Benvenuto Tisi called Garofalo

Arthur Hill-Trevor, 2nd Viscount Dungannon (1763-1837), Brynkinalt, Clwyd;
Thence by descent.

The panel is very slightly bowed and uncradled, and has fairly recently been cleaned and restored. The paint surface is in reasonably good overall condition. There are three old repaired splits to the centre of the panel, each of ca. 20 cm length, and a repaired 6 x 3 cm damage (perhaps a knot in the wood) upper right. Otherwise intervention is restricted to scattered local retouchings, the greatest concentration being in the sky upper centre.
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Benvenuto Tisi, called Il Garofalo, was one of the outstanding painters of the Ferrarese High Renaissance. Trained by the Cremonese painter, Boccaccio Boccaccino in Ferrara from 1497, Garofalo was influenced by his Ferrarese contemporaries, including Ludovico Mazzolino and Dosso Dossi, and by 1505-6 the classicism of Bolognese artists such as Francesco Francia and Lorenzo Costa the Elder became apparent in his work. In this finely executed and richly coloured panel, the artist exemplifies his early inspirations as well as his response to the work of Giorgione. 

We are grateful to Dottoressa Anna Maria Fioravanti Baraldi, author of the catalogue raisonné on Garofalo, for endorsing the attribution on the basis of a photograph. Fioravanti Baraldi notes that this is an early work by the artist, comparable to his Adoration of the Magi in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.¹ Datable to 1508-10, the painting is still heavily dependent on Giorgione's idiom, particularly in the fluid landscape.

1. See A.M. Fioravanti Baraldi, Il Garofalo, Rimini 1993, pp. 100-102, cat. no. 24, reproduced fig. 24.