Mantuan School, 18th century, Madonna Breastfeeding the Child

Mantuan school, 18th century

Madonna breastfeeding the Child

Oil on panel, 27,5×22 cm

The softly collected and intimate dimension suggested by this painting underlines the certainly private nature of the commission of the painting. The work, a Madonna Lactans with a strong intimate thrust dated around the mid-eighteenth century, presents soft and material brushstrokes, which seem to show the legacies of the Venetian and Mantuan culture of the early eighteenth century. Among the representations of Mary's motherhood expressed by pictorial art, the iconography of the Madonna del latte assumes a very particular importance to sanction the reality of the Mother of God and the efficacy of her intercession. Whether its origins are placed in the first centuries of Christianity in Egypt, among the Copts, or in Rome - according to lines of study that are currently discordant - the iconography of the Galaktotrofousa (from the Greek "she who nourishes with milk") or Virgo Lactans spread especially from the thirteenth century onwards and experienced an extraordinary proliferation in Ticino between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following a phase of censorship during the years of the Counter-Reformation, iconography rediscovers a new popularity starting from the eighteenth century, as demonstrated by this painting. Mary's milk also becomes a sign and pledge of the graces that she obtains from Christ for men, in a suggestive parallel between blood and milk, between the wounds of the Son and the breast of the Mother.

The compositional balance, the quality of the drawing and the plastic consistency of the draperies allow us to approach the painter's hand to the circle of Giambettino Cignaroli (1706-1770), a Veronese painter, working in different cities of northern Italy and aware of the teachings of Bazzani and the members of the Mantuan school: in addition to the aforementioned suggestions of Bazzani derivation, he was influenced by Ludovico Dorigny, Antonio Balestra and Giovan Battista Tiepolo and in the middle period of his activity he studied the production of Veronese and Titian. Observing the painting in question, one notices the composed and decorous tone, extraneous to excessive virtuosity, even balanced. Reconnecting to the Baroque tradition, the sacred theme is treated with a softened and persuasive pathos, in which everything is well calibrated and measured. The oval with the Virgin breastfeeding the Child can presumably also be linked to the activity of Giovanni Giacomo Figari (1739-1809), a pupil of Cignaroli and a rising star in the Brescia-Veronese area of ​​the second half of the 1765th century. Little or nothing is known about Figari's early work, although we find works in the Mantua area and especially in south-western Trentino. Worthy of note is the emblematic canvas depicting the Washing of the Feet (in the church of San Floriano in Storo, Trento) which demonstrates the leap in quality that the painter made by moving from Mantua – a city where he absorbed elements deriving from the direct observation of Bazzani's works – to territories further north. Not far from Storo, also in Tavodo (province of Trento), we find works such as the large altarpiece depicting the Assumption of the Virgin, where the neoclassical path that Figari was about to take is clear, as he began to distance himself from the style of works such as those taken into consideration, which, analyzing the painter's movements and his stylistic changes, should be placed around XNUMX.

It is clear that, in our painting, the marked chiaroscuro that distinguishes the works of Bazzani and the members of his flourishing workshop in Mantua meets a rapid, loose, indefinite and material brushstroke that looks to the experiences of Tiepolo but also to the great innovations introduced in the field of painting by the great Venetian masters between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.