Raphael
NG 2069 
Virgin and Child (‘The Mackintosh Madonna’)

Carlo Plazzotta, 2024

Extracted from:
Carol Plazzotta and Tom Henry, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume IV, Raphael (London: The National Gallery, 2022).

c. 1509–10

Oil on canvas, transferred from panel between 1729 and 1786, 78.8 × 64.2 cm

Support¹

The painting was transferred from its original wood panel to canvas, almost certainly by Robert Picault (1705–1781), in around 1751 (see under ‘Conservation’ below). A strip approximately 5 cm wide along the left edge is an addition that probably dates from the time of the transfer.² No trace of the panel appears to remain. The paint layers were stuck to the new support with oil paint containing lead white and some Prussian blue.

Ground and priming

The original ground structure would most likely have consisted of a lower layer of gesso covered by an oil‐based priming. The gesso seems to have been removed entirely as part of the transfer process, but the priming is intact and visible in cross‐sectional samples. It is off‐white but with a pinkish tint, containing lead white with colourless powdered glass and a small proportion of fine red earth pigment. The colourless glass is of the manganese‐containing soda‐lime type commonly produced in Italy, a paint additive often used by Raphael, probably as a drier.³ The primings on all of Raphael’s pre‐Roman panels are also composed of lead white and colourless glass, but tinted instead with lead‐tin yellow;⁴ Raphael continued to use a priming of this composition in Rome – for example in the Garvagh Madonna (NG 744) and La Fornarina (about 1518–19; Palazzo Barberini, Rome)⁵ – but he is less consistent. The priming on the Portrait of Julius II (NG 27), for example, has a pinkish hue – in common with the priming on the Mackintosh Madonna – but it is browner and stronger in colour, composed of lead white, red earth and some black, without any powdered glass.

Materials and technique

No underdrawing or spolveri were detected with infrared reflectography, although given the existence of the highly worked cartoon in the British Museum (see under ‘Drawings’ below) it has always been assumed that a cartoon was used. Any pre‐existing underdrawing would very likely have been lost as a result of Robert Picault’s method of dissolving the gesso ground during the process of transferring the painting from panel to canvas (see under ‘Conservation’ below).⁷

No samples were taken for analysis of the binding medium due to the extensive repainting and thick layers of discoloured varnish over much of the surface. However, the appearance and characteristics of the original paint layers in the samples taken to investigate pigments and layer structure (including the presence of many lead soaps) suggest an oil binder.

The original sky is painted with natural ultramarine combined with lead white, applied over a layer of greenish‐blue azurite mixed with white. A sample from the dark greyish‐blue swathe of the Virgin’s drapery to the left of the child’s calf shows a slightly blanched ultramarine glaze over a layer of azurite with white. The very dark, almost black, area of her drapery on the right has been overpainted several times in various layers containing azurite, ultramarine and Prussian blue. What remains of the original beneath consists only of a darkened layer of azurite over which no original ultramarine layer was detected (if indeed it were ever present).

The Virgin’s red sleeve on the lower part of her left arm is also heavily repainted; traces of the original beneath, perhaps very worn and damaged, appear to contain vermilion. The upper part of the sleeve, now a greyish‐brown colour but originally a light mauve, is painted with a mixture of lead white, ultramarine and a little red lake, applied onto a base layer consisting of lead white, azurite and red lake.

A dark greyish paint at the lower edge of the Virgin’s red sleeve, marking the boundary with the white inner sleeve, was found to contain antimony sulphide (stibnite). This unusual grey pigment has been detected in a limited number of other sixteenth‐century Italian pictures in the National Gallery, although not in any other painting by Raphael. However, the artist did use another unusual grey pigment, ground bismuth metal powder, to achieve similar dark tonal effects in the Ansidei Madonna (NG 1171).⁸ Like other artists active in the first half of the sixteenth century, he would not necessarily have distinguished between stibnite, bismuth and other similar materials such as galena (lead sulphide) as they were seemingly used interchangeably.⁹

The sample taken from the opaque yellow‐brown of the child’s drapery contains lead‐antimony yellow (Naples yellow); while this would not be impossible in Raphael’s original paint, it is perhaps more likely that the area sampled consists of overpaint.¹⁰ The blue‐green parts of the distant landscape to the right are painted with azurite, while the greenish‐yellow areas are azurite mixed with lead‐tin yellow. The brown paint in a sample from the distant tower in the landscape to the left of the Virgin and child from which the painting takes one of its names lies over discoloured varnish and therefore seems to be old repaint; beneath it is the azurite‐containing paint of the original landscape.

Conservation¹¹

When first mentioned in Louis‐François Dubois de Saint Gelais’s 1727 account of the Orléans collection, the painting was described as on wood.¹² However, the Abbé de Fontenai’s ‘entry’ in La Galerie du Palais Royale, the lavish illustrated catalogue published in instalments from 1786, describes it as being on canvas.¹³ Evidently, the painting was transferred from panel to canvas between these dates. It can possibly be identified with a Madonna by Raphael from the Orléans collection that is recorded as having been transferred by Robert Picault in 1751,¹⁴ the year in which he also embarked on the transfer of Raphael’s large Saint Michael (1518) now in the Musée du Louvre. Picault was an artisan who elevated himself to the position of restorer at the French court of Louis XV by the introduction of new and radical techniques of picture restoration, securing a pension for himself and his son, also a restorer.¹⁵ He used a highly dangerous technique to separate the paint from the panels on which he worked. Although he kept his method ‘secret’, it seems that he destroyed the ground layer (between the paint and the panel) through prolonged exposure to nitric acid vapours. This allowed him to display intact the original wooden support alongside the transferred paintings. Picault’s reputation began to wane in the early 1750s when he started charging hugely inflated prices for his spectacular but controversial practices and was undercut by other more skilled restorers using less aggressive techniques. His restorations later proved highly unstable and several pictures worked on by him had to be restored or even transferred again as early as the 1780s.

The Mackintosh Madonna has been comprehensively repainted, probably on more than one occasion. Since its presentation to the National Gallery in 1906, it has received only minor treatments, mainly the securing of loose paint and a surface cleaning and revarnishing in 1928.

Condition¹⁶

As early as 1729 the painting was described, in Joseph Antoine Crozat’s Recueil, or ‘Gallery’, of the finest paintings in French collections, as being ‘endommagé’ (‘damaged’), an assessment repeated by Fontenai in the illustrated Galerie du Palais Royale in 1786.¹⁷ X‐radiography indicates a total loss of paint in vertical strips down the centre of the picture particularly in the lower half, and in another vertical strip just to the left of the child’s shoulder (fig. 1). These were perhaps caused by movement in the panel and may have contributed to the decision to transfer it to canvas. However, its disastrous condition can mainly be attributed to the transfer. A triangular area of paint, comprising the left side of the Virgin’s head, her shoulder and part of the sky, may have become completely detached in the transfer process. The print of 1786 by Jacques Brouillard (1744–1806) shows that the haloes had been lost by then.¹⁸

The picture was not among those selected for acquisition for the National Gallery by Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865) at the time of the Samuel Rogers sale in 1856, when it sold for a modest price. As well as knowing Rogers’ collection, Eastlake had edited Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Painting of 1837 in an English edition of 1841 in which the picture is described as having ‘now lost its surface’, but as being ‘interesting in a technical point of view on account of the bright reddish undertint which is apparent’.¹⁹ In 1948 Oskar Fischel suggested the ruin of the Mackintosh Madonna (‘a wreck that has become unrecognisable’) was the result of a fire at some unspecified date, but, as Cecil Gould pointed out, there is no record of such an event.²⁰ Today, the picture is so damaged and restored, and so dimmed by old varnish, that the original surface quality is nowhere perceptible. It was not shown in the monographic exhibitions of 1994 and 2004 in Edinburgh and London, in which the composition was represented by the British Museum cartoon (further discussed under ‘Drawings’ below).

Subject

The Virgin is seated on a stone parapet on which the child stands. Her legs behind the parapet are facing to the right while her torso is turned towards the viewer in a pleasing contrapposto. Her eyes are lowered as she gently gathers her infant towards her with one hand about his waist, the other cupping his left foot. He leans his body into hers and nestles his head beneath her cheek, embracing her with both hands about her neck as he looks engagingly outwards over his shoulder to the left. Théophile Thoré, commenting on the picture when it was first publicly displayed in Britain in the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857, responded sensitively to the beauty and intimacy of the picture: ‘Cette sobrieté de l’entourage donne au groupe un caractère sinon “mystérieux”, du moins très poétique’ (‘This sober setting [referring to the simple landscape] gives the group a character which if not “mysterious” is at least most poetic’). Contrasting it with the joyful verve of the Large Cowper Madonna (1508; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), he perceived ‘une autre expression de tendresse, plus intime, et qui rayonne moins en dehors’ (‘a different, more intimate expression of tenderness, which radiates less explicitly’).²¹

Since arriving in Britain the picture has been known as the Madonna of the Tower (due to the tower in the left background, which may have been Picault’s addition), the Rogers Madonna (when it was in the Samuel Rogers collection) and more recently as the Mackintosh Madonna (after its last owners).

Influences

The composition recalls, in reverse, a glazed earthenware group of the Virgin and Child in a Niche by Luca della Robbia (1400–1482), which is known in two versions cast from the same mould: the so‐called Bliss Madonna in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 2), and the Shaw Madonna (about 1460; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).²² The pose of the child clinging to his mother’s neck and pressing his cheek against hers while shyly looking out at the viewer, and the way the Virgin holds one of his chubby feet as he braces himself against her on the convenient ledge, are close enough to the sculpture to suggest that Raphael knew it in some form. Although it is not known where these terracotta Madonnas were in the early sixteenth century, such works by Luca della Robbia were likely to have been accessible when the young Raphael was in Florence at some point between 1504 and 1508; indeed, they had inspired painters of previous generations (the Bliss Madonna is, for example, reflected in Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child of the late 1460s in the Museo di Palazzo Medici, Florence²³). Several of Raphael’s surviving drawings attest how attentively, yet creatively, he studied sculpture during his stay in the city, including Donatello’s monumental Saint George (1415–17; Bargello Museum, Florence) and Michelangelo’s David (1501–4; Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence), as well as the latter’s Taddei Tondo (about 1504–5; now in the Royal Academy of Arts, London), always translating them into his own idiom. The plump infantile tummy and complex mass of the Virgin’s sleeve in the Mackintosh Madonna are among several ways in which Raphael, never slavish in his borrowings, adapted Luca’s beautiful work, arriving at his own solution that enhances the natural, tactile intimacy between the mother and child.

Attribution

The attribution of the Mackintosh Madonna to Raphael has usually been accepted since the painting was first recorded in the Orléans collection in 1727, although often with reservations on account of its lamentable condition. Both Crozat in his Recueil of 1729 and the Abbé de Fontenai in the Orléans Galerie of 1786 mention that certain critics had, ‘from the air of the Holy Virgin’s head’, judged the work to be by Raphael’s follower and friend Timoteo Viti (1469–1523), but this dissuaded neither author from their opinion that it was one of the liveliest, freshest and most charming of Raphael’s Madonnas, albeit damaged.²⁴ Only in the National Gallery catalogue of 1920 is it noted that the Mackintosh Madonna was ‘sometimes thought to be the work of a later artist, such as Baroccio, working from Raphael’s design’, although there is no published trace of this opinion.²⁵ In his catalogue of 1962, Cecil Gould judged the picture so damaged that it ‘is no longer possible to state with confidence that it is, or was, Raphael’s original’. He nevertheless thought its autography likely: ‘Despite its ruin it conveys to most critics an indefinable air of authority, which is lacking in the copies.’²⁶ This theme of a ‘phantom’ Raphael, the strength of design and charm of which remain perceptible through the clouded lens of its conservation history, is repeated in the literature from the eighteenth century onwards, and remains current today. Thus Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, in their monograph of the early 1880s, observed: ‘The pleasure with which this picture fills the spectator would be without alloy but for the state to which it was reduced by accidents and repairs’.²⁷ Claude Phillips, in a review of the Royal Academy exhibition of Old Masters of 1902 published in the Daily Telegraph, shortly before the painting was donated to the National Gallery, asserted, ‘That this ruined canvas, beautiful still in virtue of a design of ineffable charm, emanates from Raphael there can be little or no doubt. We believe that beneath all these superposed layers of paint there lurks, radiating through and beautifying the whole, a basis which is Raphael’s’.²⁸ And Julia Cartwright, whose monograph on Raphael appeared in the year before the painting’s acquisition, was also philosophical: ‘Unfortunately this once lovely work has suffered terribly from neglect and repaint, but not even the restorer’s hand has been able wholly to destroy the exquisite charm and tenderness of Raphael’s original design’.²⁹

Despite the picture’s ruined state, it has been possible to establish through technical investigation that the materials and pigments in the original paint layers – notably the use of powdered glass in the priming, the presence of lead‐tin yellow in the landscape and the use of the grey pigment stibnite – are consistent with Raphael’s practice. But puzzlingly there are no early copies of the composition set in a landscape in Italian collections. Most post‐date its first recorded presence in France in the early eighteenth century (several being in French collections), while the picture’s history in prints dates back only to the first Orléans catalogue.

Thus, while it is possible that the Mackintosh Madonna is Raphael’s original, it is worth considering whether another version of the picture might once have existed with as strong, or even stronger, a claim. A beautiful variant set in an interior, with the figures brightly illuminated against a dark background, and with radiating haloes, is undoubtedly the best record of what their counterparts in the Mackintosh Madonna might once have looked like (fig. 3). This picture was purchased in 1808–9 from an unspecified collection in Rome, of which it was regarded as the star, by the Russian privy counsellor and senator Pyotr (Peter) Vasilievich Miatlev of St Petersburg (1756–1833), who was temporarily residing in the city having been exiled from Russia by Tsar Alexander I.³⁰ It remained in the possession of the Miatlev family in St Petersburg for at least 114 years, who later took it to Paris where it was recorded from 1921 to 1928–9.³¹ The painting (henceforth referred to here as the Miatlev Madonna) had been transferred from panel to canvas, in this case in St Petersburg in the nineteenth century. As far as can be judged from the only surviving photographs, apparently taken in Paris in the 1920s (a black‐and‐white print on photographic paper, fig. 3, and an ambrotype negative printed on glass, both still in the possession of the Miatlev descendants), it appears extremely close to Raphael in style, sentiment and execution.³² Only the veil around the Christ Child differs in that it extends to cover his genitals, a detail that could have been added by a restorer. Gustav Waagen, who described it in his 1864 survey of collections in St Petersburg as in the Miatlev palace, referred to it as ‘an older copy, warm in colour and diligent in execution’.³³ Its indoor setting links it not only with Raphael’s cartoon, in which the figures appear to have been drawn in a shadowy interior (see under ‘Drawings’, (1), below), but also with several early sixteenth‐century copies (see under ‘Copies and variants’, Group II, A, below) and with the re‐interpretations made in Rome by Giovanni Battista Salvi, known as Il Sassoferrato (1609–1685) (fig. 4), all also set in an interior space (see under ‘Copies and variants’, Group II, B, below). If this, or a similar lost prototype, were to prove an original by Raphael, then the ruined Mackintosh picture showing the group in a landscape could either be an autograph variant (see Tom Henry’s entry on the Garvagh Madonna, NG 744, which raises the possibility of there having once been a second autograph version of that painting with slight variations) or a copy by a close associate or follower.³⁴ The luminous, sculptural quality of the painting is well conveyed in the ambrotype, but until the painting itself re‐emerges it is difficult to reach any certain conclusion regarding its attributional status.

Dating and style

The composition is usually dated to the first years of Raphael’s Roman period, between 1509 and 1512. Only Sylvia Ferino Pagden suggests a slightly earlier date of 1508, prior to Raphael’s departure for Rome.³⁵ It certainly harks back to Raphael’s pre‐Roman works. The facial expression of Christ is strikingly similar to that of the child in the Large Cowper Madonna as Thoré implied (see under ‘Subject’ above). In addition, the motif in the latter painting of the child’s hand tucked into his mother’s neckline, seeking the breast, a motif borrowed from works by Perugino, is present in the cartoon associated with the Mackintosh composition, but edited out of the National Gallery and Miatlev versions.

The cartoon itself (see under ‘Drawings’, (1) below) is useful in establishing a chronology, being closer in style to Raphael’s Louvre cartoon for the head of God the Father in the Disputa of about 1508–9 than to the earlier Saint Catherine cartoon of about 1507–8.³⁶ In particular the pronounced chiaroscuro deployed to model form reveals all that Raphael had absorbed from Leonardo da Vinci.

It seems most likely that Raphael completed this composition while his Florentine experiences were still alive to him, soon after he arrived in Rome, and probably no later than 1510. The draperies have the volume of works from the early Roman period (for example, the female personifications in the ceiling roundels of the Stanza della Segnatura of about 1508–9).³⁷

The work to which the Mackintosh Madonna bears the closest resemblance is the Garvagh Madonna in the National Gallery (NG 744), datable to about 1510–11. The Virgin’s beautiful, near perfect oval head, her pensive expression with eyes downcast and even the pose of the Christ Child are all directly comparable. Several of the studies for the Garvagh Madonna find echoes in the Mackintosh composition, particularly where the Virgin and child are studied in isolation as in sketches from the ‘Pink Sketchbook’ in Lille (see under ‘Drawings’, (3) and (4) below).³⁸ The Madonna di Loreto, studied on sheets of designs for the Garvagh Madonna (Musées des Beaux Arts, Lille, inv. 437), is also of a comparable date. The idea of the Virgin hugging the child to her cheek would of course find its ultimate expression in the Madonna della Sedia (about 1514; Pitti Palace, Florence), also set against a dark background and with a radiating halo around Christ’s head, early studies for which again contain echoes of the Mackintosh design (see especially the compositional sketch in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, inv. 4303).³⁹

Reputation

Little regarded today on account of its condition, the composition of the Mackintosh Madonna was famous in past centuries, and – judging from the numerous copies, variants and prints – highly attractive to artists and patrons alike. Apart from the development of the idea in Raphael’s own work, several near contemporary echoes appear in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Cesare da Sesto (1477–1523), who knew Raphael well from the period when the two young artists were both working in the Vatican Stanze at the same time,⁴⁰ copied the Madonna and Child group twice in two small sketches, most likely datable 1512–15, a further reason for dating the painting to Raphael’s early Roman years (fig. 5).⁴¹ He may have been responsible for disseminating the design to northern Italy where it recurs in a painting attributed to the workshop of Andrea Solario (about 1465–1524; National Gallery, NG 2504). Echoes of the design crop up in Ferrarese painting as early as 1512–14, notably in the work of Benvenuto Tisi, called Garofalo (about 1481–1559), who adapted it in at least three different Madonnas.⁴² Garofalo seems to have visited Rome in 1512 where he may have worked with Raphael and certainly studied his work very carefully.⁴³ It is possible he saw the recently executed composition there, although it has been suggested that Alfonso I d’Este, who was also briefly in Rome in July of the same year, could perhaps have acquired the Garvagh Madonna – and therefore conceivably also the Mackintosh Madonna (or the interior version of it) – for his collection at this time.⁴⁴ The picture by Solario and the three by Garofalo all show the Virgin and child in an interior, although with a landscape visible through a window (the interior setting and the fact that the infant Christ in the Garofalo pictures all have the same radiance as the child in the Miatlev Madonna suggest that this version rather than the Mackintosh was the prototype).

Raphael’s friend and collaborator Domenico Alfani (about 1480–after 1553) used the British Museum cartoon (see under ‘Drawings (1)’ below), or a version of it, for the group of the Virgin and Child in the Pala della Sapienza Vecchia painted for the Collegio Gregoriano in Perugia in 1518 (and today in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria there; fig. 6).⁴⁵ Three years later, in 1521, he reused the design in an altarpiece for the Duomo in Città della Pieve.⁴⁶ His figure groups in these two altarpieces follow the cartoon in the way Christ’s right hand is tucked into his mother’s décolletage, and in the broader shape of the Virgin’s head, so it is very likely Alfani had access to the cartoon itself or a version of it, just as he is known to have received other designs by Raphael.⁴⁷ Alfani did not, however, transfer the design directly from the cartoon, as the figures in both altarpieces are proportionally reduced in scale.⁴⁸

A slightly different variation, showing the Virgin seated in an interior before a curtain, holding a book and embraced by the Christ Child who stands on a cushion, is an early adaptation of Raphael’s design (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, inv. 457). It is usually dated to the 1520s and attributed to a follower of Giulio Romano.⁴⁹ This painting was formerly in the church of S. Francesco in the Marchigian town of Sassoferrato, where the painter Sassoferrato – named after his birthplace – popularised it in numerous copies. These copies have invariably been muddled together with direct copies after Raphael’s Mackintosh/Miatlev composition, but the versions with the book and the cushion descend instead from the Giuliesque painting, and thus are listed separately below (Group II, C).

Later in date, but very faithful to the Miatlev Madonna, is a free version by Sassoferrato in the Galleria Borghese (fig. 4), datable to about 1650. It was bought in 1818 by Napoleon’s brother‐in‐law Camillo Borghese (1775–1832), who also acquired a copy of Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Julius II (NG 27), probably in an attempt to compensate for the many Raphaels sold from the Borghese collection between 1790 and 1805 during the Napoleonic occupation of Rome.⁵⁰ Sassoferrato was a brilliant copyist who introduced his own innovations and breathed new life into Raphael’s legacy in the mid‐seventeenth century. His fidelity and feeling for the original when copying or making free versions of paintings by artists of previous generations (including copies of paintings by Perugino, Lo Spagna, Andrea del Sarto, Garofalo and Guido Reni) demonstrate that he was very thorough in his research, frequently gaining direct access to original material, as can be confirmed by his squared drawings.⁵¹ This seems to have been the case with his approach to the present composition, since Sassoferrato’s related squared preparatory drawing (fig. 7) is very close in composition and feeling to the Miatlev Madonna, providing evidence that the latter was in Rome in the mid‐seventeenth century, where it may always have been, and remained until the beginning of the nineteenth century (the Mackintosh Madonna had departed for France at the latest by the late seventeenth century if not earlier: see under ‘Previous owners’ below).⁵² Sassoferrato’s finished picture, on the other hand, shows the child at a different angle, with his body rotated more towards the viewer, his right leg more elongated and his right foot pointing down, making the perspective of the parapet appear much steeper, and the child older, livelier and more accessible. Another seemingly autograph version of the Borghese Sassoferrato was formerly in Downton Castle, Herefordshire, and there are copies in Bergamo, Casamari (Frosinone) and Sheffield, revealing the popularity of Sassoferrato’s revival of this composition. There seem to be no copies of the Miatlev interior composition later in date than Sassoferrato’s adaptations.

In nineteenth‐century France, the tender composition remained of interest to artists even though the Mackintosh Madonna was already a shadow of its former self. Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), who frequently drew inspiration from the sweet perfection of Raphael’s designs, copied the composition in 1815, allegedly at one remove, from a version by Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671).⁵³ Five years later, when he was planning the Vow of Louis XIII for the cathedral in his home town of Montauban (delivered 1824), he revised the figure of the Virgin, as John Pope‐Hennessy aptly suggested, ‘along lines that Raphael would himself have approved, painting it as it might have looked had the Mackintosh Madonna been designed a few years later than it was and preserved as well as the Madonna di Foligno’.⁵⁴

Copies and variants

Excluding the above, there are two main families of actual copies after this composition: (I) those set in a landscape, which are descended from the Mackintosh Madonna or a version of it; and (II) those set in an interior, conforming to the Miatlev Madonna or its prototype. The tradition relating to the interior version is much older, supporting the idea that the Miatlev Madonna may be either an original by Raphael or a very early copy after such. The copies under each section are listed as far as possible in chronological order. The lists are by no means definitive.

Group I, Mackintosh type (landscape version)

The copies in this group, after the Mackintosh Madonna, mostly post‐date the picture’s arrival in France (some remain in French collections). There is only one indifferent copy of the landscape version in an Italian collection, which certainly raises a question about the authenticity of the tradition, fame and early whereabouts of the Mackintosh Madonna.

Mackintosh Madonna (NG 2069), by or after Raphael, oil on canvas transferred from panel, 78.8 × 64.2 cm, early sixteenth century.

• 1. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 886, oil on canvas, 82.5 × 65 cm (anon., sixteenth/seventeenth century).⁵⁵
• 2. Dijon, Musée des Beaux‐Arts, inv. ca. 60, oil on canvas, 80 × 63 cm (anon., by 1699).⁵⁶
• 3. Sale, Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 9–15 June 2004, lot 1537, oil on canvas?, 75 × 62 cm (anon., seventeenth century?).⁵⁷
• 4. Madrid, Museo de la Real Academia de San Fernando, inv. 2395, tempera on vellum, 20 × 17 cm (copy by Francisca Melendez (1770–1825), signed and dated 1790).⁵⁸
• 5. Sale, Sotheby’s (Colonnade), London, 22–24 May 1996, lot 58, oil on canvas, 82.5 × 65.5 cm (anon., eighteenth century).⁵⁹
• 6. Truro, Royal Cornwall Museum, inv. 1935.88.2, oil on canvas, 82 × 65.5 cm (anon., eighteenth/nineteenth century).⁶⁰
• 7. St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum, inv. 6968, oil on canvas, 81.5 × 65.3 cm (anon., probably eighteenth/nineteenth century).⁶¹
• 8. Montauban, Musée Ingres, inv. MI.867.65, oil on canvas, 80.6 × 64.5 cm (copy by Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres, 1815).
• 9. Dijon, Musée des Beaux‐Arts, inv. ca. 718, oil on canvas, 82 × 62 cm (anon., nineteenth century).⁶²
• 10. Florence, private collection, known as the Madonna Piccolomini, support unknown, 79 × 57 cm (anon., sixteenth century, according to Fondazione Zeri, but surely much later).⁶³
• 11. Munich, private collection, 79 × 64 cm.⁶⁴
• 12. Sale, Christie’s, South Kensington, London, 7 February 1990, lot 336, support unknown, 81.9 × 62.3 cm (anon., date unknown).⁶⁵
• 13. Sale, Christie’s, London, 28 February 1992, lot 152, oil on panel, 82.5 × 61 cm (anon., date unknown).⁶⁶

Group II, Miatlev type (interior version)

A. Anonymous Italian sixteenth‐century and later copies

At least four Italian copies on panel of the Miatlev Madonna or its prototype exist dating from the first half of the sixteenth century, attesting the early renown of this interior version.

Formerly Miatlev collection, St Petersburg, by or after Raphael, oil on canvas, transferred from panel, dimensions unknown, early sixteenth century.

• 1. Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. 358, oil on panel, 82 × 58 cm (perhaps Roman, first half of the sixteenth century).⁶⁷
• 2. Genoa, Palazzo Durazzo Pallavicini, oil on panel, 80.5 × 58 cm (?Tuscan or Roman, 1520–50).⁶⁸
• 3. Siena, Urgurgeri collection (whereabouts unknown), oil on panel, 75 × 59 cm (attributed to Andrea del Brescianino [active 1506–25]).⁶⁹
• 4. Sale, Christie’s, London, 31 March 1989, lot 3, oil on panel, 82 × 59 cm (Florentine School, about 1540).⁷⁰
• 5. Sale, unknown, lot 95.⁷¹
• 6. Truro, Royal Cornwall Museum, inv. 1915.9.5, oil on canvas, approximately 65 × 81 cm (anon., date unknown).⁷²

B. Sassoferrato and copies

Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. 382, Sassoferrato, itself a copy after Raphael, oil on canvas, 73 × 62 cm, and related preparatory drawing (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, inv. 2666 Z), about 1650.

• 1. Formerly Herefordshire, Downton Castle, first in the collection of Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) and later of Major W.M.P. Kincaid‐Lennox, support and dimensions unknown (replica by Sassoferrato?, mid‐seventeenth century).
• 2. Bergamo, Accademia Carrara, inv. 98 (779), oil on canvas, 74 × 59 cm (Sassoferrato, but attributed by some to Carlo Ceresa [1609–1679]).⁷³
• 3. Formerly Munich, Leuchtenberg collection, oil on canvas, 71 × 56 cm (anon., date unknown).⁷⁴
• 4. Sheffield City Art Galleries & Museums Trust, inv. 523, oil on canvas, 47 × 37.7 cm (after Sassoferrato, perhaps second half of seventeenth century).⁷⁵
• 5. Anon. sale, Christie’s, London, 5 July 1991, lot 235, not sold, support unknown 69.3 × 60.7 cm (after Sassoferrato, date unknown).
• 6. Casamari (Frosinone), Museo dell’Abbazia, support and dimensions unknown (anon., date unknown).

C. Interior version with book and cushion

There are several versions by and after Sassoferrato of the sixteenth‐century variant of the Mackintosh/Miatlev composition with the Virgin holding a book and the Christ Child standing on a cushion, catalogued by the Pinacoteca di Brera as ‘after Giulio Romano’, discussed under ‘Reputation’ above. They should not be confused with Sassoferrato’s copies after the Mackintosh/Miatlev composition itself (II, B). The principal versions are listed below, and other lesser versions can be found under the Mackintosh Madonna on the Fondazione Zeri website.⁷⁶

Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, inv. 130, 79 × 57 cm (anon., sixteenth century, after Giulio Romano, probably 1520s)

• 1. Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House, collection of the Earl of Exeter, inv. 277, oil on canvas, 43 × 34.5 cm (Sassoferrato, second half of seventeenth century).⁷⁷
• 2. Private collection (formerly Altomani & Sons), oil on canvas, 100 × 75 cm (Sassoferrato, date unknown).⁷⁸
• 3. Formerly Contini Bonacossi collection, Florence, sold Sotheby’s, London, 5 December 2018, lot 24 (Sassoferrato, date unknown).⁷⁹
• 4. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. SK‐A‐3423, oil on canvas, 73.3 × 62 cm (workshop of Sassoferrato, late seventeenth century?).
• 5. Portrait of Cardinal Rapaccioli, by Sassoferrato, Sarasota, Ringling Museum (a version of the Brera picture is shown hanging on the wall in the background), inv. SN128, oil on canvas, 223.8 × 162.6 cm (Sassoferrato, about 1643).⁸⁰

Drawings

The only securely related drawing for the Mackintosh Madonna is a full‐scale cartoon in the British Museum (1). More loosely connected is a series of studies for the Virgin and Child in Raphael’s ‘Pink Sketchbook’ datable to his early Roman years, discussed as numbers (2)–(4) below.

• (1) Cartoon, black chalk and/or charcoal, with touches of white chalk (British Museum, inv. 1894,0721.1) (figs 8 and 9).⁸¹ This drawing (71 × 53.5 cm, including a vertical strip 4.5 cm wide added at the left by an earlier restorer) is on two sheets joined horizontally. The outlines are pricked and partly indented. Incised compass marks near top and bottom and left and right edges indicate the position of vertical and horizonal plumb lines that would have been transferred to the painting surface to centre the composition on a panel.⁸² Both chalk and paper are much abraded. The cartoon is remarkably free in execution, with a flurry of lines around the Virgin’s left shoulder and arm. Even at this last stage in the design process Raphael was evidently willing to explore refinements. The cartoon differs from the Mackintosh painting in a number of ways. Most importantly, the tenebrous chiaroscuro, the shading in of the background and the pronounced shadow on the parapet imply that an interior setting was planned (see under ‘Attribution’ above). In the cartoon the child’s right hand is tucked into the Virgin’s décolletage, rather than resting on her shoulder. Her headdress is positioned forward at the top of her forehead in contrast to the headband in the painted versions from which her veil descends, which is set further back, on the crown of her head. The position of the veil is more vertical and less billowing than in the paintings (this feature is not pounced since, when it came to painting, it would have been added as a thin glaze on top of the underlying paint layers).⁸³ The most significant difference from the painted versions is in the sleeve of the Virgin’s dress, which is not drawn in, although it is present in pricked form. Similarly, the Virgin’s thumb is barely visible in the drawing, but is raised in the pricked outline as in the Mackintosh Madonna and all copies. In other words, in order to avoid further alterations to an already densely worked cartoon, Raphael most likely continued to make changes to the design in a separate drawing, the outlines of which were then pricked through both sheets of paper.⁸⁴ The Mackintosh Madonna and most copies follow the pricked version. Domenico Alfani, on the other hand, who as mentioned above reused the cartoon for the central group in two important altarpieces, seems to have followed both the incised outlines and the pricked revisions (the lowered thumb and the Christ Child’s hand tucked into his mother’s décolletage on the one hand and the ample sleeve on the other). Interestingly, the British Museum cartoon was once in a Perugian collection, raising the possibility that Alfani knew or even owned it.⁸⁵
• (2) Also in the British Museum is a beautiful metalpoint study of the heads of a Virgin and Child from the so‐called ‘Pink Sketchbook’ (inv. 1866,0714.79) (fig. 10).⁸⁶ The drawing is in reverse to the painting and not specifically a study for it, probably dating to fractionally earlier. The way the heads are juxtaposed is nevertheless suggestive, and their morphology and contrasting expressions (the Virgin wistfully pensive and the child smilingly cheerful) are also similar. The painting is a re‐elaboration of this earlier idea.
• (3) Musée des Beaux‐Arts, Lille, inv. 455, explores the idea (in reverse) of the Virgin, enveloped in a long veil, seated on a parapet as if in a window embrasure (very similar to the interior versions of the subject). The pose of the child is closer to the Garvagh Madonna (1510–11; see NG 744) and the Madonna dell’Impannata (about 1513–15; Galleria Palatina, Florence).
• (4) Musée des Beaux‐Arts, Lille, inv. 436, also in reverse and very close to the Garvagh Madonna, shows the Virgin holding Christ’s foot with the same fond tactility as in the Mackintosh composition.
• (5) Paul Joannides suggested a rapid study of the head of a smiling child might be a life‐sketch made in preparation for the Mackintosh Madonna (Musée des Beaux‐Arts, Lille, inv. 464).⁸⁷

Prints

After the Mackintosh Madonna

• 1. Jean Charles Flipart (1682–1751), for Crozat’s Recueil, by 1729, etching and engraving in reverse (fig. 11).⁸⁸
• 2. Jacques Bouillard (1744–1806), for the Galerie du Palais Royale, etching and engraving in reverse, published in fascicule 1786.⁸⁹
• 3. Peltro William Tomkins (1759–1840), stipple engraving, published 9 November 1808 when in the collection of Henry Hope; an example is in the British Museum (inv. 1868,0711.412).⁹⁰
• 4. Thérèse Éleonore Lingée (1753–after 1820), after Flipart?⁹¹
• 5. Robert Theer (1808–1863), lithograph, after Flipart?, but in the same direction as the painting (Mackintosh Madonna; landscape); an example is in the Royal Collection.⁹²
• 6. Marco Zignani (active 1802–1830), engraving in reverse, from a drawing by Francesco Pieraccini (active 1823–after 1851), probably after Flipart, as the painting is said still to be in the Orléans collection; published by Alessandro Bernardini in Florence, dated 1827, with a dedication to Raphael Morghen; an example is in the Royal Collection.⁹³
• 7. Joseph Alois Drda (Prague, 1782–1833), etching; an example is in the Royal Collection.⁹⁴
• 8. William Henry Watt (1804–1845), etching and engraving, signed and dated 1846, and published in London when still in Hope’s collection.⁹⁵

After the Miatlev Madonna

• 1. Franz Valentin Durmer (1766–after 1835), oval, stipple engraving, published in Vienna and labelled ‘MUTTER DER WEISHEIT’ (Madonna of Wisdom), after a version of the Miatlev Madonna (interior setting, genitals revealed, no halo); an example is in the Royal Collection, RCIN 850844).⁹⁶
• 2. Niccolò Guidetti (active nineteenth century), engraving after a design by Tommaso Minardi (1787–1871), dated in Rome, 1827; an example is in the Royal Collection (RCIN 850840).⁹⁷ Although a [?second] printing of this engraving declares it to represent ‘LA MADONNA DI RAFFAELE / Della Galleria d’Orléans’,⁹⁸ it is clearly after a version of the Miatlev Madonna (interior setting, Christ’s genitals concealed, radiating halo).

After the cartoon

• 1. Thomas Fairland (about 1804–1852), lithograph, dated 1843.⁹⁹
• 2. Anonymous, nineteenth‐century, wood engraving. An example is in the British Museum (inv. 2001,0520.50).

Previous owners

The Este Family and Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini

Alessandro Ballarin was the first to suggest that the Mackintosh Madonna may be identifiable as one of four Raphael Madonnas listed in the 1603 inventory of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571–1621), two of which – invs 3 and 228 – are identifiable as the Garvagh Madonna (1510–11; NG 744) and the Madonna del Passeggio (about 1516; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). For the Aldobrandini collection, see NG 744 (Garvagh Madonna), under ‘Previous owners’.¹⁰⁰ All four Raphael Madonnas in Aldobrandini’s collection were probably inherited from the private collection of Lucrezia d’Este (1535–1598), sister of Duke Alfonso II d’Este of Ferrara (1533–1597), after she appointed him her residuary legatee shortly before her death.¹⁰¹ While it is tempting to identify the Mackintosh/Miatlev Madonna with a painting described in the 1603 inventory as ‘Una Madonna che tiene il Putto con una mano sotto il piede sinistro, si tiene di Raffaelle da Urbino’ (‘A Madonna who holds the Infant with one hand under his left foot, believed to be by Raphael’) (inv. 57), it is more likely that this smaller picture can be identified as the Small Cowper Madonna in Washington (about 1505; National Gallery of Art), which – with its Urbinate and even ducal associations – may well have entered Lucrezia’s possession through her marriage to Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino (1549–1631).¹⁰² Ballarin, followed by Marialucia Menegatti, believed that the Mackintosh Madonna could have been the fourth Raphael Madonna owned by Lucrezia d’Este and inherited by Cardinal Aldobrandini, described as ‘Una Madonna col putto in braccio grande, di Raffaelle da Urbino’ (‘A large [picture of the] Madonna with her infant in her arms, by Raphael of Urbino’), numbered 32 in the latter’s inventory of 1603 (‘large’, presumably compared to the two other seated Madonnas by Raphael in the same inventory, assuming these to be the Garvagh Madonna (described as ‘piccolo’) and the Small Cowper Madonna, which indeed are both smaller).¹⁰³ The height given in Olimpia Aldobrandini’s inventory (by 1665) as 3.3 palmi (74.25 cm) does correspond fairly well with the Mackintosh Madonna. But Ballarin based this hypothesis principally on the fact that three small Madonnas by Garofalo datable to 1512–14 echo its design, assuming therefore that the painting must have been in the collection of Alfonso I d’Este in Ferrara by the second decade of the sixteenth century.¹⁰⁴ However, as discussed under ‘Reputation’ above, a simpler explanation is that Garofalo saw the composition during his visit to Rome in 1512, recycling the design on his return to Ferrara in November of the same year. This is all the more likely since Sassoferrato copied the painting in around 1650, almost certainly in Rome where he lived by 1641 until his death in 1685 (see no. II.B under ‘Copies’ above).

Orléans Collection

The Mackintosh Madonna is first securely documented in 1727 when it was catalogued by Dubois de Saint Gelais in the collection of the Duc d’Orléans in the Palais‐Royal, Paris.¹⁰⁵ According to Crozat’s Recueil of 1729, the deceased Regent Orléans ‘had it from M. Dorat who had it from the Sieur Beauchamp’ whose identities remain mysterious.¹⁰⁶ Johann David Passavant reported that it was in the Orléans collection by 1721.¹⁰⁷ For a discussion of its reputation while there, see under ‘Conservation’ and ‘Attribution’ above and for the Orléans collection in general see NG 744 (Garvagh Madonna), under ‘Previous owners’.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps on account of its condition, the painting did not sell in the first sale of the Italian and French pictures from the Orléans collection at the close of 1798 where it was offered at Michael Bryan’s Gallery at 88 Pall Mall, London, for the high estimate of 200 guineas.¹⁰⁹ Two years later it achieved a still very respectable price of 150 guineas at Bryan’s sale of the remainder of the Orléans pictures when it was bought by the banker Henry Hope.¹¹⁰

Henry Hope and John Williams Hope

Henry W. Hope (1735–1811) was an Amsterdam merchant banker born in Boston, New England, educated in London, and apprenticed at the banking firm of Gurnell, Hoare and Harman.¹¹¹ In 1762 he moved to Amsterdam where he worked for his uncles and cousin in the family business of Hope Brothers, the leading merchants in the Netherlands. The firm became a successful bank, and also dealt in diamonds from a Portuguese colony in Brazil. Catherine the Great of Russia (1729–1796) was its most important client. Since they were both leading art collectors, Henry sometimes acted as Catherine’s dealer. With his cousin Jan Hope he amassed a great fortune and was among the richest men in Europe. Between 1785 and 1788 he built a summer palace, the Villa Welgelegen in Haarlem, to house his large art collection. In 1794, fearing the advance of French revolutionary forces, he fled to London where he founded the London branch of Hope & Co. At first he lived in Harley Street, adding a wing to his new house to accommodate his pictures (the collection was to become one of the most famous in England at that time). Later he bought Lord Hopetoun’s house in Cavendish Square and a country house at East Sheen.¹¹² He died childless in 1811, leaving capital of 12 million guilders, his art collection and several large properties, much of which was inherited by his niece’s husband, John Williams Hope, his residuary legatee, who became his successor in the Hope firm.

Henry’s heir evidently did not inherit his passion for pictures. A first group of 57 paintings was sold at Christie’s on 6 April 1811, with the bulk of the collection (the Mackintosh Madonna included) offered five years later (27–29 June 1816), followed by a third sale, consisting of furniture and a small group of less important pictures (3–17 July 1816). The middle sale was the most lucrative auction of the new century, the proceeds from the 290 lots (no more than 10 unsold) totalling £14,466.12.¹¹³ The top price of 2,000 guineas brought by Peter Paul Rubens’s Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery (1614; Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, inv. 3461) far overshadowed all other items, including the modest 63 guineas paid by Samuel Rogers for the Raphael.¹¹⁴

Samuel Rogers

Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), the English banker, poet and collector, known in later life as ‘Mr Von Dug Up’ and ‘Skull’ for his cadaverous appearance, visited Paris for the first time in 1791, and toured the art collections in the Palais Royal, where he may well have seen the Mackintosh Madonna among the Raphaels there.¹¹⁵ From about 1795 his brother‐in‐law Sutton Sharpe, who was in touch with many painters, introduced him to artistic circles, and he soon became involved, with others, in bringing over the Orléans collection to England. He would certainly have seen the Mackintosh Madonna when it was exhibited at the Orléans private treaty sales of 1798 and 1800, at the first of which he purchased his first painting, a seaport by Claude (1604/5?–1682), for 50 guineas (lot 270).¹¹⁶ It is likely he also knew the Raphael in Henry Hope’s collection as he was an intimate friend of the latter’s younger cousin, the collector, connoisseur and designer Thomas Hope (1769–1830/1). Rogers bought six paintings at Henry Hope’s posthumous sale, including two other Orléans pictures: Holy Family by Correggio (active 1494; d. 1534) (date and current whereabouts unknown) and a Head of Christ (NG 271) by Guido Reni (1575–1642).

In 1802 Rogers took advantage of the Peace Treaty of Amiens to visit Paris again, where he further developed his artistic tastes in the Louvre filled with artistic spoils from Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy. The poet compared the collection, in which he spent ‘hours every day’, with ‘the pomp and prodigality of heaven’.¹¹⁷ He was able to view Raphael’s Saint Cecilia (about 1514; Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, inv. no. 577), sequestrated from Bologna, which he saw ‘laid on its face and about to receive a new canvas’, marvelling at the new technology of transferring pictures from their original supports.¹¹⁸ In France he socialised with contemporary English artists including Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, Benjamin West and John Opie. The following year he acquired a house at 22 St James’s Place, Westminster, overlooking Green Park, employing the architect James Wyatt to make architectural alterations and John Flaxman to provide neoclassical chimney pieces and ceiling ornament. Although his mansion was modest in terms of size, Rogers oversaw every detail of the interior, demonstrating his taste in his judicious arrangement of pictures, sculpture, antiquities, engravings, books, manuscripts, vases and furniture. The choice picture collection, admired by politicians and literati who were invited to his breakfasts and even more exclusive dinners, was praised by Anna Jameson: The small but most beautiful collection which we are now to consider … comprises about seventy pictures, which have been brought together at intervals during a period of nearly fifty years. In its gradual formation, we trace the same union of exquisite taste with good sense – the same symmetry of mind, in short, which has apparently governed the whole existence of the poet who formed it.¹¹⁹

A Trustee of the National Gallery from 1834, Rogers bequeathed it three paintings, Titian’s Noli Me Tangere (NG 270), the then famous Man in Armour formerly attributed to Giorgione (NG 269), and Guido Reni’s Ecce Homo (NG 271), now believed to be by a follower. His art collections and library, when sold at Christie’s after his death, produced £50,000 over 22 days in May 1856.¹²⁰ A portrait sketch of Rogers by John Linnell was bought for the collection in 1926 (NG 4142).

Robert James Mackintosh

Robert James Mackintosh (1806–1864), the youngest son of the Scottish philosopher and prominent Whig Sir James Mackintosh of Kyllachy (1765–1832), was born in Bombay.¹²¹ He was the author of many travel books as well as a biography of his father (himself a collector, whose portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, executed by 1804, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London). Robert was a barrister‐at‐law at Lincoln’s Inn in 1833.¹²² He met Mary ‘Molly’ Appleton in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, while researching a travel book about the area, and they married in 1839.¹²³ Eva (1843–1935) was the second of their four children. The family moved to the British West Indies in 1847 when Mackintosh accepted the position of Governor of St Kitts. Later, as Governor of Antigua, he was Viceroy of the Leeward Islands colony between 1850 and 1855. By 1861 the family were resident at 2 Hyde Park Terrace, Kensington Gore, London. Robert Mackintosh was a cousin of Emma Wedgwood, wife of Charles Darwin, and his sister Fanny was married to Emma’s brother. He knew Darwin well and corresponded with him during the latter’s voyages on HMS Beagle. Mackintosh may have been interested in items in the Samuel Rogers sale because the latter was a friend of his father.¹²⁴ He died of a fever in 1864.

Eva Mackintosh

Very little is known about Eva Mackintosh, who never married.¹²⁵ She was a guest at the Darwins’ home, Down House in Kent, in January 1861, and was probably a frequent visitor there as a girl.¹²⁶ The Mackintosh Madonna passed to her on the death of her father when she was 21.¹²⁷ At the time of the gift of the Mackintosh Madonna to the National Gallery she lived at 7 Queen’s Gate Place, Kensington. She lent the picture to the Royal Academy Old Master exhibition of 1902 at the suggestion of the then Director of the National Gallery Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919), at which time she expressed her intention to present it to the National Gallery, but not immediately (‘I feel it will be rather hard to part with it, when the time comes, as it has been so long in the family!’).¹²⁸ On Poynter’s retirement in 1905, she committed to transferring title as she wished the gift to be associated with his directorship.¹²⁹ The painting was received on 30 July 1906 and was hung in room VI.¹³⁰

Framing

As can be seen in a photograph of room XXIX (now 12) taken in 1923, the painting was then in a fairly simple gilt hollow frame with small leaf ornament on the outer and sight edges and low relief acanthus leaves in the corners of the hollow (fig. 12).

It is likely that the frame was made for the painting when it arrived in the Gallery to match that around Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which had retained the frame it was acquired in, probably having been commissioned by its previous owner William Beckford (see NG 168, under ‘Framing’). The removable slip has brass pegs in place of the bolt on the slip around the Saint Catherine.

The same frame seems to have been around the painting in 1928 (fig. 13), although Francis Draper was paid to make adjustments to this frame and that of the Saint Catherine (NG 168) in 1926.¹³²

The frame around the painting today has been described as a nineteenth‐century imitation of the Venetian sixteenth‐century pattern.¹³³ It is water gilt and has a broad pulvinated (convex or cushioned) moulding carved with a vine of semi‐abstract character centred on rose heads and covered by acanthus at each corner. The sight edge (which appears to have been cut out) and the back edge are also richly ornamented. There are sixteenth‐century Venetian frames of similar character, many of them with the pulvinated frieze ajouré, and revealing a painted interior. These were well known and were imitated for some Renaissance paintings by the Florentine frame‐maker Ferruccio Vannoni (1881–1965) for the art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) in the 1920s, a fact that may support a similar date for this frame, soon after 1928.

Provenance

Purportedly in the collections of Sieur Beauchamp and M. Dorat. Perhaps by 1721 but certainly by 1727, in the collection of Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans (1674–1723), Regent of France from 1715 to 1723). By descent at the Palais‐Royal, Paris, to Louis‐Philippe‐Joseph d’Orléans, Duc de Chartres (Philippe Égalité; 1747–1793) from 1780. By whom sold in the summer of 1792 with a group of French and Italian paintings from the Orléans collection to vicomte Édouard Walckiers (1758–1837), Paris, for 750,000 livres. Sold by Walckiers to his cousin François‐Louis‐Joseph de Laborde‐Méréville (1761–1802), Paris, for 900,000 livres, who emigrated to London during the French Revolution. Mortgaged in 1797 as part of the Orléans collection to the banker Jeremiah Harman (1764–1844) for £40,000, and then sold in 1798 to the art dealer Michael Bryan (1757–1821), acting on behalf of a syndicate consisting of Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), his nephew George Granville Leveson‐Gower, Earl Gower (1758–1833), later 2nd Marquess of Stafford and 1st Duke of Sutherland, and Frederick, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), husband of Lord Gower’s sister. Exhibited for sale at Bryan’s Gallery, 88 Pall Mall, with the Italian portion of the Orléans collection (sale, London, 26 December 1798, no. 17, valued at 200 guineas (‘not sold’)); reoffered, Peter Coxe, Burrell and Foster, again Bryan’s Gallery, 14 February 1800, no. 58, bought Hope, 150 guineas; Henry W. Hope (1736–1811) (sale, Christie’s, 27–29 June 1816, third day (29 June), lot 67, bought Rogers, 63 guineas); Samuel Rogers (sale, Christie’s, 28 April–16 May 1856, sixth day (3 May), lot 727, bought Gritten, 480 guineas, on behalf of Mackintosh);¹³⁴ Robert James Mackintosh (1806–1864); by descent to Miss Eva Mackintosh (1843–1935), by whom presented, 1906.

Exhibitions

Manchester 1857 (140, provisional catalogue), (133, definitive catalogue); London 1902 (82); London 1975 (234); Barnard Castle 2008–9 (no catalogue); Urbino 2019–20 (III.2).

Notes