Attributed to Giovanni da Asola active in Venice by 1512 - 1531 Venice

The painting is executed on a single piece of poplar wood which is on cradled flat and stable. In general this picture presents well to the naked eye. The bare panel is visible along the top half inch of the panel when the picture is framed. To the naked eye some discolored retouches are visible in the sky as well as the grey spare walls. The paint surface has begun to buckle in select areas on the floor. Uv shows some scattered read touches in the gray wall above as well as in the wings and face of the angel as well as in the face and body of the virgin. In a carved gilt wood frame.
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We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for proposing the attribution to the Brescian painter Giovanni da Asola.

Along with his son Bernardino, Giovanni acquired some prominence in the 1530s in Venice. Asola assimilated something of the prevailing Venetian style of the period into his own work, but remained predominantly a painter of the Lombard style; it is thought that much of his work in Venice was for export home. Lucco notes that whilst the overall feel of this composition is Venetian, the architecture is more Brescian, and the handling of the surface distinctly like that of artists from that region, such as Dosso Dossi and Moretto da Brescia, particularly in their early works. 

Lucco specifically references the stylistic similarities with Asola's Two musicians in a landscape in the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow.¹ Further comparable works by the artist include the Garden of Love in the National Gallery, London,² the Adoration of the Shepherds at Kansas City³, and the Saint Jerome at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.⁴  Lucco notes also that the vaguely Codussian style of the architecture in the present work is almost identical to that in Giovanni da Asola's 1526 organ shutters, painted for the Church of San Michele in Isola, on Murano.⁵ 

1. See P. Humfrey et. al., The Age of Titian, exh. cat., Edinburgh 2004, pp. 86-87, cat. no. 16, reproduced.
2. Inv. no. NG930. Currently catalogued as 'probably Bernardino da Asola'.
3. Inv. no. 34-104. See E.W. Rowlands, The Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings 1300-1800, Kansas City 1996, pp. 160-164, reproduced.
4. Inv. no. A 3995. See P. van Thiel, All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; A completely illustrated catalogue, Amsterdam 1976, p. 242, cat. no. A3995, reproduced.
5. They are now in the collection in the Museo Correr, Venice. See B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Venetian School, London 1957, vol. I, p. 88, reproduced vol. II, figs. 799-802.