Francesco Vanni

(Siena, 1563 - Siena, 1610)

Sphere of

Oil on panel

cm. 59x48. With tabernacle frame

This fine panel painting constitutes a rather interesting attributive case. The work shows an obvious iconographic and compositional relationship with the painting of the same subject executed, along with three others, by Francesco Vanni by the end of 1591 on commission from the Compagnia di Santa Caterina in Fontebranda in Siena. The Madonna in Adoration of the Child marks one of the points of greatest adherence of Vanni's language to that of Federico Barocci: an adherence of which, in fact, no trace remains in the version illustrated here. In any case, the artistic achievement was a happy one, and Vanni's painting was immediately translated in print into a woodcut attributable to Andrea Andreani, who omitted the motif of the roses held by the Child with his right hand, replacing it with the gesture of pulling a sheet. Shortly thereafter Vanni himself translated Andreani's woodcut into engraving, confirming the same motif of the pulled sheet, which is also found in a further engraving of the image made by Cornelis Galle around 1600 and, not least, also in our painting. Indeed, the expressive register of our panel aligns with the more serene and joyful one that Vanni introduces in his engraving and that significantly changes the severe intonation of the painting he had shortly before made for the Sienese confraternity.