Madonna and Child Roman School '600

The painting we are looking at is a painting, oil on canvas, measuring 100 x 82 cm without frame and 125 x 110 cm with a beautiful period frame, depicting a very colourful and sweet Madonna and Child where the very harmonious composition is clearly ascribable for style and chromatic delicacy to the Roman manner and school of the late 17th century.

In this canvas, it is worth noting that we can see the artistic expression of a singular painting specialised especially in his youth in paintings depicting portraits of people. Thus, we are before a work realised by a talented artist who shows that he has well understood the refined Italian figurative culture of his illustrious predecessors such as Raphael or Annibale Carracci.

It will be useful to recall that the artist's aim in his paintings was to link painting, endowed with the naturalistic classicism typical of Carracci's style, with the increasing spread of the Baroque and idealised Beauty that was spreading especially in the works of Guido Reni or Domenichino.

The light pictorial material, the particular tone of the azure colours, the soft hues emerging from a neutral preparation base, the manner of highlighting combined with a subject that is in itself gentle and loving are all characteristics that refer to the best figurative culture of Rome.

The sweet work emerges in itself from the standard canons of the time, both in terms of the colours and the scene as well as the objects in the foreground and also St. Joseph, who is not with the other two protagonists, but is in the background, although in a context in which his personality seems to be well emphasised and precise.