The Madonna and Child with Tobias and the Angel

This hitherto unknown picture is, as Antonio Mazzotta recognised on the basis of a photograph, an early work by Palma Vecchio (private communication). Born near Bergamo at the western tip of the terra firma, he was probably trained by Andrea Previtali, himself a former pupil of Giovanni Bellini. By March 1510, he was in Venice, where he must have studied works by Bellini with close attention. He subsequently responded to the challenge of the young Titian who, after the death of Giorgione later that year and the departure of Sebastiano del Piombo for Rome in 1511, was the unrivalled painter of the younger generation in the city. Palma himself gained a considerable clientele in Venice and found an artistic dynasty that survived for over a century.

As Mazzotta observes, the head of the Angel Raphael is an interpretation to that in Titian’s Tobias and the Angel in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. That of the young Tobias is very similar to the head in his own Tobias and the Angel at Stuttgart (P. Rylands, Palma il Vecchio, L’opera completa, Milan, 1988, no. 12), while the Madonna’s is of a type that haunted the artist throughout his career. Mazzotta suggests a date of 1514-15, between the Zogno Adoration of the Shepherds (ibid., no. 22) and the Holy Family in Berlin (ibid., no. 23) and considers that it is close to the masterly Assumption of the Virgin from the Scuola di Santa Maria (Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia; ibid., no. 11). It is thus an early example of the half-length horizontal Madonna compositions that were to become a speciality of Palma and is the smallest, and thus in a sense most intimate, of these. His preference for the format no doubt reflects the impact of early works of the kind by Titian.