Mary with the Christ Child and the Infant St John

Author: Klazina Botke

Koenigs acquired this drawing, published here for the first time, with two other sheets, I 28 and I 29, as a work by Antonio Correggio (Antonio Allegri, c.1489-1534).^[1] In 2019, however, Mary Vaccaro convincingly transferred it to Giorgio Gandini del Grano (1489?-1538), a relatively unknown artist from Parma. He was very probably a pupil of Correggio,^[2] and in 1535 was commissioned to complete his teacher’s fresco cycle in the choir vault and apse of Parma Cathedral. From a contract for work that he was to carry out we know at least that he was a ‘magister’ (independent master) and ‘civis et pictor parmensis’ (citizen and painter of Parma).^[3] His style of drawing closely resembled his teacher’s, and many sheets that were once thought to be by Correggio are now recognized as his, among them this Rotterdam study of the Virgin and Child and the young John the Baptist.^[4]

Gandini’s present body of drawings consists of some thirty-five sheets that are stylistically close. He often used red chalk and depicted his figures with sharp and well-defined contours. Typical features include egg-shaped heads with deep-set eyes. In his pen drawings Gandini employed alternating thick and thin black lines, which sometimes give his work an almost calligraphic appearance.^[5] For instance, in this drawing he outlined the bottom of the Virgin’s cloak with a single pen stroke, and defined some limbs with a single heavy line, such as the legs of the Christ Child and St John. He also imparted a liveliness to the scene with thin and almost nonchalant contours, some of which he repeated. The same pen technique is clearly visible in three other studies of the Virgin and Child by Gandini that are now in London, Venice and Florence.^[6]

The scene on the Rotterdam sheet could be associated with Gandini’s small painting The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c.1535) in Helsinki.^[7] Windsor has a very painstaking preliminary study, squared and incised for transfer, that was clearly intended as a model for the finished work.^[8] The Rotterdam drawing may have been made as an earlier study for the same scene while Gandini was still searching for the right composition. The verso  has a few figure studies in red chalk, but none of those reclining figures appear to have anything to do with the scene on the recto.