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FRANCESCO MARMITTA (PARMA C. 1464 - AFTER 1505) Madonna and Child in a landscape

FRANCESCO MARMITTA (PARMA C. 1464 - AFTER 1505) Madonna and Child in a landscape oil on panel, with the original painted reverse, unframed 22 3/8 x 14 7/8 in. (56.8 x 37.7 cm.)(Probably) Sir Charles McLaren, 1st Bt. Aberconway, PC, QC, JP (1850-1934), circa 1907, and by descent in the family until the late 1990s, when acquired by the present owner.This hitherto unstudied panel is one of the handful of pictures that are securely attributable to the Parmese Francesco Marmitta, who worked both in his native town and at Bologna, and was one of the most accomplished miniaturists of his age. Strongly influenced by Ercole de’ Roberti and by his associate Lorenzo Costa, Marmitta emerges as an artist of high rank in the illuminations of about 1485 in a Petrarch executed for a Bolognese patron, Giacomo Giglio, now in the Landesbibliothek at Kassel. Marmitta’s subsequent development as a miniaturist can be followed in a number of illuminated manuscripts including a Missal commissioned by Cardinal Domenico delle Rovere, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Turin, most recently dated about 1490-92: this, like a leaf from a Benedictional done for Pope Innocent VIII, was evidently executed in Rome. The artist returned to his native Parma. He continued to evolve and the Durazzo Book of Hours (Genoa, Biblioteca Berio), of about 1500, places him in the vanguard of north Italian taste. Although Vasari was aware of Marmitta’s achievement, and his name was never forgotten, no manuscript was securely identified as by him until 1907. It was not until 1948 that Pietro Toesca recognised that he was the painter of the remarkable Madonna di San Quintino in the Louvre (A Bacchi, B. and R. Bentivoglio-Ravasio, A. de Marchi and S. Pettenati , Francesco Marmitta, Turin, 1996, pp. 329-33, no. 11). Subsequently a small group of panels has been recognised as by the artist. The earliest is the small Flagellation at Edinburgh ( ibid., p. 307, no. 1), clear in colour and strangely calm despite the subject, which is perhaps marginally earlier in date than the Durazzo Hours. A Madonna (Genoa, Palazzo Durazzo Pallavicini), oddly akin in her face to Pinturicchio, who also worked for Cardinal delle Rovere, and a Portrait of Donna Elena di Bonsignore Bonsignori (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) have also been attributed to Marmitta ( ibid., pp. 340-1, nos. 19 and 20). His masterpiece as a painter rather than a miniaturist is the San Quintino Altarpiece, painted for the church of San Quintino at Parma, which can be confidently dated to between 1500 and the painter’s death in 1505. That picture—to which this Madonna and Child is closely related—had been attributed as early as 1812 to Francesco Bianchi Ferrari, although as early as 1908 Berenson accorded it ‘a still higher place’ than other pictures given to him, fairly praising ‘its severely virginal Madonna, … the large simplicity of its arrangement, the quiet landscape seen through slender columns, the motionless sky …’ (B. Berenson, The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York and London, 1907, p. 69). It marks a high point in Parmese Renaissance painting. The Madonna in this panel is no less virginal and calm in demeanour than her counterpart in the Louvre, and the picture is comparable with that masterpiece in other ways: the landscape with hills descending to the plain - as is the case with the Apennines west of Parma - and the fabrics are resolved with an equally fastidious precision. Small details, rendered with an exacting precision, remind us that Marmitta had for two decades been principally active as a miniaturist. The composition had previously been known from a picture at Cremona (Centro di Musicologia Walter Stauffer; ibid., p. 339, no. 17), in which the figures are shown against a plain background.

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古典大師（第二部分）：繪畫，雕塑及水彩

古典大師（第二部分）：繪畫，雕塑及水彩

2024年07月03日 18:00

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