Giovanni Pietro Rizzi Pedrini called Giampetrino

The following condition report has been provided by Karen Thomas of Thomas Art Conservation LLC., 336 West 37th Street, Suite 830, New York, NY 10018, 212-564-4024, info@thomasartconservation.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. While more densely painted passages – the green drapery, the garments, highlights in the hair – are in relatively good condition, portions of the picture appear to have been affected by cleaning in the past. Tiny losses and abrasion, particularly in the flesh passages, have been addressed with retouching. A network of fine cracks reduces the brightness of the skin tones. A fair amount of the darks in the flesh passages have been reestablished or strengthened with retouching, and much of Saint Elisabeth's face is restoration; some restoration, for example in Mary's blue garment, has shifted in tone. Under ultraviolet (UV) illumination recent restorations are observable; earlier restoration beneath the fluorescing varnish is more difficult to distinguish with UV. The varnish remains clear and has a low gloss with some slightly matte areas. Wood strips, approximately 1cm wide, have been nailed into the edges on the top, left and right. The horizontally grained wood support has been thinned and a cradle attached to the reverse, encompassing the added strips. While cleaning would allow for a new restoration to correct any shift in tone in the current restoration, wear requiring careful retouching would be revealed in the process.
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We are grateful to Cristina Geddo for the preparation of this catalogue entry.  The painting will be included in Geddo's forthcoming monograph on the artist.

The style, composition, technique and high quality of execution all confirm that this unpublished Madonna and Child with Young Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elisabeth belongs to the corpus of works by Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, the most prolific and talented of Leonardo’s students in Milan.

Giampetrino’s hand is confirmed not only in the fineness of details, as seen in the ruffled hem of the Madonna’s pleated shirt and the cabochon gemstone on the Baptist’s tunic, but also in the rendering of the individual elements.  This can be seen in the supple hands of the Virgin, with her wrist joint shown, and on the wood stool painted white with a worn edge, a return to the Flemish style.

This painting should be recognised as a prototype from which a series of weaker quality replicas descend.  These replicas reference the inner circle of collaborators and followers of the Master.  It is therefore a valuable discovery, which fills a gap in the artist’s oeuvre.

The painting shows a group of four holy figures in an interior of three levels.  The first level is occupied by the two ‘Holy Children’, the infant Jesus and the young Saint John the Baptist, embracing and kissing on the mouth.  The Saint John is standing at three quarter, scantily clad in a tunic fastened at the side, while the naked Christ Child is sitting on a stool in a complex position with his chest turned toward his companion and legs in the opposite direction.  The Madonna, who wears a fashionable dress of the time with long balloon sleeves and a square neckline, is transversely placed in the second level, with her arms around the two infants, strokes the side of the Child with one hand and the head of the small Baptist with the other.  Within the shadows of the background is a middle-aged woman, veiled and hallowed, creating eye contact with the viewer.  It is, in all probability, the elderly Saint Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist, a figure who also appears next to the child in a thematically similar painting by Bernardino Luini in the Museum of Budapest.¹

The "Kiss of the Holy Children" as an iconographic and psychological theme originated as a Milanese and Leonardesque subject, as Mauro Natale notes, citing a work recorded in the Borromeo House in 1513. It enjoyed extraordinary success in Lombardy and especially in Northern Europe, as the large number of replicas and variants produced in the Antwerp workshop of Joos van Cleve attest.²

The scene alludes to a meeting between the Child Jesus and John the Baptist, His cousin, upon the return of the Holy Family from Egypt, as told in the apocryphal Gospels and the Meditationes Vitae Christianae by Paolo Bonaventura.  But it seems also closely connected with the legend passed on by an apocryphal tradition preserved in the Gnostic text of the Pistis Sophia, on the meeting between the Christ Child and his long-awaited double, or alter ego, whom he is quick to hug and kiss.  It is, therefore, no coincidence that the two infants are depicted as twins, both naked and without distinguishing attributes, just as in the first version of the Virgin of the Rocks.  Such an invention could not belong to anyone but Leonardo himself, as shown by a sketch with The Kiss of the Holy Children in Windsor, Royal Library (inv. no. 12564), which is a copy after Da Vinci by the workshop.  The idea was translated into a painting at the time of the second stay in Milan (1506-1513) of one of the Master’s star pupils: Marco d’Oggiono.  Marco painted four versions of the subject, with different landscape backdrops.  The version in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court (inv. no. 405463), already documented at Malines in 1516, would have been responsible for transporting the model from Milan to Flanders.³

The “Kiss of the Holy Children”, as well as being treated as an autonomous subject, has been included in larger compositions with the Virgin, the Holy Family or other entities, generally in a landscape background.  The best known cases are Marco D’Oggiono’s Madonna Thuélin and that of Bernardino de Conti in Brera, dated 1522, a variant on the Virgin of the Rocks, or the Holy Family with Holy Children by Bernardino Luini in the Prado, which shares characteristics with the picture here.⁴  Giampetrino’s version is more innovative than these examples as it provides an environment in an interior, a view into a happy family with children’s tender embrace, the Virgin’s graceful gesture and the hushed presence of Saint Elisabeth all create an intimate atmosphere of domestic affections.

The work presented here, exhibiting more fluency and expression, fits quite easily into the third and final phase of Giampetrino’s career, exhibiting more fluency and expression.⁵  The work is most comparable to the polyptych currently in the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi in Milan, distinguished by a sort of “Leonardesque Mannerism”, with which it shares the colouring and chosen atmosphere, suffused with a languid sweetness.  The Virgin, in particular, is in perfect harmony with the graceful and sinuous female figures.  This style probably corresponds to a dating of circa 1530-1535.

Cristina Geddo

1.  A. Ottino Della Chiesa, Bernardino Luini, Novara 1956, p. 68 cat. no. 20, reproduced plate 100.
2.  F. Moro, Spunti sulla diffusione di un tema leonardesco tra Italia e Fiandra sino al Lanino, in I leonardeschi a Milano: fortuna e collezionismo, International Conference, ed. M.T. Fiorio and P.C. Marani, Milan 1991, pp. 120-139; L. Traversi, Il tema dei “Due fanciulli che si baciano e abbracciano” tra “leonardismo italiano” e “leonardismo fiammingo”, in “Raccolta Vinciana”, vol. XXVII, 1997, pp. 373-437; C. Pedretti, entry in Collezione privata, in Il Cinquecento lombardo. Da Leonardo a Caravaggio, exhibition catalogue, ed. F. Caroli, Milan 2000, pp. 128-129, no. III.28.
3.  L. Traversi, op. cit, pp. 387-394, fig. 1.
4.  D. Sedini, Marco d’Oggiono. Tradizione e rinnovamento in Lombardia tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento, Milan-Rome 1989, pp. 66-67 cat. no. 27, reproduced fig. 27a; A. Ottino op. cit., p. 89, cat. n. 102, reproduced plate. 114.
5.  See C. Geddo, Le pale d’altare di Giampietrino: ipotesi per un percorso stilistico, in “Arte Lombarda”, vol. 101, 1992, 2, pp. 73-78, reproduced fig. 8-19, in detail fig. 13.