Virgin and Child

Author: Gert Jan van der Sman

This drawing was done with the point of a brush in brownish-grey ink and white bodycolour on blue paper that is somewhat discoloured. The technique was used many times by Giovanni Battista Cima (called Cima da Conegliano) in, among others, the drawings The Redeemer (c.1485-90) in London and St Francis (c.1499) in Paris.^[1] As Von Hadeln (1933) had already observed, the Rotterdam drawing was worked up in pen and ink in some places, particularly in the Christ Child’s hair, in his right lower arm and hand and the Virgin’s right arm and hand.

The seated Virgin and Child was a preliminary study for the central figure group of an untraced sacra conversazione (holy conversation). The artist was concerned both with the figures’ poses and with the volumes of the bodies and the folds of the garments. The frontal rendering of the infant Christ harks back to a design by Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) that was widely known among Venetian artists thanks to his numerous followers.^[2] Peter Humfrey dates Cima’s drawing to around 1490-95, basing this on, among other things, the Virgin’s full face, which differs from the oval faces that characterize Cima’s early Madonna types.

The drawing on the verso can be associated with an anonymous engraving after a design by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506).^[3] As well as the praying Virgin, it also shows the naked infant Christ. As he lies on the folds at the front of her cloak, he basks in her adoration. The Christ Child has been omitted from Cima da Conegliano’s drawing. Peter Humfrey believes that the artist made a huge number of drawings, only a fraction of which have survived.^[4]

The Rotterdam sheet, which was originally larger, provides an insight into various aspects of Cima’s working methods. A grid has been added to the image on the recto so that the drawing can be transferred to a different support. The verso reveals that prints by other artists were occasionally borrowed from in Cima’s workshop. The hypothesis put forward by Paola Bromberg that the drawing discussed here preceded the Mantegnaesque engraving and that Cima engraved the design in copper himself, is not persuasive. In the drawing Cima softened the Virgin’s sharp features and made the draperies less busy. His interpretation of the engraved example primarily served for a new invention around the theme of the adoration of the newborn Christ.