Cristofano Roncalli

Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, London, 10 December 2015, lot 166;

Where acquired by the present owner.

Cristoforo Roncalli was one of the most acclaimed and sought after late Mannerist painters in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. His altarpieces and fresco cycles are preserved in over twenty-seven different churches in Rome, as well as being represented in most of the major seicento collections of that city, including those of the Barberini, Borghese, Colonna, and the Spada. Works by Pomarancio are very rare on the market as most of his career was spent painting frescoes and altarpieces which are still in situ. 

Born in Pomarance, he completed his initial training fifty miles away in Florence, before moving to Siena in 1575, where he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece of Saint Anthony in the Duomo. He is recorded in Rome from 1582, where he achieved great commercial success, being one of only a handful of artists in the seventeenth century who were ever paid more than 750 scudi for an altarpiece.¹ He was also held in very high esteem by his fellow artists, with Sir Peter Paul Rubens describing him in a letter to the Duke of Mantua in 1606 as being 'considered among the the top in Rome'.² Perhaps the pinnacle of his career was his creation as a 'Cavaliere di Cristo' by Clement VIII in 1607 in recognition for his work in the Capella Clementina in St Peter’s, Rome. 

Dr Ian Kennedy, to whom we are grateful for endorsing the attribution to Roncalli, notes a Sienese influence in the present work and suggests an early date. The tenderness of the Virgin's features and her delicate luminosity are indeed reminiscent of Sienese painting and comparable to an early Madonna and Child in the Gallerie Nazionali delle Marche, Urbino, thought to have been executed during Roncalli's first few years in Rome.³ Parallels can also be drawn with the graceful fall of drapery, the blessing gesture of the Christ Child and the position of the Virgin's slender hands.  

1. R. Spear, Caravaggio Reflections and Refractions, Dorchester 2014, pp. 209–10. 

2. Spear 2014, p. 199. 

3. I. Chiappini di Sorio, Cristoforo Roncalli detto il Pomarancio, Bergamo 1983, pp. 130–31, cat. no. 66, reproduced.