Set against a luminous background within an architectural setting, in which a low wall may be discerned to the right and an imposing pillar to the left, the Virgin, depicted half-length, encircles the naked Christ Child, who stands upon a piece of furniture, in her arms. In the lower left, slightly recessed in space, the young Saint John the Baptist, of whom only the head and upper torso emerge, presents to Christ, with his right hand, a reed cross entwined with a phylactery and, with his left, a pomegranate.
This previously unpublished panel, an engaging domestic conversation between the Virgin and Child and Saint John the Baptist, derives from the apocryphal account contained in the Meditationes de Vita Christi, attributed to Pseudo-Bonaventure around 1300. According to this text, during the return from the Flight into Egypt, the Holy Family paused to rest at the home of Saint Elizabeth. While playing with Christ, the young Saint John the Baptist already displayed reverence towards Him, recognising His exceptional nature, signified here by the radiant cruciform nimbus that distinguishes Him from the other halos.
More than a simple scene of childhood tenderness, the artist offers an image intended as a meditation upon the foretelling of the Passion, no doubt conceived for a confraternity. The cross bearing its inscribed scroll and the pomegranate offered to Christ—symbol of the blood to be shed during the Passion—indeed announce the sacrifice to come. The Virgin, however, in an attitude of gentle acceptance, tempers the gravity expressed in the children’s faces.
Italian Renaissance artists, particularly those active in Florence, treated this subject extensively throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The author of the present panel clearly drew inspiration from Raphael’s models, echoing, in the attitudes of the children and the Virgin’s downcast gaze, those found, among other works, in the Madonna del Belvedere of 1506, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). Yet the elongated proportions of the figures, the Virgin’s elegant double twist, the refinement of her coiffure, and the use of a subtly cangiante palette in the draperies point rather towards the Mannerist idiom developed in Florence in the wake of Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and numerous later artists of fertile invention, including Domenico Puligo, Giovanni Antonio Sogliani and Pier Francesco Foschi.
It remains difficult to attribute this work with precision. Its author, still anonymous, remained attached to classical principles through the balanced composition and firmness of the draftsmanship, while simultaneously subjecting the forms to the precepts of the new maniera, characteristic of the mid-sixteenth century.
