The Madonna suckling the infant Christ

Giampietrino’s reputation as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most successful and talented pupils is by now well established. His mastery of form and light are perfectly demonstrated in this finely preserved panel, which was attributed to Leonardo in the nineteenth century while in the collection of the Earls of Suffolk, who also owned Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks (fig. 1; London, National Gallery).

Relatively few facts are known about Giampietrino's life, but a key reference appears to record his presence in Leonardo’s studio; the name ‘gian pietro’ appears in a note, which dates to the 1490s, together with the name of Salaì, in the Codex Atlanticus, held in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (fol. 713r; ex fol. 264 r-b). Giampietrino's earliest known works indeed reveal an artist who trained by copying and reinterpreting compositions of his master. In his Kneeling Leda with Her Children (Kassel, Staatliche Museen), for example, Giampietrino uses Leonardo’s sketches of Leda and the Swan, suggesting that he had access to drawings and designs in the workshop. Similarly, the modelling and execution of the devotional paintings of his early maturity show a clear indebtedness to, and knowledge of, Leonardo’s technique and style: this is particularly evident in the downcast gaze of the Madonna and the accomplished use of sfumato in the Madonna and Child in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, characteristics that the present panel clearly shares. However, while the Borghese picture shows a landscape through a window beyond, here Giampietrino chooses to place the figures in front of a trellis around which foliage has grown. It inevitably calls to mind the hortus conclusus, an attribute of the Virgin Mary herself, which was used from the fourteenth century onwards in representations of the Madonna. In fifteenth-century Milan, the motif was employed by Giampietrino’s contemporaries, notably Bernardino Luini in his Madonna del Roseto (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera).

The provenance of the picture reveals the heightened interest amongst British collectors in the work of Leonardo and his followers in the later eighteenth century. This keen interest continued into the following century and the panel was loaned on three occasions, in 1818, 1851 and 1858, together with Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, to public exhibitions whilst in the collection of the Earls of Suffolk. During the 1858 show, George Scharf, then the newly appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, noted that doubts had begun to surface about the attribution of the Madonna. It would be many more decades before it would be rightfully recognised as the work of Giampietrino, whose artistic personality and significance have only recently been fully restored.

We are grateful to Dr. Cristina Geddo, who notes that this is the only known autograph version of this composition, and will include the picture in her forthcoming catalogue on the artist.