The Virgin and Child and Another Figure

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

When first published in 1908 by D’Achiardi, the drawing was presented as an autograph study by Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) for his painting The Madonna and Child with Saints Joseph and John the Baptist and a Donor, now in the National Gallery, London (fig.). The hand of Michelangelo was first recognized by Charles de Tolnay in his publication of 1966, but according to a note on the drawing’s former mount, this was based on a verbal communication of 1962 from John Gere. The drawing has since been published under Michelangelo’s name to universal acclaim.

Sebastiano was a close friend and protégé of Michelangelo and is known to have received preparatory drawings and cartoons – full-sized studies drawn to the same scale as the finished work – from the older master from which to paint. For example, Michelangelo provided Sebastiano with designs for a chapel in San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, commissioned in 1516 by the Florentine banker Pierfrancesco Borgherini (b.1480). The Rotterdam drawing and the London painting may well be connected to another Borgherini commission. In a letter of 1 March 1517, Leonardo Sellaio, an associate of Borgherini and a friend to Michelangelo, asks the latter to send Sebastiano a cartoon for a Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist from which to paint a picture for Borgherini. This was to be a substitute for a painting made by Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531), with which Borgherini was dissatisfied.^[1] A recent examination of the painting by Sebastiano with infrared reflectography revealed that it is dated 1517 and signed with the letter ‘S’ on the Virgin’s seat, below Christ’s foot, making it highly likely that this is the resulting painting.^[2] The sitter featured in a male portrait now in San Diego^[3] bears some resemblance to the kneeling donor in the picture and may therefore also depict Borgherini.

It is not known if Michelangelo ever supplied a finished cartoon. Yet the pose of the Virgin in the spirited sketch, seated with her legs turned to the right and her head looking down the other way at what seems to be another figure, presumably the donor, is close to that in the painting, as is the agile Child almost jumping from her lap. Both scenes are set in an interior with a heavy curtain. Although the painting also includes a figure of St John the Baptist and St Joseph, infrared reflectography suggests that the panel was extended on the right and its format thus originally closer to that of the Rotterdam drawing.^[4] The drawing shows the Virgin’s right hand raised high above the head of the donor almost as if to crown him with a wreath. This aspect may have been inspired by Raphael’s Holy Family of Loreto (c.1513), the prime version of which is in Chantilly,^[5] in which the Virgin holds up a thin veil.

An interesting observation made by Michael Hirst and possibly pointing to the drawing’s afterlife, or a derivation from it, is that its basic design, especially in the pose of the Child, recurs in Del Sarto’s Holy Family painted in c.1528 for Giovanni Borgherini, Pierfrancesco’s brother, and now in New York.^[6]