Lot Essay
We are grateful to Dr. Ann Sutherland Harris for the attribution, given on the basis of photographs. Dr. Sutherland Harris notes the close similarities, for example in 'the technique with rough brushed highlights in the hair [and] along [the] edges of drapery folds', between the present picture and Burrini's Virgin with Saints Petronius and Dionysus the Areopagite painted in 1684 for the church of S Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna (now in Monghidoro, parish church; see D. Benati, ed., Disegni emiliani del sei-settecento, Milan, 1991, p. 223, illustrated). She also remarks on the physiognomical similarity between the figure of Saint Petronius in the latter work and that of Saint Jerome in the present picture.