Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Sassoferrato

Sassoferrato, Palazzo degli Scalzi, Salvifica. Il Sassoferrato e Nicola Samorì tra rito e ferita, 28 October 2022 – 15 January 2023, no. 10.

M. Pulini in Salvifica. Il Sassoferrato e Nicola Samorì tra rito e ferita, M. Pulini and F. Facchini (eds), exh. cat., Sassoferrato 2022, pp. 91–93, no. 10, reproduced in colour.

This recently rediscovered work is the finest example of a painting known in a number of variants, including a fresco by the artist in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome.¹ Sassoferrato’s innovative composition, combined with the clarity of sixteenth-century Roman classical revivalism, was clearly popular with the artist’s ever-increasing clientele. Other notable versions of this work include the painting in the Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, and another sold at auction in 2009, both attributed to Sassoferrato and his workshop.² A preparatory drawing for this composition, squared for transfer and depicting the Madonna looking downwards rather than directly ahead, is in the Royal Collection.³ Another, also squared for transfer but smaller in size and lacking the figure of the infant Saint John the Baptist, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.⁴

As pointed out by François Macé de Lépinay, this composition owes much to Sassoferrato’s great Marchigian forbear, Raphael and his celebrated Garvagh Madonna (The National Gallery, London), a work with which the artist was well acquainted and is known to have replicated (Musée du Louvre, Paris).⁵ Retaining the principal ideas of Raphael’s design, Sassoferrato reworks the composition, shifting the position of the figures and gaze of the Madonna and the Christ Child, engaging the viewer in a serene and tender exchange.

¹ F.M. de Lépinay in Sassoferrato: Devout Beauty, F.M. de Lepinay (ed.), exh. cat., Sassoferrato 2019, p. 110, reproduced in colour; http://catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/scheda/opera/49377/Salvi%20Giovanni%20Battista%2C%20Madonna%20con%20Bambino%20e%20san%20Giovannino

² Sassoferrato 2019, pp. 108 and 110, both reproduced in colour.

³ Inv. no. RCIN 906095; black and white chalks on blue paper; 30.3 x 26.3 cm.; https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/66/collection/906095/the-madonna-and-child-with-the-infant-baptist

⁴ F.M. de Lépinay, 'Sassoferrato déssinateur', in Paragone, 363, May 1980, p. 72.

⁵ Sassoferrato 2019, p. 110; https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/raphael-the-garvagh-madonna ; https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010066262