Lot 1043 | Giovanni Battista Salvi | Praying Madonna

SALVI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA
('Il Sassoferrato')
1609 Sassoferrato - 1685 Rome

Title: Praying Madonna.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Mounting: Relined.
Measurement: 50.5 x 39cm.
Frame: Framed.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Giovanni Battista Salvi, named after his place of origin in central Italy, also Sassoferrato, first learns the work of painting from his father. In Rome, he is trained presumably by Domenichino, however, he educates himself with the works of Raffaels and Guido Renis.
In the 17th century, the period ofthe Counter-Revolution and the Thirty-Years War, the adoration of the Virgin Mary, especially throgh Rome, strongly booms and is assigned a thrologically propagandist function. A few altar paintings and several portraits of Sassoferratos are known, yet, the painter finds his best and most popular form of expression especially in small-sized devotional pictures of the Virgin Mary that he predominantly paints for the free market. As "Pictor Vigorum", the painter of vigins, Sassoferrato is also called and often produces numerous versions of his Madonna paintings with and without child.

The viewer can direct their concentration and devotion fully to the close-up painting of the face of the Virgin. Sassoferrato reduces the colours of his painting to the minimum: In front of the dark background there is the figure of the praying woman, defined by her cream-coloured headscarf as well as the attributively used ultramarine coat against the dark.Mantel abgegrenzt. Her hands, overcut by the lower image edge, are folded in fornt of her chest in prayer, her fingers gently resting at each other. here a small glimps of red catches the eye: an artistic device that makes it possible to imagine the remaining garb of her figure. It is rare to find a grieving and praying Mary in Guido Renis' who has turned her eyes to heaven. This Madonna here has cast her eyes down, she is fully turned inward and puts it to the viewer's imagination to feel close to the child in the crib to whom Mary's eye and prayers are dedicated.

The Virgin herself is so much in the tradition of Raphael in terms of type and execution that art historians often regarded Sassoferrato's works as 16th-century pieces, which is not surprising.

This painting is one of Salvi's most successful and popular compositions. In the course of his many years of work on Sassoferrato, François Macé de Lepinay has identified around twenty other versions by Sassoferrato. Vicenzo Mancuso, who is working on completing and publishing the monograph on Sassoferrato begun by François Macé de Lepinay, includes the painting as an original work in the catalogue raisonné.

We are grateful to Vincenzo Mancuso, Paris, for confirming the atttribution of the present painting on the basis of a high-resolution photograph.