The light that falls onto the scene from above makes their faces stand out against the dark background, projecting dark shadows onto the mother’s eyes and lingering on the face of the sleeping child, modelled with skilfully hatched brushstrokes loaded with white lead. 

The painting appears to be in a good state of preservation, with the exception of the partial loss of the blue layers in the Virgin’s cloak, which appears to tend slightly towards green. The canvas was purchased in 2006 at a Sotheby’s auction in London, where it appeared following an earlier sale by Christie’s in 2000, prior to that coming from the collection of Rudolf J. Heinemann (1901-75), a well-known art dealer operating in Europe and the United States in the mid-20th century. As well as being known for purchasing numerous old master paintings for various US museums, Heinemann was also renowned for the leading role he played in establishing the collection of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen and in the foundation of the museum devoted to him in Lugano, even compiling the catalogue. After Heinemann’s death in 1975, the paintings and drawings from his collection passed into the possession of his wife Lore and many were donated to American museums in the late 1990s. Some of them, as in the case of the canvas presented here, were auctioned by Christie’s to raise money for the Lore and Rudolf Heinemann Fund for research into old paintings. Featuring a close-up view of the faces of the two figures, the canvas depicts the Child resting in the arms of the Madonna. The light that falls onto the scene from above makes their faces stand out against the dark background, projecting dark shadows onto the mother’s eyes and lingering on the face of the sleeping child, modelled with skilfully hatched brushstrokes loaded with white lead. As is typical of Crespi’s work, the austere chiaroscuro is contrasted by sophisticated sparks of colour, dominated here by tones of red, blue and ochre, recalling the painter’s fascination with the Venetian palette. The Child holds a small cross in his left hand, a portent of the Passion he will experience in later life, while the rose in the centre, which he has certainly dropped, can be interpreted as a sophisticated Marian evocation. The painting was published in 1980 in the monograph on Giuseppe Maria Crespi by Mira Pajes Merriman, who studied the photographic reproduction of the work and placed it during the Bolognese painter’s mature phase, between the second and third decade of the 1700s, judging it to be “one of the most beautiful religious works for a private client” in his catalogue.¹ Because of its similar small format, religious sensibility and delicate sentimentalism, the canvas can be compared to the Madonna and Sleeping Christ Child formerly from the Tinozzi Collection in Bologna and datable to around 1720-25.² 

Paolo Vanoli

¹ Pajes Merriman 1980, p. 243, no. 30.

² Ibid., p. 243, no. 31; G. Viroli, in Bologna 1990b, pp. 132-133, cat. 66.