in the collection of Lucrezia d’Este d’Urbino, who left all of her assets to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, with the result that large number of paintings from Ferrara ended up in Rome, entering the Borghese Collection through Olimpia Aldobrandini the younger.

The small work is a masterpiece of the ‘paintings of the affections’ genre: the Virgin, sitting in front of a solid tree trunk, calms and watches over the little Christ Child, who sits on her knees, and John the Baptist as they play, the former having taken the staff ending in a cross from the latter, who was playing with it with lamb he holds in his arms. Behind the tree, separate from the loving everyday scene in the foreground, Joseph leans against the same tree as Mary, reading a book.

In the background, there is a city in flames overlooking a river, black smoke rising up from the burning town and mixing with the shadows that have just been lightened by the dawn.

Object details

Commentary

This work was probably one of the paintings in the collection of Lucrezia d’Este, duchess of Urbino. In fact, no. 15 of the inventory taken of her assets in 1592 reads: ‘Above a cornice on the left there are two small paintings of the Madonna with Our Lord in her arms by Mondino Scarsella, and the other with a similar Madonna by Dosso’ (Della Pergola 1959). The Ferrara noblewoman left all of her assets to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, papal legate of Ferrara at the time, such that a large number of paintings from Ferrara came to Rome, including one, no. 102 in the inventory of 1603, described as ‘a Madonna with a child in her arms, on a small panel [by] Mondino Scarsella’ (Della Pergola 1960). The attribution of the painting to Sigismondo Scarsella, Ippolito’s father, was repeated in the inventory of Olimpia Aldobrandini junior drawn up in 1682, in which item no. 457 is described as ‘a painting on panel with the Madonna and child in her arms [measuring] about one palm hight by Mondin Scarsella’ (Della Pergola 1963). This documentation has posed more than a few problems for scholars, who have concluded that the description refers either to a lost painting by Sigismondo, known as Mondino (Hermann Fiore 1998, pp. 192–193; idem, 2002, pp. 208–209, no. 43) or to the Borghese painting (Grigoletto 1978, p. 260; Bentini 1993, p. 258; Morandotti 1997, p. 30). If the latter theory should prove to be correct, it would be based on extraneous documentary information, therefore the first true citation of this painting would be found in the Borghese inventory for the family’s two residences in Rome, drawn up in stages between 1620 and 1630, which describes ‘a painting in … the Madonna with the child and the young St John the Baptist [in a] gilt frame, [measuring] 1 high 1 wide, [by] Scarsellino’ in the second room towards the aviary in the Casino di Porta Pinciana and ‘a painting with the Madonna, the child [and] the young St John the Baptist [in a] gilt frame [and measuring] 1 high 1 wide, [by] Scarsellino’ in the room with the wardrobes in the Palazzo di Ripetta. If this theory is correct, also considering the reliability of the inventory of Lucrezia d’Este given the chronological correspondence with the production of Scarsellino and his father, it would change the terminus ante quem for the work (Novelli 2008, p. 312). However, the stylistic and compositional aspects already noted by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Venturi 1893, Longhi 1928, Della Pergola 1955, Novelli 1955), allow us to date the painting to between 1582 and 1590.

The small work is a masterpiece of the ‘paintings of the affections’ genre codified by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in his treatise Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images), published in Bologna in 1582. The Virgin, sitting in front of a solid trunk, calms and watches over the little Christ Child, who sits on her knees, and John the Baptist as they play, the former having taken the staff ending in a cross from the latter, who was playing with it with lamb he holds in his arms. Behind the tree, separate from the loving everyday scene in the foreground, Joseph leans against the same tree as Mary, while he reads a book.

In the background, there is a city in flames overlooking a river, black smoke rising up from the burning town and mixing with the shadows that have just been lightened by the dawn. The dramatic landscape in this composition, which looks to Dosso Dossi’s flaming scenes, like Apollo (inv. 1), also evokes Albrecht Dürer engraving The Madonna of the Pear (1511) in its use of a tree as a place for the Virgin to lean and Venetian painting, in particular that of Titian and Tintoretto, for the use of colour to define the vanishing point, emphasising the figures in the foreground.

The success of this composition, influenced by Northern art and the Veneto and Ferrara tradition, is attested by an engraving by Raphael Sadeler made by 1624 and dedicated to Cardinal Bonifacio Bevilacqua (one of the best exemplars of this work is in Naples at the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Collezione Firmian, vol. 65, f. 14) and three copies of the painting, two of which found on the antiquarian market (1957 and 1977) and one in the Pinacoteca Comunale, Ravenna (Novelli 2008, p. 312).

Lara Scanu