Giovanni Battista del Verrocchio, known as the Master of Volterra (Florence 1494 – 1569), Madonna with Child and the Infant Saint John

Giovanni Battista del Verrocchio, known as the Master of Volterra (Florence 1494 – 1569)

Madonna with Child and Saint John

Oil on panel, 63 x 50 cm

Frame: 92 x 80 cm

The stylistic elements of this panel reveal the hand of a talented master of the Florentine school, active in the first half of the 16th century. A talented artist influenced by great masters such as Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio and above all Domenico Puligo.

Precisely by virtue of these influences, this work can reasonably be attributed to Giovan Battista Verrocchi, also known as Giambattista del Verrocchio (Florence 1494-1564), nephew of the famous Andrea del Verrocchio and, most likely, identifiable with the so-called Master of Volterra.

In sixteenth-century Florence one of the most important workshops was that of the Verrocchi (or del Verrocchio), the owners of which were the descendants of the famous Andrea del Verrocchio, master of Leonardo and Botticelli and Perugino. The first exponent of the dynasty was Giovanni Battista, son of Tommaso, brother of Andrea. His personality has been traced only in recent years, which makes this panel an important new piece towards the complete deciphering of his pictorial history. In fact, the name of Giovanni Battista has been, by Alessandro Nesi, linked to the production of the so-called Master of Volterra (A. Nesi, I verrocchi pittori fiorentini del Cinquecento, Maniera p. 3). The name of Master of Volterra referred to a conspicuous number of religious paintings for private devotion very close to the style of Domenico Puligo and Andrea del Sarto that Federico Zeri had already begun to group under a single author starting from the Sacred Conversation of the Conservatory of Saints Peter and Linus in Volterra. Alessandro Nasi has noted, in a series of paintings, notable stylistic coherences. The immediately recognizable characteristics are the drapery of the clothes that sometimes seem not to follow the shape of the body mass underneath, a schematism that recalls the works of Sarte, the faces, especially those of adults, have an elongated, straight and very thin nose, small and round eyes with heavy eyelids and a chin made accentuated spherical with a small bump. Moreover, all these characteristics are easily readable in the face of the Madonna in the present painting.

Giovan Battista married the daughter of the sculptor Baccio da Montelupo and lived his whole life in Florence, in the Santacroce district. The works of Giovan Battista partly recall the art of the so-called “eccentric Florentines”, rediscovered by Federico Zeri in the fundamental essay of 1962. Giovanni Battista registered in the Arte dei Medici e deli speziali in 1516 and in the Compagnia di San Luca in 1515, and was the owner of a workshop in via del Garbo at least since 1521, entrusted to him by the Benedictine friars of the Badia fiorentina, for whom he worked throughout his life creating paintings and decorated numerous liturgical objects. An important commission was the altarpiece depicting the three archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael with Tobias for the Badia di Santa Maria, Buggiano (Pistoia)

To confirm the attribution, it is sufficient to compare this work with other works by Verrocchi, such as the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Pinacoteca di Siena, the version in the Fesch Museum, or the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Anne in a Private Collection.

In these paintings, similarly to the painting in question, we find a stylistic approach influenced by Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino and Puligo, as well as a balance between the most accentuated Mannerist tendencies and the most eccentric Florentine pictorial tradition. These characteristics are typical of the compositions of Giovanni Battista Verrocchi during the period of greatest creative fervor.

The object is in good condition