This exquisite depiction of The Virgin sewing with the Christ Child is a masterpiece by the Roman late baroque artist Francesco Trevisani and can be dated to about 1690–1700. It was painted for Trevisani’s leading patron Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667 – 1740), whose emblem is displayed on the glass vase on the left of the scene. The painting’s high degree of finish and attention to detail is complemented by the copper support, and the beautiful fall of light through the window unifies the intimate domestic scene to make this one of the most refined and poetic works within the artist’s oeuvre. The composition exists in one other version, a painting today in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

This painting can be dated to the last decade of the 17th Century, when Trevisani enjoyed the protection of Cardinal Ottoboni. As with many of the paintings Trevisani executed for his patron, he included Ottoboni’s emblem of the double-headed eagle, in this case on the vase of flowers at centre left. In Trevisani’s portrait of the Cardinal in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, the emblem appears twice, on the bell and on a chair in the background.[1] Trevisani served as Ottoboni’s ‘painter-in-residence’ from the late 1690s, living under his roof at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. By 1698, Ottoboni had two pictures by Trevisani in his collection and, as a mark of the esteem in which he held the painter, in 1709 he sought to secure a knighthood for him, albeit unsuccessfully. Trevisani was, however, finally granted one in 1730 by Cardinal Coscia, along with a pension of 300 scudi.[2]

This is one of two known versions of the composition by Trevisani; the other, that in the Uffizi, is dated by DiFederico to 1690–1700 and is of approximately the same dimensions as this copper.[3] The Uffizi version may have been painted as the right-hand pendant to the artist’s Dream of Saint Joseph, also in the Uffizi and also executed on a copper support of approximately the same dimensions.[4]

The present version is not listed in the inventory of the Cardinal’s goods drawn up after his death on 5 March 1740.[5] Olszewski has argued that the omission of a number of key commissions from the inventory, such as Trevisani’s Holy Family (Cleveland Museum of Art), and indeed the overall low number of his paintings listed there (only thirty for approximately four decades of service), suggests that a substantial proportion of Trevisani’s paintings was disposed of before the inventory was completed. Olszewski further argues that, if pictures from Ottoboni’s collection were indeed sold after his death, those by Trevisani would be the obvious choice, being both of the greatest value and not bound by the complicated primogeniture restrictions (fidecommissio) that affected so much of Ottoboni’s collection as a result of it having been inherited from his uncle Pope Alexander VIII.[6]

After leaving the Ottoboni Collection, the painting remained untraced until the 19th Century, when it is believed to have been acquired in Italy in the 1860s by Mary Anne Shelley, a forebear of the previous owner. Mary Anne Shelley was the granddaughter of Samuel Shelley (1750 – 1808), a miniaturist and founder member of the Royal Watercolour Society, and cousin of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She lived in Florence during the 1860s after the death of her husband and became a close friend and supporter of Garibaldi.

[1] F.R. DiFederico, Francesco Trevisani: Eighteenth-Century Painter in Rome, Washington, 1977, p. 73, no. P5 (illus. pl. 100).

[2] The Dead Christ with Angels at Stanford and The Three Maries in a private collection, California; DiFederico 1977, nos. 24 and 25.

[3] F.R. DiFederico, 1977, p. 46, no. 30 (illus. pl. 24).

[4] F.R. DiFederico, 1977, p. 46, no. 29 (illus. pl. 23).

[5] E.J. Olszewski, The Inventory of Paintings of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667–1740), New York/Oxford, 2004.

[6] F.R. DiFederico, 1977, pp. 10-11.