The Artist: Best remembered as one of the artists who traveled to Rome in 1481 to paint frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel, Cosimo Rosselli was one of the most successful Florentine painters of his day with an activity that spanned nearly fifty years. Born in Florence in 1440, he belonged to a family of craftsmen that also included his father Lorenzo, a stonemason; his half-brother Francesco (1448–1508/27), a famous engraver (and reportedly also an illuminator and painter, though his work in these fields remains unidentified); and his step-brother Chimenti (1417–1482), a decorative painter. His cousin Bernardo di Stefano (1450–1526) was an equally prolific painter of panels and frescoes, and like Cosimo, trained in the most industrious workshop in Florence, that of Neri di Bicci. Cosimo is documented as Neri’s apprentice from May 1453 until October 1456, when he went to Rome for reasons now unknown. He was back in Florence in 1459, where he began an altarpiece (now lost) for the Scali chapel in Santa Trinita. He must have been well-established by 1465, when he and Chimenti were summoned to work at the cathedral in Pisa. In 1481, after several high-profile commissions in Florence, he was called to Rome to work in the Sistine Chapel alongside Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Perugino; Biagio d’Antonio (with whom Rosselli had an earlier association), Bartolomeo della Gatta, and Luca Signorelli would later join this team in 1482. On Cosimo’s return to Florence in 1483, his shop became one of the foremost in the city; it produced altarpieces, frescoes, small-scale devotional panels, and portraits for patrons in Florence and the surrounding region. The artist also advised on important civic matters, such as in 1491, when he served as a judge in the competition to design the facade of Florence Cathedral, and in 1504, when he was on the committee to decide the placement of Michelangelo’s
David. He died in Florence in January 1507 and was buried in his neighborhood church of Santissima Annunziata. His pupils included three of the most important Florentine painters of the next generation: Piero di Cosimo (
75.7.1;
75.7.2;
22.60.52), Fra Bartolomeo (
06.171;
1982.60.8), and Mariotto Albertinelli.
Despite his contemporary esteem, the sixteenth-century biographer Giorgio Vasari disparaged Rosselli as “neither one of the rarest nor most excellent painters of his time.” Yet as his extant works demonstrate, Rosselli was a sound technician, and stylistically abreast with the most important developments in contemporary Florentine painting. He also keenly observed contemporary Netherlandish painting, as can be seen in the delicate
Visitation (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford) and
Assumption of the Virgin (Museo Beato Angelico, Vicchio). which show a remarkable facility in the medium of oil paint. Rosselli had fully adopted this technique by the mid-1490s, in place of the traditional tempera technique in which he was trained. Furthermore, His most ambitious altarpieces, such as the
Apotheosis of Saint Barbara (Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence) and
Salviati Altarpiece (Cenacolo di San Salvi, Florence), exhibit a sensitive use of color, a dignified sense of design, and a preference for polished, stonelike surfaces. His frescoes, such as the
Vocation of Saint Philip Benizzi (Santissima Annunziata, Florence), the scenes in the Sistine Chapel, or the
Miracle of the Holy Blood (Sant’Ambrogio, Florence) reveal his command of perspectival space, while his aptitude for portraiture comes forth in the particularly fine example at The Met (
50.135.1).
The Picture: The Virgin looks out at the viewer, supporting the Christ Child who stands in an elegant contrapposto pose on a freestanding stone ledge. The child delivers a blessing to the viewer and carries a small globe, referring to his role as the
Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World (the European continent and Italian peninsula are clearly visible). Two wingless angels appear in front of the ledge. The one at the right carries a bowl of sweetbriars, the five petals of which symbolize the five wounds of Christ, while the one at the left rests his hands on the corner of the stone ledge. A distant view of Florence can be seen in the landscape at the upper right.
Function and Iconography: As indicated by its rather modest dimensions, the painting must have been hung in a domestic interior, where it would have served as the focus for daily prayer and devotion. This function is clearly articulated by the angel at the right, who turns to look out at the viewer as if in an invitation to pray. The angels are intermediaries, placed close to the viewer’s space—before the stone ledge and on a lower plane than the holy figures—and seem to offer a behavioral model: like the angels, the viewer would have knelt before the Virgin and Child, in prayer. The empty space between the two angels, in fact, seems intended for the devotee.
The unusual architectural setting is also important to the iconographic program. The Virgin stands beneath a gilded dome supported by four columns and backed by a niche, recalling a tabernacle or baldachin, a structure that typically surrounds the high altar in a church. The ledge on which the Christ stands can therefore be interpreted as an altar, and the Virgin’s presentation of him to the viewer, in turn, as a Eucharistic offering. The Eucharistic connotations are underscored by the Christ Child’s nudity, which highlights the sanctity of his flesh, and by the sweetbriars proffered by the angel which, as mentioned above, allude to Christ’s wounds and, in turn, the Passion. The hieratic frontality of the Virgin and Child imbues the picture with a sense of sacred solemnity and offers the viewer a clear focal point for devotional meditation.
Design and Style: The composition—with the Virgin supporting the Christ Child on a ledge—was one of the most popular in late fifteenth-century Florence. It is today commonly referred to as the
Madonna davanzale, or Madonna at a windowsill, since the Christ Child is usually placed on a stone ledge or parapet that continues across the lower part of the picture to create the illusion that the figures are being seen through an open window. The type has its origins in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the most versatile artists in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century, who exploited the design in both painting and sculpture; The Met, in fact, possesses one of the outstanding examples in painting (
14.40.647). Though Rosselli’s picture has often been described as the product of Verrocchio’s influence, it is important to recognize that the design has been significantly altered in order to enhance its iconographic content. Furthermore, the figural style has little to do with Verrocchio’s example; with their heavy eyes, long noses, and stiff gestures, the figures are entirely in keeping with Rosselli’s personal manner. The picture should thus be considered a highly original response to Verrocchio on the part of Rosselli, rather than a simple testament to the former’s influence. It is perhaps also worth mentioning here that the attribution to Rosselli has never been questioned with the sole exception of Padoa Rizzo’s (1988) proposal that Agnolo di Domenico del Mazziere, alias the Master of Santo Spirito, was involved as an assistant. The entirely uniform surface, however, rules out such a possibility.
Date: The picture’s date has never reached consensus, with proposals ranging from as early as 1475 to as late as 1505 (see Refs.). The most convincing hypothesis is that it dates to about 1480–82, around the same time Rosselli was painting in the Sistine Chapel. The Virgin’s cylindrical form, with her stilted gestures and unflinching expression, have much in common with the female figures in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Flemish-inspired landscape is far deeper and airier than those in Rosselli’s works of the 1470s. Similarities can also be drawn with the
Madonna and Child with Two Angels (Philbrook Art Museum, Tulsa) and
Lamentation (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Both are traditionally dated to the 1490s but they were almost certainly painted in the years around 1480, as persuasively argued by Kanter.[1] These pictures further correspond to The Met’s example because of their delicate tempera hatching, which stands apart from Rosselli’s use of oil in the 1490s.
Variant Composition: Wehle (1940) observed that a panel at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, is similar in composition to The Met’s panel (see fig. 5 above). Indeed, despite some differences (the angels are reversed, the setting is altered to an interior pierced by two windows, and the sweetbriars have moved to a translucent glass on the parapet, now covered by a textile), the Huntington’s painting is close enough to The Met’s to presume a direct relationship between the two. Despite Zeri’s (1971) claim that it cannot be determined which of the two came first, Wehle (1940) was undoubtedly right to assert the primacy of The Met’s version. In fact, his point can be proven by reconsidering the authorship of the Huntington panel. Traditionally attributed to Bastiano Mainardi, a pupil and associate (and eventually brother-in-law) of Domenico Ghirlandaio, it in fact bears little resemblance to that artist’s signed and documented works, such as the panels and frescoes he left in his native San Gimignano. Instead, the slick and oily treatment of the paint suggests that it was made by Domenico Ghirlandaio’s younger brother Benedetto, who spent six years in France where he adopted the technique of working in an oil-based medium (or at the very least manipulating his tempera to look like oil).[3] Since Benedetto was the only Ghirlandaio brother to adopt this technique, the Huntington panel can be attributed to him and given a
post quem of 1493, when he returned from France. The technique also approaches the other works that have been attributed to Benedetto around this time, such as the
Saint Lucy with Tommaso Cortesi as a Donor (Santa Maria Novella, Florence) or the two tondi now in Birmingham (Birmingham Museum of Art) and Naples (Museo di Capodimonte). Rosselli’s picture must have therefore been painted first, later to be imitated by Benedetto Ghirlandaio. Exactly why the picture was imitated remains to be clarified, but we can perhaps imagine that it was at the request of a patron, likely one with a particular appreciation for Rosselli’s engaging iconography.
Christopher Daly 2021
[1] Laurence Kanter, “Review. Cosimo Rosselli: Painter of the Sistine Chapel,”
Renaissance Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (June 2003), pp. 289–91.
[3] For the most recent study on Benedetto Ghirlandaio, see Takuma Ito, “Ghirlandaio Brothers Reconsidered: The Master of the Saint Louis Madonna as Young Benedetto Ghirlandaio,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 83 (2020), pp. 81–130. My thanks to Takuma Ito for discussing the Huntington picture with me and agreeing, albeit tentatively, with the attribution to Benedetto Ghirlandaio.
