The Virgin and Child with Saints Cecilia and Ursula
The Virgin and Child with Saints Cecilia and Ursula is an important work by the Renaissance Venetian artist, Vittore Carpaccio. It was sold by Nicholas Hall on behalf of a private collector.
Provenance
Contessa Morosini, Venice, as of 1945
Olvrado Lebreton, Naples, by 1969
Opera Don Bosco nel Mondo Foundation, Lugano
with Colnaghi, London, after 1984
Frank Pearl, Washington, D.C., after 1988
Acquired from the above by the current owner, 2005
with Nicholas Hall, New York; sold to the following
Private collection
Exhibitions
London, Colnaghi, Gothic to Renaissance: European Painting 1300-1500, 26 October – 12 November 1988
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Carpaccio, 20 November 2022 – 12 February 2023; travelled to Venice, Palazzo Ducale, 18 March – 18 June 2023.
Bibliography
Vittorio Sgarbi,’Vittore Carpaccio: poetica e committenza’, Prospettiva, 14, July 1978, pp. 31-46, reproduced figs. 1, 2, 5, 7.
Vittorio Sgarbi, Carpaccio, Bologna, 1979, no. 16, reproduced.
Vittorio Sgarbi, Capolavori della Pittura Antica, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Mamiano, 1984, exh. cat., p. 97.
Peter Humfrey in Donald Garstang (ed.), Gothic to Renaissance: European Painting 1300-1500, Colnaghi, London, 1988, exh. cat., pp. 33-40, reproduced.
Peter Humfrey, Carpaccio: Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1991, pp. 62-63, no. 15, reproduced.
Vittorio Sgarbi and Giusseppe Pinna, Carpaccio, Milan, 1994, pp. 196-197, no. 3 (as dating from ca. 1490-1493).
Sara Menato, Per la giovinezza di Carpaccio, Padua, 2016, pp. 20-22, pl. 6 fig. 8, pl. 8, fig. 10, reproduced.
Peter Humfrey, Carpaccio, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2022, exh. cat., pp. 145-146, no. 16.
Eliot W. Rowlands, ‘Here, There, and Everywhere: Harold Parsons, the Italian Art Market and a Letter of 1948’, in Lynn Catterson and Denise Budd (eds.), Describing-Circumscribing Art Markets: Italy for Sale, Leiden, 2023, pp. 329-407.
Essay
This Virgin and Child with Saints Cecilia and Ursula is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful of the artist’s small-scale works, and, together with the signed Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, probably represents the artist’s most engaging contribution to the popular, well-established genre of the half-length Madonna. These works can be seen as highly successful combinations of the dignified half-length formula, developed by Giovanni Bellini, and Carpaccio’s own taste for picturesque anecdote. Carpaccio’s main figure group, with the Virgin seen in three-quarter view praying over the Child who reclines on two large cushions on the foreground parapet, is clearly based on a widely diffused composition by Bellini dating from the early 1470s,[1] and the dark, neutral background was evidently inspired by Bellini’s Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine and Mary Magdalene in the Accademia, Venice. Still, there is a significant contrast of mood between Carpaccio’s picture and that of his Bellini prototypes.
Whereas Bellini’s Madonnas are pensive and slightly melancholy, Carpaccio’s main figure group combines aristocratic refinement with a genre-like intimacy. The Child appears as a real human baby, clutching a piece of fruit in his chubby fist and dressed as an infant member of the Venetian patrician class. His mother, with her embroidered veil, robe and mantle hemmed with a pseudo-Cufic script that alludes to worldly luxury, gazes down on him with an expression of gentle solitude. The princess-like saints similarly combine feminine tenderness with sartorial richness. Compared to the somewhat remote character of Bellini’s Madonnas, those of Carpaccio appear undeniably secular. The picture was almost certainly a work of private devotion, presumably intended for a bedroom rather than for the more solemn surroundings of a church, so the informal, spontaneous approach was likely adopted in order to render its pious message more vivid to the original owners.
The identity of the two saints in this painting is not absolutely clear. The saint on the left, holding her palm of martyrdom and wearing a crown of roses, is almost certainly Cecilia, who was shown with a very similar crown in the celebrated altarpiece by Antonello da Messina for the Venetian church of San Cassiano, of which she was cotitular. The saint on the right, whose crown and coiffure are richly decorated with jewels, is probably the princess Ursula, who, as depicted by Carpaccio in his Life of Saint Ursula cycle, suffered martyrdom by being shot with arrows. It may be suggested that the present intimate panel was painted for one of her devotees involved in the commission of the cycle.
Often considered second only to Giovanni Bellini as the outstanding Venetian painter of his generation, Vittore Carpaccio was once a student of Bellini’s younger brother, Gentile. Influenced by the style of Antonello da Messina and Early Netherlandish artists, Carpaccio had a taste for anecdote and eye for the crowded detail of the Venetian scene. This is particularly evident in his scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula, the first of the two great cycles of paintings for which he became known. The nineteenth century art critic John Ruskin described his work as ‘the sweetest, because the truest, of all that Venice was born to utter: the painted syllabling of it is nearly the last word and work of hers in true life’.[2] In the present panel, the delicate Virgin is far removed from the voluptuous feminine ideal of various High Renaissance Madonnas by such artists as Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian. Intrinsic to Carpaccio’s artistic style is the hard, clear, chiseled quality of the forms and the precisely controlled draftsmanship of a kind that even the older Giovanni Bellini had by this date abandoned for a broader, softer type of handling.
Carpaccio’s works are not always easy to date. Sgarbi and Humfrey were once inclined to date this panel to 1495-1500. However, its closeness to Giovanni Bellini and even Antonella da Messina suggest an earlier date. Humfrey now believes it to have been painted ca. 1490-1495. This would place it around the same time as the early works from the Saint Ursula Cycle and the Correr Museum Two Venetian Ladies, which was particularly praised by Ruskin and whose elegant yet distracted expressions echo those of the two female saints in the present picture.
A note on the early provenance
The Morosini were a historic Venetian family who produced several Doges between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had three palaces in Venice including one on the Grand Canal. One prominent member of the family, Marco Antonio (1509), was a general of the Venetian forces that fought against the d’Este controlled Ferrara and the Venetian ambassador to Florence, Naples and Emperor Maximilian. Although they were known patrons of Venetian artists when it was painted, there is no documentary evidence linking the family to the present work before 1945.❖