Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Sassoferrato Sassoferrato 1609 - 1685 Rome

We are grateful to François Macé de Lépinay for confirming the attribution to Sassoferrato, based on photographs.  He will include this painting in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the works of the artist.

This composition, showing the Madonna enveloping the sleeping Christ Child in a protective embrace, was one of Sassoferrato's most celebrated and repeated images.  It is known in a number of variants, some of which include putti in the upper corners.¹  This particular variant, of upright format and without putti, is identical to that in two paintings in the Wallace Collection, London and one in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  Another version, formerly in the collection of Marc and Lillian Rojtman, New York, was sold in these rooms on January 28, 2005, lot 509 (for $168,000).

This painting was once in the famed collection of Cardinal Joseph Fesch, half-brother of Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte,  the mother of Napoléon Bonaparte.  At the time of his death in 1839, his collection comprised nearly 16,000 works.  While a number of paintings and works of art were sent by his heir, Joseph Bonaparte, to Corsica (the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio opened in 1852), a large number of works, such as the present painting, were sold in a series of sales in Rome between 1843-45.

1  See, for example, the painting sold, London, Sotheby's, December 17, 1998, lot 64, or that in the Galleria Brignale sale catalogue, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa (reproduced in Giovanni Battista Salvi "il Sassoferrato", exhibition catalogue, Sassoferrato, June 29 - October 14, 1990, pp. 64-5, cat. no. 15); and, in horizontal format with putti, in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.