This magnificent work in marble is certainly the finest piece in the collection of sculptures that belonged to Francesco Federico Cerruti. Its state of preservation appears very good overall, despite some small breakages (including the auricle of the Virgin’s right ear) and general surface wear, which is more visible in the protruding parts such as Mary’s nose, suggesting that the sculpture may have been exposed to the elements for a long period. 

This high-relief was evidently designed to be viewed from a distance, perhaps housed in a niche. The only viewpoint envisaged by the sculpture is a frontal view from beneath, as demonstrated by the workmanship that ends at the sides, on the top and at the back, with these portions simply being roughly hewn. It is not an image designed for private devotion and intended for a room in a palace or a cell in a convent. Instead, it is reasonable to suppose it originally formed part of a monumental complex, perhaps installed above a portal or on top of a tomb. 

The sculpture belonged to the wonderful collection of Alessandro Contini Bonacossi from the 1920s onwards, as demonstrated by a photograph showing it in a room in his Roman home on Via Nomentana, alongside numerous masterpieces, including various marble sculptures from the Lombard Renaissance and Giovanni Bellini’s Crucifixion that is now in the Louvre.¹ It came to Florence when Contini moved there with his collection.² However, it was only in 1950 that Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua mentioned it, without illustrating it, in a long essay on the brothers Antonio and Cristoforo Mantegazza, particularly associating it with the latter. The Contini Bonacossi Madonna featured with this attribution in the historical exhibition on Arte lombarda dai Visconti agli Sforza in the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1958.³ In more recent times, Dell’Acqua’s reconstruction of the Mantegazza brothers has been discounted and most of that corpus has been transferred with good reason to Giovanni Antonio Piatti and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, whose respective catalogues - despite many heated discussions even recently - still have very blurred margins. In 1991, in particular, Marco Tanzi reproduced the Nursing Madonna - sold by the Contini Bonaccossi heirs in the meantime and then on the market - with a cautious attribution to Piatti, which he himself later corrected in favour of Amadeo.⁴ The piece had re-emerged in the meantime (1996) at a Sotheby’s auction in London. On that occasion, the anonymous and succinct presentation entry attributed it to Amadeo. The piece was therefore restored to the name under which it had originally been presented in the Contini Bonacossi home.⁵ There is no doubt that this is actually the right solution, as also endorsed by Cara 2015. Purchased by Giovanni Sarti, the sculpture was presented in 1997 at the Lingotto biennial antiques fair in Turin, where it was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti. 

As suggested in the London auction catalogue in 1996, within the busy career of the sculptor from Pavia, who was the real patriarch of the Renaissance in Lombardy, the Cerruti Madonna was most likely made during work on the Bartolomeo Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo, an undertaking carried out between around 1470 and 1476. This was a crucial chapter and one of major transformation for the still young artist, who a few years earlier had proudly signed off his first masterpiece, the marble portal of the small cloister in the Certosa di Pavia (c. 1467-69), but who had not yet reached the more characteristic register of his full maturity, illustrated by the masterpieces he carved in the early 1480s for Cremona, with their close ties to the style of Piatti, whom Amadeo replaced in the creation of the Shrine of the Persian Martyrs for the church of San Lorenzo (now split up between Cremona Cathedral and various museums, both in Italy and abroad). In the Cerruti Madonna, the wide compressed cloak is structured with a freedom and imagination that go beyond the clearer cut shapes of the Carthusian portal, where the fabrics featured points and spurs and the chiaroscuro was much drier and more contrasting. Nor are there any longer any traces of those final signs of Gothic nostalgia that still emerged in the large relief in certain calligraphic locks, in the veil that was frilled at the edges, and in the anatomies that were not yet as harsh, nervous and almost bony as they appear in the marble in question. On the other hand, we do not yet see an explosion of that unrestrained and tendentially abstract imagination that would characterise much of Lombard sculpture for the last quarter of the 15th century, marked by draperies broken up into elaborate folds and overly expressive poses, in an ever more radical rejection of the three-dimensional element of sculpture in favour of a substantially two-dimensional projection. The Cerruti Madonna therefore embodies the same style that we see in the Colleoni marbles, particularly those from the final phases of the undertaking: the reliefs of the lower sarcophagus in the great funerary monument to the military leader, the figures of Roman soldiers sitting immediately above and, above all, the statues on the front. In the Virtues on either side of the portal and in the putti perching on the two imperial portraits (the originals, replaced by copies in situ, are now in the Luogo Pio della Pietà), Amadeo conveys a humanity united by the same oval faces, rounded foreheads, perfectly arched eyebrows, the slightly swollen eyelids of the women and the inquiring, mischievous eyes of the children. All of them, adults and children alike, are pervaded by the same nervous and darting vitality. The exquisite stylistic synthesis of the Cerruti Madonna represented everything that was modern about Lombard sculpture in around 1475. Surprising verification of this is provided by its perfect harmony with a painting from around ten years later, the Madonna del Latte in Boston, a poetic masterpiece by the very young Bramantino. 

Laura Cavazzini and Aldo Galli 

¹See Tamassia 1995, fig. on p. 176.

² It was put back on display there in Villa Vittoria, present-day Palazzo dei Congressi, in E. Colle, “La collezione Contini Bonacossi a Villa Vittoria”, in La collezione Contini Bonacossi 2018, p. 43, fig. 6, this time accompanied by Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello.

³ It can be seen on display in room 19, dedicated entirely to the Mantegazza brothers and Amadeo, in a photograph reproduced in Longhi 2002, np, and also in Russoli 1958, p. 77, fig. 1.

⁴ See R. Cara, “Giovanni Antonio Piatti e un ‘Cristo in pietà tra due angeli’ a Casale Monferrato”, in Casale Monferrato 2009, pp. 146-155.

⁵ See Dell’Acqua 1950, p. 139.