The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist

(Mariotto Albertinelli)

Mariotto Albertinelli’s career is intrinsically linked to that of Fra Bartolomeo. Not only were the two artists partners, sharing a workshop in the convent of San Marco in Florence and jointly carrying out a number of important commissions, but also Albertinelli’s independent compositions and style are firmly rooted in Fra Bartolomeo’s work. Even after the partnership dissolved in 1513, Albertinelli continued to reuse Fra Bartolomeo’s earlier ideas. This has made the attribution and dating of his work difficult, especially that of his small devotional panels, which are often based on figural groups from the partnership’s monumental altarpieces. The problem is farther complicated by the fact that other members of the San Marco workshop replicated both Fra Bartolomeo and Albertinelli’s small, devotional panels.

This wistfully sweet Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist is an excellent example of Albertinelli’s small-scale devotional work and both the panel and the paint surface are remarkably well preserved. The Madonna, dressed in a brilliant crimson gown, stands before a pair of parted curtains holding the Christ Child in her arms. At the lower left an angel with a reed cross in one hand presents the Young Saint John, who reaches up and gently tugs at Christ Child’s diaphanous swaddling. With amazing grace and fluidity, the Christ Child raises his hand in blessing. On the parapet at the right there is a pomegranate, one of the symbols of Christ’s Passion, and just behind the parapet there is another angel, who holds a lily. Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John was a favourite Florentine theme during the years of the Republic (1494-1512), but practically died out after the Medici returned to power. According to a legend popularised by the fourteenth-century Pisan friar, Domenico Cavalca, the infant Baptist, having escaped Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, lived in the wilderness protected by the archangel Ureil. During the flight into Egypt he visited the Holy Family and when the Christ Child saw him, he blessed his young friend and announced his future baptism. During these years of continual territorial threat, the theme undoubtedly took on political connotations, since the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence.

The intimacy of the subject made it ideal for small-scale devotional pictures and Albertinelli was to repeat the theme a number of times. A tondo, attributed to him and dated between 1506 and 1509 (Columbia, S. C., Columbia Museum of Art, Kress Collection), shows the Madonna and Child enthroned and with the Young Saint John being presented by an angel. This picture, like much of Albertinelli’s work , is an amalgamation of ideas culled from Fra Bartolomeo’s slightly earlier drawings. Likewise, Albertinelli’s Holy Family (New York, Stanley Moss collection) from around 1510, repeats the pose of the Christ and Virgin from Fra Batrolomeo’s Mond Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with Saint Joseph (London, National Gallery). The Leonardesque head of the Virgin is a type that frequently appears in Fra Bartolomeo’s work and there are a number of black chalk studies of a similar female head inclined towards the left with down cast eyes. As Chris Fisher has pointed out, Fra Bartolomeo probably did not execute these portrait studies with any special painting in mind, but drew them to keep in stock for potential use. Thus the same type appears in the unfinished Pala de Gran Consiglio (Florence, Museo di San Marco – See fig. 1 detail.), which was started in 1510, and The Annunciation (Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire – See fig.2.) from around the same time, which was executed in the workshop perhaps by Albertinelli and Fra Bartolomeo. It reappears again in The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John under discussion here.

Around 1511 Fra Bartolomeo and Albertinelli were also working on The Carondelet Madonna for the cathedral in Bescançon. One of Fra Bartolomeo’s preparatory studies for this monumental altarpiece shows the Christ Child in a similar position to the one in The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John (fig.3). The body of the Christ Child swings towards the left, his left knee is bent and his right leg stretched over the Virgin’s arm. In the end, however, the position of the child was changed to a more upright one and the position of his two legs reversed, so that the left leg is stretched out and the right one is bent . Nevertheless, it is to this drawing that Albertinelli seems to have turned for his Christ Child in The Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John. Taking the Virgin from one drawing and combining it with the pose of the Christ Child from another is symptomatic of Albertinelli’s eclectic mode of composing a picture. The parted curtains behind the Virgin are also a motif that Albertinelli used repeatedly, although generally on a much larger scale as in his Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (Florence, Galleria dell’ Accademia) of around 1509 or his Madonna and Child with Saints and a Donor (Volognano, San Michele), which is signed and dated 1514. In the smaller work he simply compressed the elements into a more focused field.

Because Albertinelli continued to reuse similar compositional elements throughout his career, there have been different opinions as to the date of this Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist. Mina Gregori thinks that it was a splendid work from between 1509-1512, in other words, during those years that he was working with Fra Bartolomeo and frequently painting small-scale devotional panels that used the drawings made for larger commissions . Everett Fahy, on the other hand, believes that it is a characteristic work done sometime during the last two years of his life.

The central group of figures proved to be a popular motif that would be repeated by the workshop in other compositions. Two versions are known that have a similar arrangement of the Virgin, Christ Child and Baptist placed in an architectural niche. One, which was in the Somzée collection in Brussels, was sold by the Galerie Sedelmeyer in Paris in 1907 with an attribution to Fra Bartolomeo. A softer and more beautiful version of the same composition, also given to Fra Bartolomeo, was in the Erhardt sale in London in 1931. Neither of these pictures have the soft-focused and lyrical beauty of Albertinelli’s Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist.

Sold Berlin, 27 October 1925, lot 40 (as North Italian, c.1530).
Paul Werners, Berlin, bought in the 1930s, thence by decent.
Sold Sotheby’s London, 8 July 1992, lot 267 (as Manner of Fra
Bartolomeo).
Private collection.