Da Correggio (XIX) - Madonna della Cesta

A perfect period-copy (19th century) of the 'Madonna della Cesta' by Antonio Allegri, called Correggio. Correggio, Reggio Emilia, August 1489 – Correggio, Reggio Emilia, March 5, 1534. Oil on canvas reproducing Correggio's Madonna della Cesta (the original from 1525). With a frame measuring 57 x 43 cm - canvas size: 38 x 29 cm - H 5 cm. It has been relined and restored in its era; viewed with a Wood lamp it has very few restorations. The original painting is housed in the National Gallery in London. This small painting, intended for private devotion, had the honor of being cited in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters and Sculptors… (Torrentino, Florence 1550) in decidedly enthusiastic terms: “beautiful to behold, by the hand of Correggio, in which Our Lady puts a chemise on Christ the Child.” Its oldest provenance is precisely that mentioned by Vasari, who recalls it in the first half of the 16th century in Parma at the famous Cavalier Baiardo, Parmigianino’s patron and a refined collector of the time. Probably thanks to this encomiastic mention, the work was appreciated by Bishop Federico Borromeo, who commissioned a copy for his Milanese collection, entrusting the task to his miniaturist Gerolamo Marchesini. Moreover, for similar reasons, Diana Scultori in Rome, in 1577, produced a copper engraving copy that must have helped spread its fame. From the Roman milieu also comes the testimony of Federico Barocci, who showed himself ready to embrace the narrative suggestions offered in works such as the Madonna Albani. And it could not be otherwise since the Urbino artist was seeking a language less intellectual and artificial than that spoken by contemporaneous Mannerists, a language able to clothe sacred history in a fresh and persuasive naturalism. These aspirations led him on more than one occasion to reflect on the models offered by Correggio’s religious art. The heart of the painting is represented by the affectionate bond between the Virgin and the Child, and her gentle attempt to dress him in the small blue chemise she has just finished sewing. The sewing basket with the scissors clearly visible opens the painting to the left and, as far as symbolic allusions can be read, its role is mainly to grant the image a convincing “reality effect.” Portraying the Virgin as very young, almost adolescent, as she has just laid aside the tools of sewing, Correggio succeeds in placing sacred history within a frame of simple and captivating everyday life. Jesus is a real man, according to the evident masculine form of the body, and yet the mother has prepared him a double garment as a sign of the two natures, human and divine, that he bears within him. The truth of his destiny is expressed as he opens his arms in a cross, while the small right hand blesses with the Trinity symbol. Particularly in the background, where Saint Joseph can be glimpsed, reference can be made to northern models, notably to a Dürer engraving that Correggio perhaps knew, the Holy Family in Egypt.