Restored masterpiece from Leonardo’s workshop
MúzeumCafé 8.
A masterpiece depicting the Madonna with child and the young John the Baptist is exhibited alongside paintings by Giorgione, Raffaello, Tiziano in the Old Masters collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. Specialists presume that the work – held in storage for nearly a century – must have been painted by an artist in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop. If not the work of Leonardo himself, it is certainly worthy of his best pupils. According to art historian Vilmos Tátrai, Leonardo is not likely to have ‘dipped his hand’ into the painting. Yet he surely played a significant role in its creation, since the Madonna is based on one of his sketches (held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) which he could well have given to the painter of this work. As for its provenance, Count János Pálffy purchased the painting in London in 1862 and bequeathed it to the Fine Arts Museum in 1912. Nadia Righi, who described the painting in Arte Lombarda in 1996, attributed it to a 16th-century artist of Lombardy. According to Righi, the Madonna’s profile echoes a Madonna in the Hermitage which had been earlier attributed to Leonardo. Vilmos Tátrai believes that this work from Pálffy’s collection and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s small Madonna are closest to Leonardo’s style. There are works in the Collection of Italian Old Masters in Budapest with features suggesting the strong influence of Leonardo, yet none can be characterised by the absolutely close connection that can be seen in several paintings by Boltraffio or this recently restored Madonna with child and John the Baptist.