Francesco Salviati: a New Entry

Galerie Pinilla

A Madonna remembered by Vasari.

A commission recorded in the Salviati archives.

A painting that travelled for centuries under the name of Bronzino.

A reassessment.

A new perspective on Cecchino's beginnings.

A Young Painter Called to Rome

In the so-called Giuntina edition of his Le Vite (1568), Giorgio Vasari recounts that in 1531 Cardinal Giovanni Salviati (1490-1553) asked the clockmaker Benvenuto della Volpaia, Michelangelo's close friend, to recommend a young painter whom he could take into his household, offering him protection and the opportunity to study.

The choice fell on the promising Cecchino, alias Francesco de' Rossi, the future Francesco Salviati (1510-1563).
In Rome, the young artist found a city still marked by the Sack, yet newly vibrant. Here he was reunited with Giorgio Vasari, a friend since their Florentine years, and together they studied the most innovative art the city had to offer. Raphael, Michelangelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio and Perin del Vaga, rapidly transformed his language and opened the way to his first Roman works.
A panel to paint
A post quem

Vasari recalls that among the first works executed by Cecchino for Cardinal Giovanni Salviati on his arrival in Rome was a painting of Our Lady, which was held to be beautiful.

The Salviati archives confirm the commission.

On 21st August 1531, a payment is recorded to maestro Francesco nostro dipintore - maestro Francesco, our painter - for a quadro di legnamo - a painting on panel - per dipingere a figura di nostra donna - to paint a figure of our Lady.

The panel was then painted at a later date.
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Florence Meets Rome
Rome Reshapes Cecchino

The composition still retains memories of the Florentine tradition of Andrea del Sarto and of Raphael's Madonnas, yet something has already changed.

The gestures acquire greater elegance, light moves swiftly across the folds, the colours gain enamel-like brilliance and the bodies take on a new energy.

Above all, Perin del Vaga offered the young Salviati a new language: elegant, dynamic and intensely chromatic.

This is the moment when a still essentially Florentine taste begins to evolve into the modern maniera.
Salviati's first Roman stay began in 1531 and ended following the completion, in 1538, of the large fresco of the Visitation for the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato.

Very little survives from its earliest years: many works mentioned by Vasari have been lost, while the surviving evidence is concentrated from 1534 onwards.
An Almost Lost Beginning

It is precisely within this gap that the present panel assumes particular importance.

The strong presence of Perin del Vaga still discernible in the painting suggests a very early date, around 1532.

The tondo Madonna and Child, formerly at Sotheby's, provides a interesting comparison, while the Annunciation in San Francesco a Ripa of 1534 already reveals a more mature language.

In a phase documented by so few works, this panel becomes a rare point of access to the birth of Cecchino's Roman style.
A Madonna in the Salviati Collection

After Cardinal Giovanni's death, the painting remained within the family.

An inventory records a Madonna reavuta dal vescovo - recovered from the bishop - identified as Giovanni's brother, Bernardo Salviati (1508-1568); from there the work passed by inheritance through successive generations of the family.

For more than a century, the panel therefore remained within the world in which it had first been created.
Through Caterina Zeferina Salviati (1701-1756), who married into the Colonna family, the painting entered one of Rome's great princely collections. In eighteenth-century inventories it remains perfectly recognisable by subject and dimensions, but its attribution changes: its author becomes Bronzino. Around 1756 it is described as Una Madonna col Bambino, e S. Giovannino […] del Bronzino; the same attribution recurs in Colonna inventories of 1782 and 1783.

The work continued to be preserved and appreciated, while the identity of its true author gradually faded.
From the Colonnas to the Bonapartes

At the end of the eighteenth century the panel still belonged to the Colonna princes.

Early in the following century it most probably passed to Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840) and subsequently to his mother, Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte (1750-1836).

No bill of sale has yet come to light, but the well-documented commercial, financial, and collecting relationships between the Colonna and Bonaparte families make such a transfer highly plausible, also in light of the painting's subsequent Talbot provenance.
To England Under a False Identity

In 1829 John Talbot (1791-1852) - 16th Earl of Shrewsbury - acquired Letizia Bonaparte's collection and brought the painting to Alton Towers.

There our painting was recorded in guidebooks and by connoisseurs such as Gustav Friedrich Waagen, still under the name of Bronzino.

Following Talbot's death, the princely collection was dispersed at public auction in 1857.

The Christie & Manson sale catalogue described the painting in precise terms: The Virgin, in a red dress, holding a book, the Infant before her, St John standing at the side.

The reverse of the panel still preserves the label bearing lot number 262 and the Talbot provenance.
From England, the painting passed through several collections before reaching Maximiano Errázuriz Valdivieso and, subsequently, the family collections in Chile, between Panquehue and Viña del Mar.

During the twentieth century its journey continued, until it reached the gallery collection still attributed to the School of Bronzino.

It is here that the two strands of the story come together once more.
The archives trace the panel across almost five centuries.

Its style leads back to the earliest Roman years of Francesco Salviati.

The painting, whose identity had remained recognisable while the name of its author was lost, thus regains its rightful place in the youth of one of the great protagonists of the Italian maniera.