Signed “Barnabas de Mutina pinxit” along the lower edge, the work was published by Frederick Mason Perkins in 1916 in a brief article in Rassegna d’arte, when the panel was part of the collection of Robert Schiff (1854-1940) in Pisa. On that occasion, Perkins also recalled seeing it in the studio of the painter Federico Padulli (c. 1860-1938) in Florence “ten or more years” earlier.¹ In 1945, now the property of Giorgio Giorgini-Schiff (1895-1965), the second child of Robert Schiff and Matilde Giorgini (1860-1940), it was shown in the exhibition Mostra d’arte italiana at Palazzo Venezia in Rome. It entered the Cerruti Collection on 14 March 2000.

The Virgin looks lovingly down on the Child in her arms, who rests his head tenderly on her shoulder while touching the sole of his left foot with his right hand, crossing his limbs in a spontaneous infantile gesture that conceals a sophisticated prefiguration of the Crucifixion.² The Child’s tunic, trimmed with braid and belted at the waist with a gilded cord, is very similar in style and decoration to the crimson tunic of the Infant Jesus in the cusped panel of the Galleria Estense in Modena. The curved folds of the maphorion (garment covering the head and shoulders) held by the Virgin with her very long fingers are a feature found repeatedly in Barnaba’s works, from the Madonna and Child formerly in the collection of Anton Philips in Eindhoven, which reappeared at Christie’s in London on 6 July 2011, to the panel of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt dated 1367.³ The rosy hues and bold chiaroscuro of the flesh tones instead recall more mature works like the Madonna of Mercy in Santa Maria dei Servi and the St Catherine of the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola in Genoa, both painted in the 1370s.⁴ Typical of Barnaba’s painting is the languid preciousness of the mixtion glue gilding of the Child’s tunic and the narrow, Byzantine-like gold writing on the Virgin’s mantle and scarlet robe. Another trademark is the elegant inscription in Gothic capitals, “AVE GRATIA PLENA” (hail full of grace), in reserve on the circle of the Virgin’s halo, differing from the signature in minuscule book hand, also on the gold. The gold leaf of the ground has largely worn away to leave the red wood beneath exposed. The gilding presents a better state of preservation along the edges, which are decorated with a strip of small trefoil arches flanked by simple punch marks. Some older photographs (fig. 1), including the one of very poor quality - “assai male riuscita” - published by Perkins (1916), document the panel’s eventful history in terms of conservation, showing areas of wear on the Virgin’s apparel and a very evident crack running from the cheek all the way through the mouth and down to the neck of the Child. This was subsequently repaired with remarkable imitative skill in a misleading operation - which was also partially beneficial to the gilding of the garments - that is hard to document but in any case prior to the work’s entrance into the Cerruti Collection. The work’s state of preservation has also hampered the critics’ judgement and caused uncertainty as to its dating. Pasquale Rotondi (1957) suggests the mid-1360s; Roberto Longhi (1960) the following decade in close continuity with the St Catherine now in Palazzo Spinola, which he dates as c. 1375; and Enrico Castelnuovo (1964) the last stage of Barnaba’s career after the work in Pisa attested by the Madonna of the Merchants. The recent suggestion put forward by Gianluca Zanelli (in Genova 2005) that the Schiff panel is an early work of the 1350s very close to the Madonna and Child of the parish church in Lerma has instead been rejected by Giuliana Algeri (2008; 2011), who draws attention to the work’s compositional similarities with those produced by Barnaba during the 1360s, in which the figure of the Child touching his foot with the opposite hand reappears a number of times with a few variants. The Schiff Madonna presents a version halfway between the Städel panel in Frankfurt (and its severely damaged twin in Turin at the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica) and a now lost prototype produced by Barnaba for an important location - possibly the Loggia dei Banchi in Genoa⁵ - and copied repeatedly throughout the region of Liguria as a result. This motif, invented by Barnaba himself, enjoyed lasting popularity well into the following century, when it was introduced into Siena and the Naples of Charles III by Taddeo di Bartolo and Andrea de Aste, but also in Lombardy by Foppa (the Berenson Madonna), whose presence in Liguria is repeatedly documented in Genoa and Savona.⁶ 

[Emanuele Zappasodi]

1 Perkins 1916, p. 203.

2 De Marchi, in Importanti dipinti 2015, pp. 40-41.

3 See G. Algeri, in Algeri, De Floriani 2011, pp. 213-215.

4 Ibid., pp. 223, 226.

5 Ibid., pp. 219-220.

6 De Marchi 1991, p. 129, note 38; De Marchi, in Importanti dipinti 2015, pp. 40-41.