MASP

In a letter of June 20, 1947, to P. M. Bardi, Roberto Longhi wrote: “Your work has the habitual characteristics of the last phase of the Bolognese Francesco Francia, both in the shining, almost vitreous luminance of the enamel, and in the persuasive color harmony that echoes between the gure and background as well as in the a­ectionately anecdotic invention of the Child Jesus playing with John the Baptist’s cross. e Virgin’s head, certainly the principal and most reliable autograph of the painting, is very similar, in the long sfumato oval, to the Virgin in the Buonvisi retable, dated around 1511 (today in the National Gallery, London) and may, therefore, indicate the approximate date of the work. At this time, Francia was accustomed to making use of disciples for his works, and it may be presumed that this occurred in some parts of the Child Jesus and of Saint John the Baptist”. Virgin with Child and the Infant St. John the Baptist shows, in fact, exceptionally denitive traces of the poetics of Francia and, by extension, of the Bolognese Classicism of the time. Prominent among these traces are the virtuoso torsion of the body of Jesus, which avoids dynamic tension; the tenuously rounded rhythms of the shapes; the grace of the opposing diagonals of the Child and the melancholic head of the Virgin; and nally the unity of feeling of the pyramid formed by the gures in an extremely simple inner space, in which the curtaining synthesizes the domestic decorum and provides a glimpse of a no-less-idealized landscape. Although the Virgin and Saint Anne Buonvisi is documented as dated from slightly aer 1511, it provides reliable stylistic and chronological references that situate our work during Francia’s later phase. e dilating of shapes and the idealizing impetus seen here are symptomatic of the pervasive inuence of Raphael in Bologna in the early 1500s, which is associated with a taste for abstractionism typical of Bolognese intellectualism, in which Francia’s painting played a key role.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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