Sassoferrato (1609-1685), praying Madonna

Circle of Giovanni Battista Salvi, called Il Sassoferrato (1609-1685)
Madonna praying
Oil on canvas, 48 x 38.5 cm - with frame 51.5 x 42 cm

The work shows strong analogies with prestigious paintings by the painter who more than anyone else celebrated the Marian cult in the seventeenth-century pictorial representation: Giovan Battista Salvi, called Sassoferrato (1609-1685). The artist, flanked immediately by a large workshop and by several followers, turned out to be the main creator of this iconography which, being in the full period of the counter-reform, found immediate success in local commissions, especially for its delicacy and humanity that this subject was able to express. The painter, although making multiple paintings, rarely devoted himself to canvases intended to adorn altarpieces or other religious buildings, thus manifesting his own voluntary preference for the creation of small format paintings, dedicated to private devotion. Sassoferrato was formed initially with his father, then moved to Rome to study Raphael's works in Domenichino's (Domenico Zampieri) workshop with whom he probably moved to Naples. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, by now an established artist, he carried out his activity mostly engaged in the representation of Madonnas with Child, between Rome, Urbino and Perugia; then he moved to Naples and Venice around 1660. His pure style, the cold tones of the chromatic range, the very regular shapes are characteristics linked to the great sixteenth-century tradition of drawing matrix. The memories of Domenichino's teaching can be seen here precisely in the composition with a regulated classical measure, in the accurate drapery, in the purity of the face and in the clarity of the colors. The portraits of Sassoferrato almost always strike for their desired and symbolic simplicity in the chromatic range; skilful combinations of pink, blue and white give the artist a profound originality compared to his contemporaries, thus allowing us to better appreciate the classicism of its forms and the rigorous composure of its images. The sweetness of the faces, characterized by soft and delicate pinks that define the complexions, and the somatic features, are often also a place of careful and precise "shading", which arise as a geometric projection of the headdress and often contribute to amplifying that three-dimensional perception of the image by the viewer. This work is particularly striking for the humility that the Virgin manages to express, portrayed in a solitary and intimate prayer. As in the paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the one at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, in which the grace and gracefulness of the Madonna embracing the Child is observed, a grace that also transpires in the canvas in question, especially in the expression of the Virgin, with her eyes demurely half-closed in meditation and her hands clasped to her chest in prayer. The anatomical setting of the figure thus seems to still take into account all that sixteenth-century portraiture that, from the Muta of Raphael to the Gioconda of Leonardo, gave the hands an expressive, unique role, so much so as to become one of the most interesting iconographic signs in the history of pictorial criticism .