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The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ:
Catalogue entry

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Entry details

Full title
The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ
Artist
Titian
Inventory number
NG3948
Author
Sir Nicholas Penny

Catalogue entry

, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

© The National Gallery, London

c. 1565–75

Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretcher. The canvas is of a coarse and open tabby weave. Cusping is apparent at the lower and upper edges, but not at the sides, where the canvas has been cleanly cut. Two sets of tacking holes are visible at the lower edge, inside the painted area, suggesting that the height of the painting was decreased at an early date, perhaps by Titian himself. The canvas has been lined with a wax resin on to a modern tabby‐weave canvas of medium weight on a modern stretcher, with crossbars, of varnished pine.

Materials and Technique

The gesso ground is covered with a dark grey imprimitura. Originally, there were pink lake glazes in the shadows of the Virgin’s lavender‐grey dress, a hint of which survives by the child’s feet. The feet themselves are both faded and worn. The lead white drapery between the child’s legs is now sufficiently abraded for it to be clear that much of it was painted over the Virgin’s dress.

A trail of loosely dragged lead white to the right of the child’s hand is perhaps best explained as part of some preliminary compositional brush drawing that was made by the artist on the dark ground. This white would have been concealed by layers of paint which have now been abraded.

Conservation

On acquisition in 1924 the painting included a thin strip of putty at the upper edge, and a broad one (between 1.25 and 1.90 cm) at the lower edge. The latter had been scratched in such a way as to create a texture imitating that of the original canvas. Cavalcaselle maintained that the painting’s merits were more apparent when it had been part of the Bisenzo collection, but that it had been subjected to cleaning and repainting soon after it left that collection.1 Thus a date in the late 1840s seems likely for the putty extensions. However, the evidence of prints and copies (see below (a, b)) suggests that the picture had been lengthened in some way before it was a hundred years old.

The painting was recorded as having a darkened varnish when it was acquired by the Gallery in 1924, and suspicions that the varnish had been deliberately toned were confirmed in August 1961 when analysis revealed the presence of bitumen.2 The manuscript catalogue stated that the painting had been cleaned shortly before acquisition, but this was probably a superficial cleaning, and the toned varnish is more likely to have been applied in the late 1840s, the probable date of the treatment alluded to by Cavalcaselle. Polishing was recorded in 1945 and 1956. In August 1961 the toned varnish was removed and in February 1962 cleaning and restoration were completed, treatment which had been proposed to the Trustees by Philip Hendy in May 1948. Relining, which preceded restoration, entailed removing the extensions described above.

Condition

There are numerous small paint losses. The surface has been flattened and worn from ironing during relining and cleaning. In some areas the abraded appearance may have been exacerbated by the grainy effect of small residues of the old, darkened varnish having been driven into the interstices of the canvas weave. The wrinkling of the paint in the Virgin’s sleeve may be due to excessive oil. For possible changes in the colour, see below.

Subject

Although the painting was captioned as depicting the Virgin and Child in a seventeenth‐century print (see below), and clearly regarded as such by the artists who adapted the composition as a Sacra Conversazione (see below), and described as such in the nineteenth century, it was catalogued in the National Gallery as Mother and Child,3 a designation perhaps chosen by the director, Charles Holmes, and certainly favoured in his own publications.4

Paintings of an anonymous mother and child were as rare in the sixteenth century as they were common in Holmes’s lifetime, and the claim that Titian’s painting belongs to the former category reflects the widespread conviction that it was in some sense a modern work (as is discussed further below). Cecil Gould rightly reverted to the traditional Madonna and Child.5 We have modified this because it was relatively rare in art to show the infant Christ at his mother’s breast (there are perhaps half a dozen other examples in the National Gallery6) and because, in the centuries when most women in families likely to own good paintings did not nurse their own infants, the subject had a significance which we easily neglect.7

Attribution, Dating, Style

The earliest observation on the painting in print seems to have been made by Gustav Waagen in his survey of Lord Ward’s collection, published in 1854: ‘Titian. – The Virgin and Child: a work not agreeing with the master’s characteristics – tenderer and more pleasing in the heads, and much more broken, though very harmonious, in colour.’8 This reads like a poor translation but it certainly seems to indicate that Waagen had doubts about Titian’s authorship on account of both the tender sentiment and the colouring. The former is perhaps less characteristic than the latter, and by 1898, when Claude Phillips wrote his monograph on the artist, the broken brushwork and ‘restrained scheme of colour’ in the painting were acknowledged as typical of Titian’s late work as exemplified by the Christ Crowned with Thorns in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, or the Nymph and Shepherd in Vienna.9 Since then it has been generally agreed that NG 3948 dates from very late in Titian’s life.

Gould, however, suggested that the painting was perhaps a revision of an earlier composition10 (as was the case with [page 269][page 270]Christ Crowned with Thorns and perhaps the Nymph and Shepherd). He cited the fact that an early copy of the composition is in an earlier style (and thus may record an earlier lost painting by Titian). More significant perhaps is the fact that Schiavone’s Holy Family with Saint John in the Castle Museum, Prague, in which an unusually heavy infant has his legs in the same position, looks as if it was derived from Titian’s composition but must date from the mid‐1550s.11

The torsion of the child and the heroic build of the Virgin represent one of Titian’s most notable attempts to appropriate something of the sublime grandeur of Michelangelo, which had been an intermittent ambition throughout his life. This grandeur is here poignantly combined with a fragile tenderness in the Virgin’s pensive face and delicate fingers. Cecil Gould compared the painting to the altarpiece in Titian’s family chapel in the Chiesa Arcipretale of Pieve di Cadore, a work mentioned by Vasari and thus not executed later than 1567.12 The Virgin and Child in that altarpiece do indeed have something of the same largeness of form and roughness of surface, but there is a tremulous touch in NG 3948 which suggests a later date, and the inconclusive character of the painting may even indicate that it was a work which the artist kept in his studio and tinkered with in the last years of his life.

Matteo Mancini has published documents concerning how greatly moved Antonio de Gúzman y Zúñiga, Marchese di Ayamonte, was by a painting of the Madonna which he saw when he visited Titian together with the Spanish ambassador, Diego Guzmán de Silva, in the second half of July 1573. Mancini suggests that this picture, which was sent to Ayamonte in November, may have been NG 3948. But if so it is surprising that the payment made to Orazio Vecellio on 19 February 1574 was for only 20 scudi.13 If the painting was not NG 3948 it may have been a workshop painting derived from it, perhaps one of the copies listed in the relevant section below, but there are many other possibilities.

Reputation

NG 3948 was both copied and engraved at an early date but it was not much commented on in the mid‐nineteenth century, perhaps partly because it was not lent to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition. This may be explained by the fact that it was among the ten pictures that Lord Ward had earlier agreed to lend to Dublin (see the section on Exhibitions and Loans). The picture only became celebrated after 1892, when it was sold to Ludwig Mond for a high price at the Dudley sale. It is not coincidental that 1892 was also the year in which the magnificent new imperial art gallery, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, was opened in Vienna. An unanticipated by‐product of the opening was a new conception of Titian’s late style, for the artist’s Nymph and Shepherd, which had not even been included in Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s comprehensive survey of the artist’s work, was given prominence and excited great interest. It was a ‘picture which the world had forgotten until it was added, or rather restored, to the State collection on its transference from the Belvedere to the gorgeous palace which it now occupies’.14 For Wickhoff, writing in the Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, the painting in Vienna was perhaps the last genuine painting by the artist and extraordinary for its pursuit of an ‘effet d’unité’ reminiscent of Rembrandt but with the underlying tonality not coming from the darkness of an interior but from ‘the soft pink glow of dusk’ (‘la lumière rose du soir’).15 These same qualities were obvious in NG 3948, which excited much more interest when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1894 than it had done in 1871. It was illustrated in Claude Phillips’s monograph in 1898 and praised there as one of Titian’s last and most original creations: ‘in its almost monochromatic harmony of embrowned silver the canvas embodies more absolutely … the ideal of tone‐harmony towards which the master in his late time has been steadily tending.’16 It is surely significant that the enthusiasm for Titian’s late style coincided with an interest in rough or smudgy handling and deliberately blurred form in contemporary art: Eugène Carrière’s near monochrome pictures of solemn maternal subjects were then enjoying especial popularity and critical acclaim (fig. 9, p. xxi).17

Mond displayed the painting on an easel in his library, where, in his old age, he found special comfort in contemplating it.18 Not surprisingly, the critic, historian and dealer Jean‐Paul Richter, who must have advised Mond to buy the painting at the Dudley sale, praised it in the highest terms in the luxurious two‐volume book he devoted to Mond’s pictures in 1910. Having drawn attention to the harmony both of colour and of composition, to the way that the line of the child’s back was adjusted ‘in order to force the eye to travel up it to the apex of the pyramid’, to ‘the deep red‐brown of the sturdy little round head’ in the ‘quieter chestnut’ of the ‘kerchief’, and to the fringe of the kerchief, which matches the child’s ruddy cheek, he then managed to associate the painting with the art of Byzantium, which was at that moment being rediscovered and imitated by the avant‐garde.19

Richter declared that the ‘rich mosaic of tender colour’ applied within a silhouette of ‘melodious unity’ reflected what Titian had ‘learned on his knees from ancient ancones gleaming above the altars of old Venetian churches’20 – a charming variation on the speculative literature concerning the artist’s youth, which had not previously supposed that he had travelled from Cadore to Venice at this early stage in his development. Later in the twentieth century the affinities between Titian’s broken colour and fragmentation of form and the earlier mosaics of Venice were often emphasised.21 It was also possible to associate Titian with the most spiritual art of the seventeenth century: for Charles Holmes, director of the Gallery when the painting was acquired, this was a ‘most exquisite and tender example’ of a late phase in Titian’s art, when he favoured ‘darker, almost hueless, pigment lit as it were from within by murky and fitful fires … attaining thereby to a depth and mystery like Rembrandt’.22

Dissenting voices are not easily detected in the early twentieth century, but Harold Isherwood Kay, annotating the catalogue of the National Loan Exhibition held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1913–14, faintly praised the painting as ‘pretty’ and added that it was ‘a little weak’.23 Cecil Gould, when he came to catalogue the painting in the 1950s, clearly [page 271]felt unable to share in the general enthusiasm, and merely considered it as ‘accepted and acceptable as a work of his old age’.24

Fig. 1

Pieter de Jode the Younger after Titian, The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ, c. 1631–2. Engraving, 24.5 × 17.8 cm. Private collection. © The National Gallery, London

Fig. 2

Anon., seventeenth‐ or eighteenth‐century copy after Titian’s Virgin suckling the Infant Christ. Woodcut, 21.6 × 16.2 cm. Vienna, Albertina. © Albertina, Vienna.

Provenance

Bisenzo Collection, Rome, where seen by Cavalcaselle; Lord Ward (later Earl of Dudley) c. 1843, and certainly by 1850 (see p. 453). Bought by Ludwig Mond at the Dudley sale,Christie’s, London, on 25 June 1892, lot 89, for 2,400 guineas (£2,520)25 and bequeathed by him to the National Gallery, which received the painting on the death of his widow (who retained a life interest in it) in 1924.

Prints

The painting is reproduced in a three‐block chiaroscuro woodcut (fig. 2) measuring 21.6 × 16.2 cm. Recorded by Bartsch as after Andrea del Sarto, it was, when published as such in the volume of the Illustrated Bartsch devoted to prints of this kind which appeared in 1983,26 recognised as after the National Gallery’s painting by more than one scholar.27 If, as is easily assumed, this print was made in Venice in the last decades of the sixteenth century, it suggests that the painting must have been well known then.

The painting was certainly reproduced in an engraving inscribed ‘Petrus de lode iunior fecit’ which was published in Paris by A. Bonenfant under royal licence (fig. 1).28 Pieter de Jode the Younger (1604–?1674) was working for Bonenfant in 1631/2, which is a probable date for the print. It must certainly have been made before the death of Pieter’s father in 1634, after which the ‘iunior’ was no longer used. ‘Titian Inv’ is inscribed on the right side of the legend, which is chiefly taken up by a Latin quatrain on the Holy Virgin and the significance of her milk. The print seems likely to have been made with direct reference to the original painting, which may therefore have been in Paris or in the Low Countries around 1630. Pieter de Jode was admitted to the Antwerp guild in 1628/9. He is not known to have visited Italy.

Both woodcut and engraving extend the format of the painting, which may reflect the fact that the canvas had already been lengthened. The similarities between the prints are suspect. There is no detail in the woodcut which is certainly derived from the painting, whereas several details are closer to the engraving – especially the Child’s fingers. Neither the woodcut nor the engraving includes the fringe of the Virgin’s veil. One print derives from the other and, since the woodcut excludes the curtain, it must be the later work (reversing the composition back to its original direction), therefore the woodcut was made not in the sixteenth century but in the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth. Caroline Karpinski kindly informs me that she will date the woodcut to the seventeenth century on grounds of style in her forthcoming catalogue volume for the Illustrated Bartsch.29

[page 272]
Fig. 3

Anon., seventeenth‐century copy after Titian’s Virgin suckling the Infant Christ. Oil on canvas, 87 × 68.5 cm. Private collection. © The National Gallery, London

Copies

Copies of the painting are not uncommon. One such was exported in 1943; others have appeared at auction: lot 117 at Christie’s, London, on 6 February 1953; lot 43 at Sotheby’s, London, on 15 December 1954; and lot 60 at Sotheby’s, London, on 11 April 1968 (fig. 3). Of these, the third mentioned (the one sold in 1954) was horizontal in format and seemed to Gould to be painted in a style more like that of Titian’s maturity. But none of the pictures attempts to imitate the artist’s late manner.

Several examples of the composition, with a saint added to the right and the left to form a Sacra Conversazione, are recorded: one was in the collection of Gustave Gluck;30 another, very schematic in character, was in the Worcester Art Museum;31 and a third was published in 1928 as an original by Titian by Hadeln, the great scholar of Venetian art. This last work is a fascinating document in the history of taste, which cannot be dismissed as an aberration of Hadeln’s since The Burlington Magazine agreed to publish it. To Hadeln it seemed reminiscent of Cézanne (with whom it was then, of course, even more distinguished to be associated than with Byzantine mosaics or with Rembrandt) and as Gould later mischievously observed it almost looked as if it had been painted by him.32 It was surely a modern interpretation of Titian made for modernists and as such interesting to compare with the painting exhibited by Vanessa Bell at the Storran Gallery in February 1939 as one of a series of ‘paraphrases’ by ‘about twenty artists’.33

[page 273]

Exhibitions and Loans

Dublin 1853, Exhibition Hall, Merrion Square, Irish Industrial Exhibition (93); Dublin 1854, Irish Institution, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts (101);36 London 1871, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition (331); London 1894, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition (110); London 1913–14, Grosvenor Gallery (47); London 2003, National Gallery (35); Madrid 2003, Museo Nacional del Prado.

There seems to be no trace or record of the frame or frames in which the painting was displayed when it was in the Dudley and Mond collections. Its present frame was chosen for it by Philip Hendy,34 presumably in 1962 after a relining had altered the size. It is a gilt cassetta frame with a fluted outer moulding of a pattern typical of Tuscany in the early seventeenth century.35 The frame has certainly been reduced in size and the collision of the flutes at the corners has been masked with smudged putty. Some at least of the clumsy rosettes and piecrust cherubim with awkward foliate attachments in the flat are surely remade. The toning layer, as well as muffling the gilding, conceals the alterations. Old frames with coarse ornament and matt, often repellent, textures were much favoured for modern paintings in the mid‐twentieth century and perhaps seemed appropriate for the rough late style of Titian as well.

Notes

1. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, II, p. 428. The observation must be Cavalcaselle’s. (Back to text.)

2. Report by Joyce Plesters of the National Gallery’s Scientific Department, dated 10 August 1961. (Back to text.)

4. Holmes 1927, p. 195. (Back to text.)

5. Gould 1959, p. 116; 1975, p. 283. (Back to text.)

6. Notably NG 29 (Barocci), NG 275 (Botticelli Workshop), NG 728 (Boltraffio), NG 593 (Lorenzo di Credi), NG 293 (Filippino), NG 2595 (Bouts). (Back to text.)

7. In Spain and Spanish South America paintings of the Virgin suckling the infant Christ were given a special name, that of the Virgen de la Leche and Virgen de Belén (Virgin of the Milk, Virgin of Bethlehem). (Back to text.)

8. Waagen 1854, II, p. 235. (Back to text.)

9. Phillips 1898, p. 104 (and see the reproduction on p. 103). For the Munich painting see Wethey 1969, p. 83, cat. 27. (Back to text.)

10. Gould 1959, p. 116; 1975, p. 283. (Back to text.)

11. Neumann 1967, pp. 237–9, no. 56; Richardson 1980, p. 171, no. 284. (Back to text.)

12. Gould 1959, pp. 116–17; 1975, p. 283. For the altarpiece see Wethey 1969, p. 83, cat. 57, plate 47. The picture has often been considered as a workshop piece but there was great enthusiasm for it in the decade following its cleaning in 1951. See especially Valcanover 1951, p. 207 (where the ‘stretta affinità’ with NG 3948 is mentioned), and Pallucchini 1969, I, pp. 183–4 and p. 198 (where again it is compared with NG 3948). (Back to text.)

13. Mancini 1998, pp. 81–3 and (for documents) pp. 378–88. (Back to text.)

14. Phillips 1898, II, p. 106. (Back to text.)

15. Wickhoff 1893, pp. 16–17. (Back to text.)

16. Phillips 1898, II, p. 106. (Back to text.)

17. For Carrière see Faure 1908 and Geyer et al. 1997. (Back to text.)

18. Richter 1920, p. 42. I owe this reference to Giorgia Mancini. (Back to text.)

19. See, for example, Roger Fry’s letter to the editor of The Burlington Magazine in 1908, p. 375, explaining that Cézanne and Gauguin were ‘proto‐Byzantine’ artists, rather than ‘neo‐Impressionists’. (Back to text.)

20. Richter 1910, pp. 134–44. (Back to text.)

21. For example Wilde 1973, p. 184. (Back to text.)

22. Holmes 1923, p. 195. (Back to text.)

23. See the copy of the catalogue in the National Gallery library on p. 71 (in the same copy Claude Phillips’s opinion that the painting is a ‘gem’ is recorded). Isherwood Kay (1893–1938) joined the Gallery as a photographic assistant in 1919 and was made assistant curator in 1921 and keeper and secretary in 1934. He died in office. (Back to text.)

24. Gould 1959, p. 116–17; 1975, p. 283. (Back to text.)

25. In the copy of the sale catalogue in the National Gallery library the lot is annotated as bought by ‘Mond’ rather than by ‘Richter’ (who was bidding for Mond); this was also the case with the Rubens landscape (lot 30). This is unlikely to be significant but is perhaps worth recording. The price was one of the highest in the sale, although, surprisingly, identical to that of a Lorenzo di Credi (lot 56). It was, of course, lower than that of Raphael’s Crucifixion, formerly in Cardinal Fesch’s collection and now in the National Gallery, known as the ‘Mond Crucifixion’, which was bought for 10,600 guineas. (Back to text.)

26. Bartsch 1802–21, XII, 1811, p. 54, no. 8; Karpinski 1983, p. 69, no. 8 (54). Examples of the print are in the Albertina, Vienna, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Back to text.)

27. Both the late Richard Godfrey and David Landau wrote to me at the National Gallery to point this out. (Back to text.)

28. The print (Hollstein, IX, p. 211, no. 8) was first drawn to the attention of Cecil Gould by Christopher White on 18 August 1960 – it was not mentioned in Gould’s catalogue of 1959. (Back to text.)

29. Karpinski (typescript), pp. 311–13. (Back to text.)

30. Photographs of all these copies are in the National Gallery’s dossier. I have seen none of them in the original. (Back to text.)

31. Inv. no. 1931.82. Included in their catalogue of 1974. (Back to text.)

32. Hadeln 1928. The painting was the property of a Mr Henneker‐Heaton. Gould’s comment appears in his second note (1959, p. 117; 1975, p. 284). (Back to text.)

33. For the Storran Gallery, which sold modern French and contemporary British painting between 1932 and 1939, see Knollys 1989, and for this exhibition see p. 206: ‘One of the most stimulating exhibitions resulted from an invitation to about twenty artists to send us paraphrases or free versions of works by other painters. There was Rogers after Corot, Moynihan and Vanessa Bell after Titian, Gowing after Goya, etc. They made a fascinating but perhaps too varied a show.’ Richard Shone kindly informs me that the painting is not in the catalogue of Vanessa Bell’s works at Charleston in 1950. (Back to text.)

35. See Baldi, Lisini et al. 1992, pp. 141–2, nos 59 and 60. But see also Sabatelli et al. 1992, pp. 178–9, no. 54 (an Emilian frame). (Back to text.)

36. For both Dublin exhibitions see Stewart 1995, p. 713. (Back to text.)

List of archive references cited

List of references cited

Avery‐Quash 2011b
Avery‐QuashSusanna, ed., ‘The Travel Notebooks of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake’, The Walpole Society2 vols, centenary edition, 2011, 73
Baldi et al. 1992
BaldiRenatoGiovan Gualberto LisiniCarlo Martelli and Stefania MartelliLa Cornice Fiorentina e Senese. Storia e tecniche di restauroFlorence 1992
Bartsch 1803–21
BartschAdam vonLe Peintre graveur (publication date of first volume often given as 1802), 21 volsVienna 1803–21
Collins Baker 1915–29
[Collins BakerHenry Charles], et al.National Gallery: Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of Foreign Pictures in Trafalgar Square (Collins Baker’s catalogues replaced those by Burton; the last of them, the 86th, was reprinted without revision in 1936), London 1915, 1920, 1921, 1925, 1929
Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877
CroweJoseph Archer and Giovanni Battista CavalcaselleTitian: His Life and Times. With Some Account of his Family, Chiefly from New and Unpublished Records2 volsLondon 1877
Faure 1908
FaureElieEugène CarrièreParis 1908
Fry 1908
FryRoger, ‘[letter to the editor]’, Burlington Magazine, 1908, 375
Geyer 1997
GeyerMarie JeanneEugène Carrière (exh. cat. Musées de Strasbourg, 1997), Strasbourg 1997
Gould 1959
GouldCecilNational Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth‐Century Venetian SchoolLondon 1959
Gould 1975
GouldCecilNational Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth‐Century Italian SchoolsLondon 1975 (repr., 1987)
Hadeln 1928
HadelnDetlev von, ‘Two unknown works by Titian’, Burlington Magazine, August 1928, LIII53–7
Hollstein 1949–2010
HollsteinFriedrich W.H.et al.Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca.1450—170072 volsAmsterdamBlaricumOuderkerk aan den IjsselRoosendaal and Rotterdam 1949–2010
Holmes 1923
HolmesCharlesSirOld Masters and Modern Art. The National Gallery Italian SchoolsLondon 1923
Holmes 1927b
HolmesCharles J., ‘A preparatory version of Titian’s Trinity’, Burlington Magazine, February 1927, L52–9
Joannides and Dunkerton 2007
JoannidesPaul and Jill Dunkerton, ‘“A Boy with a Bird” in the National Gallery: Two Responses to a Titian Question’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 2007, 2836–57
Karpinski 1983
KarpinskiCaroline, ed., Italian Chiaroscuro woodcuts (the text volume for this is forthcoming), The Illustrated BartschXLVIII, formerly 12New York 1983
Knollys 1989
KnollysEardley, ‘The Storran Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, March 1989, CXXXI203–7
Mancini 1998
ManciniMatteoTiziano e le corti d’AsburgoVenice 1998
Neumann 1967
NeumannJaromírPicture Gallery of Prague CastlePrague 1967
Pallucchini 1969
PallucchiniRodolfoTiziano2 volsFlorence 1969
Penny 1998
PennyNicholas, ‘Un’introduzione ai taccuini di Sir Charles Eastlake’, in Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: Conoscitore e conservatore, ed. Anna Chiara Tommasi (papers from the Convegno held in 1997 at Legnago, Verona), Venice 1998, 277–89
Penny 2004
PennyNicholasNational Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth‐Century Italian Paintings, Volume I, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and CremonaLondon 2004
Phillips 1897–8
PhillipsClaudeTitian: A Study of his Life and Works2 volsLondon 1897–8
Richardson 1980
RichardsonFrancis L.Andrea SchiavoneOxford 1980
Richter 1910
RichterJean PaulThe Mond Collection: An Appreciation2 volsLondon, privately printed, 1910
Richter 1920
RichterLouiseRecollections of Dr. Ludwig MondLondon, privately printed, 1920
Sabatelli, Zambrano and Colle 1992
SabatelliFrancoPatrizia Zambrano and Enrico ColleLa Cornice ItalianaMilan 1992
Simon 2007
SimonJacobBritish Picture Framemakers 1600–1950 (National Portrait Gallery online dictionary), https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/conservation/directory-of-british-framemakers/, accessed 21 May 2024, 1st edn, 2007
Stewart 1990–5
StewartAnn M.Irish Art Loan Exhibitions 1765–19273 volsDublin 1990–5
Valcanover 1951
ValcanoverFrancesco, ‘La mostra dei Vecellio a Belluno’, Arte Veneta, 1951, V201–8
Waagen 1854–7
WaagenGustav FriedrichTreasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss., &c. &c.ed. and trans. Lady E. Eastlake3 volsLondon 1854 (Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great BritainLondon 1857, supplement (vol. 4))
Wethey 1969–75
WetheyHarold E.The Paintings of Titian (1. The Religious Paintings, 1969; 2. The Portraits, 1971; 3. The Mythological and Historical Paintings, 1975), 3 volsLondon 1969–75
Wickhoff 1893
WickhoffFranz, ‘Les Écoles italiennes au Musée Impérial de Vienne (part one)’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, January 1893, IX5–18
Wilde 1973
reference not found

List of exhibitions cited

Dublin 1853
Dublin, Exhibition Hall, Merrion Square, Irish Industrial Exhibition, 1853
Dublin 1854
Dublin, Irish Institution, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, 1854
London 1871, Royal Academy
London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, 1871
London 1894, Royal Academy
London, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition, 1894
London 1913–14
London, Grosvenor Gallery, Second National Loan Exhibition: Woman and Child in Art, 1913–14
London 2003
London, National Gallery, 2003
Madrid 2003
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003
Manchester 1857
Manchester, Old Trafford, Exhibition Hall, Art Treasures of the United Kingdom Collected at Manchester in 1857, 5 May–17 October 1857

The Organisation of the Catalogue

Artists are listed alphabetically and separate works by the same artists are ordered chronologically (rather than by date of accession). The division of an artist’s work between catalogues has been avoided in the past, but Titian presents a special problem. His work from before 1540 has been left for another volume and his later productions are presented here together with works by rivals, followers, pupils and imitators.

I have included one painting which seems to be a pastiche made soon after Titian’s death (A Concert, NG 3) and another which is a copy of one of his compositions, probably made later than 1600 (The Trinity, NG 4222), but not A Boy with a Bird (NG 933), which has often been taken for a seventeenth‐century imitation of Titian. The light cloud of drapery around the upper arm and the outlining of the fingers recall Titian’s Noli me tangere (NG 270) of c. 1515. It may be an excerpt from a painting of Venus and Adonis, a composition discussed in this catalogue (pp. 274–91), but if so must, as Paul Joannides has proposed, be an early version. Arguments in favour of the autograph status of this curious morsel are presented by Joannides and Jill Dunkerton in volume 28 of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.

A good case could easily be made for including works by Rottenhammer, Elsheimer and El Greco, all of whom painted in Venice and were formed, or at least reformed, as artists by that experience. But readers will expect to find their work in other catalogues and it is unlikely that my colleagues would have consented to their appropriation. It may therefore seem inconsistent to have included The Conversion of Mary Magdalene (NG 1241) which is probably by Pedro Campaña, who was Netherlandish by birth and worked for many years in Spain. He was probably only briefly resident in Venice, but this painting was commissioned by a Venetian patrician both as a record of his family and as a record of a fresco in a Venetian church, so it seemed wrong to omit it.

As in the first volume of the sixteenth‐century Italian paintings, the entries, which are more discursive than was formerly the case in the Gallery’s catalogues, have been divided into sections with titles intended to help readers select the topic that interests them. Much material concerning previous owners is supplied and much on the circumstances of the work’s acquisition, but a succinct, factual summary of provenance is also supplied separately for ease of consultation.

The information on picture frames provided in the first volume attracted more comment in print than any other feature of that book. Here I have also drawn attention both to old frames of distinction and to frames made for the National Gallery. The reader should note that Jacob Simon at the National Portrait Gallery has created an online directory of framemakers which includes all the craftsmen mentioned here as employed by, or as suppliers to, the National Gallery.

An account of the conservators employed by the Gallery to varnish, line, clean, repair and retouch before the establishment of the Gallery’s own Conservation Department is incorporated in the introduction to the first volume (Penny 2004, pp. xiv–xv). A great deal of information about the conservation of the National Gallery’s paintings is provided and I have tried to relate the conservation history to the provenance, identifying not only nineteenth‐century restorers but also, sometimes, those from earlier centuries.

A question‐mark is used to indicate a doubt as to the authorship of a painting in preference to the formula of ‘Attributed to’ or ‘Ascribed to’. Comprehensive listing of references made in recent art‐historical literature has not been attempted. References in the notes are abbreviations of entries in the bibliography. I have tried to identify the actual authors of exhibition catalogues and of anonymous guides.

A Note on Manuscript Material Cited

References are made in the notes to manuscript material (chiefly letters) studied in British family papers – for example, those of the Earls of Carlisle and of the Dukes of Hamilton – and also to material studied in public and church archives in Venice – for example, confraternity manuscripts in the care of the parish of S. Trovaso, the parish records kept in S. Silvestro, and wills, inventories and financial records in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (here abbreviated to ASV). Most frequent reference, however, is made to the Archive of the National Gallery itself: the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees, with the associated papers, the Gallery accounts, the diary and other papers of Ralph Nicholson Wornum, and above all the notebooks or travel diaries kept by Sir Charles Eastlake on his continental tours between 1852 and 1864 (there is also one for 1830). Since there is more than one notebook for each annual tour, the number of the notebook cited is given in parentheses – thus ‘MS notebook 1864 (2)’ for the second in 1864. I have published an account of Eastlake’s methods and motives for compiling these notebooks in ‘Un’introduzione ai taccuini di Sir Charles Eastlake’ in Anna Chiara Tommasi, ed., Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: Conoscitore e conservatore (papers from the Convegno held in 1997 at Legnago, Verona), Venice 1998, pp. 277–89. They are currently being transcribed and edited by Susanna Avery‐Quash for publication by the Walpole Society.

About this version

Version 1, generated from files NP_2008__16.xml dated 06/03/2025 and database__16.xml dated 09/03/2025 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 03/01/2025. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG294 reintegrated into main document; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 prepared for publication; entries for NG16, NG26, NG224, NG277, NG294, NG674, NG1318 & NG1324-NG1326, NG1883-NG1884, NG3948, NG4452, NG6376, NG6420 and NG6490 proofread and corrected.

Cite this entry

Permalink (this version)
https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EB7-000B-0000-0000
Permalink (latest version)
https://data.ng.ac.uk/0E8I-000B-0000-0000
Chicago style
Penny, Nicholas. “NG 3948, The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ”. 2008, online version 1, March 9, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EB7-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style
Penny, Nicholas (2008) NG 3948, The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EB7-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
MHRA style
Penny, Nicholas, NG 3948, The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ (National Gallery, 2008; online version 1, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0EB7-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 19 March 2025]