The Florentine painter Santi di Tito was a leading exponent of the so-called Counter-Maniera, or Counter-Mannerism, which anticipated the Baroque. Born in Sansepolcro in Eastern Tuscany, he is alleged to have studied under the Mannerist Agnolo Bronzino and the painter-sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, although there is a shortage of documentation to confirm this supposition. We do have evidence of the artist’s activity in Rome between 1558 and 1564, where he carried out commissions in the Casino of Pope Pius IV, in Palazzo Salviati and in the Belvedere, in collaboration with Giovanni de’Vecchi and Niccolò Circignani. Sidney Freedberg described his classical inflection as ‘Raphaelesque’, noting that it contrasted against the exuberant, painterly manner of the Romans Federico and Taddeo Zuccari and the Florentines Vasari and Allori.

In 1564, Santi di Tito returned to Florence, where he remained, easily reinserting himself into the artistic circles there and gaining admission to the Accademia del Disegno. Santi proved himself capable of executing works in the dominant Mannerist style when he completed two paintings for the Studiolo of Francesco I in the Palazzo Vecchio, a project for which he was enlisted by Vasari (1568). But according to his early biographer Baldinucci (1688), Santi went on to distance himself from the maniera typified by Bronzino and Allori, preferring a more classical, elegant and naturalistic style. This can be seen in the Sacra Conversazione he painted for the Ognissanti and two altarpieces for Santa Croce, among other examples, and it set him apart from the majority of his peers in Florence.

In the foreground of this composition, the Virgin, Christ Child and the infant Saint John form a stable pyramid with a broad base. Christ grasps the lamb offered solemnly by Saint John, in acknowledgement of his future sacrifice, under the gentle and serene gaze of the Virgin. The figures are illuminated from the upper left by a bright light that emphasises Christ’s diagonal movement and the Virgin’s protective gesture. Joseph, just visible in the background beyond the classical column, prepares the donkey for the flight into Egypt. The mauve, turquoise, pink and red-orange tones of the drapery are those favoured by the Florentine Mannerists, and the folds are polished and sculptural, while the landscape is treated in a more fluid manner. The visible brushstrokes combined with the elegance of line recall Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, from whose work, rather than that of the mannerists, Santi took inspiration. In this panel, we can discern the beginnings of the Counter-Mannerist reform, and anticipate the Florentine ambitions in the final decades of the 16th Century.

As Barbara Wollesen-Wisch notes in the catalogue of the 1987 catalogue, the palatial ruins in which the group is seated features a prominent, grey column, which appears to be made of pietra serena, the grey Florentine limestone. This, she explains, highlights the Virgin’s identification as the Columna novae legis, or Column of the New Law. For this reason, artists of the period frequently included columns, according to a precedent that Wollesen-Wisch credits to Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck (1534-40). She lays out the contemporary scholarly comparisons between the ideal proportions of a classical column and the ideal feminine beauty of the Virgin, noting that the detail thus has both aesthetic and iconographic importance.

This painting was first attributed to Santi di Tito by Jack Spalding (which he communicated to Piero Corsini) and dated to 1570, both for the style, which is similar to that seen in numerous documented altarpieces by the artist, and for the faces of Christ and St. John, repeated in various autograph works. In 1984, that attribution was endorsed by Simone Lecchini Giovannoni (see S. Lecchini Giovannoni, ‘Studi e disegni preparatori di Santi di Tito’, in Paragone, Florence, vol. XXXV, 1984, no. 415, p. 34, no. 20, the version in the Metropolitan Museum illus.) A drawing in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Morton B. Harris shows that the artist experimented with various poses for the figures in this grouping, and both Vasari (1568) and Baldinucci (1688) confirmed that Santi di Tito produced numerous paintings depicting the Madonna and Child. However, few paintings of the subject are currently attributed to Santi di Tito or his workshop. There is a version of this composition in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which, at 103.8 x 85.7 cm., is very slightly smaller than our work, and which is dated to circa 1570. It is clearly based on the same drawing, but there are differences: in the colour of the Virgin’s costume, in the treatment of the surface and landscape, as well as the omission of St. Joseph. A third autograph version, in the Museo di Casa Martelli, Florence, is noted in the 2014 exhibition catalogue entry by Nadia Bastogi, attesting to the popularity of the composition in its own time. Bastogi proposes that the inclusion of the column, symbolising the solidity of the church, might suggest an awareness of Titian’s Pesaro altarpiece, and that the tender relationship between mother and child and the naturalness of the infant could have been inspired by Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch. Further influences, according to Bastogi, range from Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo to Bronzino. She notes that the elegance of the poses prefigures Santi’s paintings for the Studiolo, like the Gathering of Amber, which dates from the beginning of the following decade, and in which one of the putti assumes the same pose as the Christ Child in this composition. Bastogi would, therefore, identify the Metropolitan version as the earliest of the three, followed by our version and finally the Martelli picture.

Little is known about the painting’s history prior to its appearance in the collection of the dealer Piero Corsini, who lived between New York and Monaco, in the 1980s. Based on the idealised beauty and features of the Virgin, which correspond to 16th Century courtly ideals as laid out in Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo delle belleze delle donne of 1542, Wollesen-Wisch suggests that it may originally have been commissioned by a noble in the Florentine court.