Bartolomeo Ghetti - Missing Virgin and Child With St. John

Missing Virgin and Child With St. John

Bartolomeo Ghetti has been identified as the author of a panel depicting the Madonna and Child with St. John, the property of the Seminario Patriarcale of Venice. Although this picture mysteriously disappeared from the Seminario’s Pinacoteca a few decades ago, the work was well photographed as a result of a traditional attribution to Raphael, and on the basis of a clear Alinari photograph dating from the early years of the twentieth century it has been possible to identify the painting’s true author with a more than reasonable degree of certainty.

Ghetti's lost Madonna and Child, which measures 54 x 50 cm., forms part of the historic collection of marchese Federico Manfredini (1743–1829), the wealthy and influential counselor of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Born into the provincial nobility at Rovigo in 1743, Manfredini first rose to prominence as a military commander in Austrian service. His career at the Tuscan court of Lorraine began in 1776, when Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo summoned him as tutor to his children. Under Pietro Leopoldo’s son and successor Ferdinando III, Manfredini was appointed Maggiordomo Maggiore, and negotiating in this guise with Napoleon in 1797 he briefly preserved the independence of the Grand Duchy. Forced to flee with his sovereign before Napoleon’s forces only two years later, Manfredini fell into disgrace and was exiled to Sicily. In 1803, when Ferdinando III was compensated for the loss of Tuscany with the title of Prince Elector and Duke of Salzburg, Manfredini returned to his former position at the Grand Ducal court. But he retired from public life, officially on account of a riding accident, in 1805, making his home at first in Padua and subsequently at his villa at Campo Verardo, in the Venetian terraferma, where he died in 1829.

According to early authors, the Madonna and Child with St. John comes from the Grand Ducal collection at Palazzo Pitti, from which the picture — already bearing the optimistic attribution to Raphael — was presented to Manfredini by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany. The Alinari photograph shows the inner part of the work’s gilt frame, consisting of a cyma molding and, around it, a row of oblong beads; this is easily recognizable as the standard cornice da collezionista given by Manfredi to many of his paintings, and which still graces a large proportion of the paintings in the Seminario of Venice. The celebrity of Manfredini’s “Raphael” is attested by the existence of copy, known only from an old photograph in the Fototeca Berenson. A note on the back indicates that it is on canvas and belonged to the Carlo Foresti collection in Milan as of in October 1926. This version has a slick, glib quality that suggests it is probably a replica created around the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth — perhaps as a substitute for the original that was given away by the Grand Duke.

The traditional attribution to Raphael endured for well over a century after Manfredini acquired it, still appearing (but with a question mark) on the early twentieth century photograph by Alinari. According to tradition, Charles Le Brun perceived in it the emergence of Raphael’s first truly individual style, after throwing off the manner of Perugino. It was accepted by Edwards in his 1809 inventory, by the Venetian police inspector and art dilettante Antonio Neu Mayr (or Neumayr) in his 1811 treatise on Italian painting and his 1836 Mazzolino pittorico, and by Giannantonio Moschini in his 1842 catalogue. The anonymous 1912 Guida del visitatore artista opened up the question to include either Raphael or some other pupil of Perugino, while Giovanni Costantini’s 1916 essay on the Manfredini collection reasserted the traditional attribution with a question mark. An attribution to Bachiacca was argued by Adolfo Venturi in his monumental Storia dell’arte italiana, which was accepted by Roberto Salvini and by Berenson in the first published version of his lists. In the 1936 Italian edition, Berenson later reconsidered the problem and proposed an attribution to Domenico Puligo, to which a question mark would be subjoined in the posthumous edition of 1963. The identification has not been taken up in the literature on Puligo, including the recent catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work by Elena Capretti.

Guidebooks to the collection reveal that the painting had vanished from the Seminario by the late 1960s. It seems highly possible, however, that the picture disappeared from the Pinacoteca of the Seminario as early as the Second World War, when a number of objects from the collection went missing.