Madonna and Child in Glory
Location: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami
City: Coral Gables, FL
Artist: Benvenuto Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi)
Contents
Artist Biography
About the Painting
Related Links and Resources
References
Artist Biography
Il Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi) – (1481-1559)
Benvenuto Tisi, known as Garofalo, was one of the leading painters of sixteenth-century Ferrara, the site of one of the most brilliant and cultured courts of Renaissance Italy. He was probably trained by Boccaccio Boccacini of Cremona who worked in Ferrara from 1497 to 1500. As an established master, Garofalo became known for his carefully rendered religious paintings and mythological scenes.
The Lowe’s Madonna and Child in Glory is a small-scale version of a composition that Garofalo employed for several large altarpieces, ultimately derived from Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana) of 1511-12, which he may have seen in person on a trip to Rome. As in Raphael’s masterpiece, the glorified status of the Virgin Mary is conveyed by her elevated position in heaven, enthroned on clouds. The painter chose to further emphasize her special role as Queen of Heaven by the actions of her minions: two angels hold a crown above her head, while four others play music in her honor. The wide landscape below is a generalized setting used by Garofalo in a number of paintings, but in this context it is more than a mere backdrop. Its prominence suggests that the work was intended as a votive offering, invoking the Virgin’s protection for a particular (but unknown) town and its surrounding countryside.
More than any other painter outside Raphael’s closest Roman circle, Garofalo imitated the style of this High Renaissance master. He was influenced also by the rich chiaroscuro effects and intense colorism of his Ferrarese contemporary, Dosso Dossi.
– Dr. Perryi Lee Roberts
About the Painting
Members of Pio di Savola family were some of the earliest recorded owners of Garofalo’s Madonna and Child in Glory (until 1843) after which the painting was sold to the Holford family in England. Finally, the panel was acquired by Samuel H. Kress on May 15th 1929 and was eventually gifted to the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in 1961.
In a condition report written by Alan Burroughs in 1930, Burroughs described Garofalo’s technique as “rapidly painted with free, but small, [with] rather loaded bushes, is quite similar in technique to the Legend of St. Nicholas in the Metropolitan Museum and to the Baptism of Christ in Mr. Kress’s collection.” Prior to conservation treatment in 1930-31, Madonna and Child in Glory was nailed into an additional support (as can be seen in the early x-radiograph pictured in the slideshow featured above) but was subsequently cradled, cleaned, and retouched in areas of loss.
Related Links and Resources
“Benvenuto: Biography: Virtual Uffizi.” Virtual Uffizi Gallery.
“Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi).” Metropolitan Museum of Art.
References
“Benvenuto Garofalo”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2015.
Gardner, Edmund G. The Painters of the School of Ferrara. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Wattel, Arvi. “Garofalo. Ferrara.” The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (2008): 568-70.