Lot Essay
When this panel was first published, it was considered to be by Antonio del Massaro da Viterbo, il Pastura (active by 1478-before 1516), the leading indigenous painter of his generation in the Lazio. He was an assistant of Pinturicchio in the Borgia Apartments of the Vatican and strongly influenced by him and Perugino. That attribution was endorsed by Berenson; that the picture was selected for illustration in the 1968 edition of the lists may have been due to Luisa Vertova. Federico Zeri also accepted the attribution to Pastura (op. cit.). He suggested that the Madonna and Child may derive from Perugino’s Madonna della Consolazione of 1496-8 (Perugia, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 270) and that the saints might depended on a Madonna composition by Perugino of the same decade. There is an obvious parallel between the Saint Jerome and his counterpart in the altarpiece from San Girolamo at Lucca, now at Chantilly, which was almost certainly designed by Perugino.
In 1989, Filippo Todini plausibly associated both this Madonna and the altarpiece at Chantilly with a group of works that had been linked to a Madonna formerly at Finch College, New York. He suggested that these were by Rocco Zoppo, who Vasari states was an assistant of Perugino when he was working on the Sistine Chapel. He was definitely in Florence in 1496 and the close stylistic relationship between the Chantilly panel and many passages in the Cenacolo di Fuligno in the former Convento di Sant’Onofrio in Florence makes it clear that the painter of these was then working in Perugino’s Florentine équipe. Todini fairly states that this panel was possibly based on an invention of Perugino (‘forse basata su un invenzione del Perugino’; op. cit., p. 298). His attribution to Rocco Zoppo was accepted by Everett Fahy (see the entry in the 2011 sale catalogue).
The contemporary popularity of the composition is attested to by the existence of a number of versions. One of significantly smaller size (9 7/8 by 7 5/8 in.), from the collections of Andrew W. Anderson and Senator Edward A. MaGuire, was sold in these Rooms on 9 April 1990, lot 64. A panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 32.100.74), in which the Virgin is shown seated and Saint Jerome’s lion is introduced, is reasonably considered by Todini to be by a follower of Pinturicchio. Todini records a further variant in a Venetian private collection (op. cit., p. 308).