Acclaimed in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists as the most important Roman painter of the late 1400s, Antonio di Benedetto Aquilio was the son of a painter documented in Rome between 1423 and 1451.¹ Antoniazzo Romano, as he became known, was likely born sometime between 1435 and 1440, given that his earliest confirmed work is an altarpiece commissioned by Cardinal Bessarion, dated 1464.² From that year until the 1490s, Antoniazzo received frequent commissions from the Vatican, often collaborating with prominent painters such as Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), Melozzo da Forlí (1438–1494), and Perugino (1446–1523), who were called to Rome from other Italian centers by Pope Sixtus IV.³ Antoniazzo absorbed their influences but also brought his own interests and sensitivities to his work. For instance, he is known to have copied Byzantine icons, such as the Madonna and Child of the high altar of Sant’Agostino in Rome,⁴ which served as important sources for his own paintings of the Madonna. Thanks to commissions from the pope and from prominent Roman families, Antoniazzo left his mark on many churches in Rome through his altarpieces and frescoes.⁵ However, the achievements of the unrivaled masters of the High Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—overshadowed Antoniazzo’s later efforts. He became less active after 1505, but his will, written shortly before his death in April 1508, documents the substantial wealth he had accumulated throughout a successful career.⁶

The small panel of a Madonna and Child with a donor that Percy S. Straus acquired in 1921 was immediately recognized as a masterwork from the brush of Antoniazzo by Mason Perkins, as set out in his letter to Straus dated March 15, 1922.⁷ In acknowledgment of its outstanding quality, it was included in an exhibition of Italian paintings organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year.⁸ In her monograph on the artist, Anna Cavarallo describes this panel as one of the finest works by Antoniazzo from that felicitous period of Ghirlandaio’s influence, manifested in the use of perspective, the firmness of the outline, and the elegance of the figures.⁹ Antoniazzo seamlessly combines these elements with older traditions such as the gold ground and the inclusion of the diminutive figure of a donor, which hark back to medieval practices.

The outstanding feature of this painting is the striking beauty of the youthful Madonna and her tender interaction with the Christ Child. She inclines her head toward the child, balancing somewhat precariously on one foot on a ledge in the foreground, so that their cheeks touch. She gently steadies him with her left hand, while pulling her diaphanous veil across his loins. The Child in turn holds on to her neck with his right hand and grasps a goldfinch with his left. Carolyn C. Wilson pointed to a marble relief by Andrea Bregno (1418–1506) as a likely source of the Christ Child’s unusually animated stance.¹⁰ Although the comparison is enticing, it would push the date of the panel, which is generally thought to have been painted around 1475–76, forward by a few years. Thus, Wilson’s alternate suggestion of a thirteenth-century mosaic in Santa Maria Nova (Santa Francesca della Romana) in Rome, featuring a similarly striding Christ Child, seems a more likely source (fig. 16.1).¹¹ Antoniazzo’s interest in Byzantine art is well documented by his copies of several icons of the Madonna and Child venerated in a number of Roman churches.¹²

Both the unusual stance of the child and the motif of the veil drawn across his genitals are repeated in numerous other works produced by Antoniazzo and his studio over the years. At least five versions from his own hand and another nine produced in his workshop follow this type closely.¹³ The motif of the veil drawn across the Child was first used by Antoniazzo in his early Madonna della Consolazione, dated 1467–70,¹⁴ but here and in another twelve autograph works the Child is shown in different poses.¹⁵ Although both the poses and gestures of the Christ Child are often animated, the crossed-leg stance is not repeated without the veil motif. The veil itself, according to Edgar Peters Bowron and Mary Morton, and specifically the emphatic manner in which the Virgin holds it, has been associated with the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ, a devotional work that states that the Virgin used her kerchief to swaddle the baby and wrapped the same cloth around Christ’s loins on the cross. Thus, this motif was central to the contemporary debate about Christ’s human nature and the Incarnation.¹⁶ Bowron and Morton argue further that the donor is not only a petitioner for his own salvation but also acts a witness to the Incarnation.

The donor wears elegant clothing, consisting of a knee-length coat of purple velvet, worn over a red long-sleeved tunic that echoes the Virgin’s own gown. The tunic’s fashionably slit sleeves reveal a white shirt underneath. His hat, possibly that of a Roman prelate, hangs down his back.¹⁷ Many works by Antoniazzo, including his earliest dated painting, include small figures of donors; an almost identical figure, for instance, is included in the same place on his Madonna and Child with Saints Peter and Paul.¹⁸

The frame with its pediment adorned with the dove of the Holy Spirit seems to consist of old elements, but assembled relatively recently, according to Wilson. However, it reflects the type of original tabernacle frames found on other similar works by Antoniazzo.¹⁹

—Helga Kessler Aurisch