Bartolommeo Ramenghi, called Bagnacavallo

With Lindsay Burns & Company, Perth;

Thereafter acquired by the present collector.

Bagnacavallo specialized in half-length depictions of the Madonna and Child, often accompanied with saints, as in the present work. Although the painter spent almost the entirety of his career in Bologna, where he trained in the workshop of Francesco Francia, in the 1510s he travelled to Rome, where he encountered Raphael, whose influence is readily apparent. Saints Sebastian, shown pierced by arrows at left, and Roch, dressed as a pilgrim at right, were both invoked in times of plague. Their pairing suggests Bagnacavallo may have produced this work in the late 1520s, following the outbreak of the epidemic in 1527, when the Landsknechts, under the direction of Charles V, invaded the Italian peninsula.