Giovanni Bellini - The Madonna and Child at a Ledge with an Apple: "The Philips Madonna"

 Giovanni Bellini

Venice 1435/40 - 1516

The Madonna and Child at a Ledge with an Apple: "The Philips Madonna"

tempera and oil on panel, gold ground

panel: 30 1/4 by 20 7/8 in.; 76.8 by 53 cm. 

framed: 40 1/8 by 31 3/8 in.; 101.9 by 79.7 cm.  

With Dowdeswell Gallery, London, before 1888;
Charles Loeser, Florence, 1888;
From whom acquired by Julius Böhler, Munich, 1913;
From whom acquired by Dr. Anton F. Philips (1874–1951), Eindhoven, 1913;
Thence by descent to the present owner.

S. Reinach, Répertoire des Peintures du Moyen Age et la Renaissance (1289 - 1580) , vol. III, Paris 1910, p. 437, reproduced no. 1 (as early Bellini, according to Bernard Berenson);
G. Gronau, Giovanni Bellini; des Meisters Gemälde, Stuttgart 1930, p. 16, reproduced p. 200, note 16 (as by Bellini, related to the Kessler Madonna in Amsterdam);
L. Dussler, Giovanni Bellini, Frankfurt 1935, p. 156;
R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. XVII, The Hague 1935, p. 209 (possibly an early work by Bellini on the basis of photographs);
C. Gamba, Giovanni Bellini, Paris 1937, p. 194, cat. no. 3 (as a replica of a lost original by the young Bellini);
L. Coletti, “Revisione della Storiografia Belliniana,” in Vernice, 4, 1949, p. 10;
L. Dussler, Giovanni Bellini, Vienna 1949, p. 65 (reminiscent of a Bellinesque model);
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Venetian School, vol. I, 1957, p. 31 (as by Bellini);
F. Heinemann, Giovanni Bellini e i Belliniani, Venice 1959, vol. I, p. 203, cat. no. S 824, reproduced vol. II, p. 640, fig. 736 (as known only by photograph, a Venetian school painting, and dating it later, noting that the infant was “too human” for an early work);
T. Pignatti, L’opera completa di Giovanni Bellini, Milano 1969, p. 95, reproduced no. 78, reproduced;
M. de Bondt-Somer in H.W. van Os, et al, The Early Venetian Paintings in Holland, Maarssen 1978, pp. 27-28, reproduced fig. 17;
A. Conti, “Giovanni nella bottega di Jacopo Bellini,” in Hommage à Michel Laclotte: Etudes sur la Peinture du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance, Paris 1994, p. 264;
J. Paris, L’atelier Bellini, Paris 1995, p. 204;
M. Lucco, “Giovanni Bellini: his early years highlighted,” in The Philips Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, The Hague 2017, pp. 14-29;
M. Lucco, "Un 'opera dimenticata di Giovanni Bellini (e qualche considerazione sulla sua data di nascita')," in Giovanni Bellini: “…il migliore nella pittura”, conference proceedings at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice 2019, pp. 13-15, reproduced p. 6, fig. 5, detail of IRR reproduced p. 10, fig. 7 (as "una sua opera cardine," datable to 1460-1462);
M. Lucco, P. Humfrey, and G. C. F. Villa, Giovanni Bellini: Catalogo Ragionato, Treviso 2019, cat. no. 3, pp. 290-291, reproduced p. 81, fig. 3 (as by Giovanni Bellini, painted circa 1459-1460);
P. Humfrey, Giovanni Bellini, Venice 2021, pp. 35-37, reproduced figs. 21 and IRR fig. 22 (as by Giovanni Bellini, dated circa 1460). 

Catalogue Note

[Giovanni Bellini], most excellent painter…who is famous throughout the world, and even as aged as he was, painted with excellence...

MARIN SANUDO, 1516. [1]

Giovanni Bellini, more than any other Venetian painter of his generation, realized the full artistic potential of the Renaissance, becoming in a real sense the father of the golden age of Venetian painting. In addition to numerous “belliniani”—apprentices who would later become independent masters in their own right—he trained some of the greatest artistic geniuses of the early sixteenth century. Cima da Conegliano, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano del Piombo and, most importantly, Titian, were all pupils of Bellini. His long career charts the progress of Venetian painting from a late gothic to a modern, classical style, without which the masterpieces of Giorgione and Titian would not have been possible.

Of all the subjects favored by Giovanni Bellini, his depictions of the Madonna and Child have been perhaps the most prized by collectors. This Madonna and Child is a key early work by the artist. It has been dated by Mauro Lucco to circa 1460, just after Bellini set up an independent workshop in 1459 in the parish of San Lio, near the Rialto Bridge. Even at this early date, Bellini’s progressive approach to the subject is evident. The gold ground on which the image is painted represents a conservative trend still prevalent in Venetian painting in the mid-fifteenth century, espoused by the rival Vivarini family of painters; it harkens back to Venice’s enduring relationship with the art of the Greek east. However, the dynamism of the pose of the figure of the infant Christ in this painting demonstrates Bellini’s awareness of the “new style” being formulated throughout Italy. The composition echoes the terracotta reliefs of this same theme by Donatello, whose own work had made such an impression in Venetian artistic circles during the previous two decades. Indeed, Mauro Lucco has recently connected the pose of the bambino with that of one of the putti in the so-called “Trono di Saturno,” a pair of ancient reliefs that decorated an archway between Piazza San Marco and the Frezzaria which furnished inspiration not just for Donatello, but also Mantegna, Titian and Sansovino.^[2]

FIG. 1. GIOVANNI BELLINI, THE PRESENT VIRGIN AND CHILD, CIRCA 1890/1900.

While known to scholars, this Madonna and Child has been largely inaccessible for the last century. It was acquired by Anton Philips (1874-1951), the great entrepreneur and co-founder of Royal Philips Electronics from the famous Munich dealer, Julius Böhler, after which it has remained in the family’s collection.^[3] Most modern scholars have known it only through old black and white photographs, likely taken when the painting was in the collection of Charles Loeser in Florence, or shortly thereafter. The earliest images of the painting show later enhancements, likely made in the 19^th century (fig. 1): a band of pseudo-kufic decoration interspersed with pearl rosettes was along the edge of the Virgin’s mantle (indeed, a small section of this has been purposefully left at foot of the Infant Christ lower right). The plain, mulberry tunic of the Madonna was also covered with a pomegranate/damask design. These later additions were removed in the first half of the twentieth century, to reveal the artist’s original intent. However, these accretions no doubt caused some confusion amongst scholars who were studying the picture only in photographs. Except for the engraved reproduction of the image published by Salomon Reinach, the painting was only reproduced in print by Gronau in 1930, who himself commented he had never seen the original. This inaccessibility led to a wide variety of opinions on the painting, from variations in dating, to the painting being a studio work, and even a suggested attribution to Bellini’s contemporary, Lazzaro Bastiani by Anchise Tempestini.^[4] Federico Zeri rejected that assertion, and considered it to be from the “stretto ambito di Giovanni Bellini,” while Jean Paris restituted the painting to Giovanni Bellini himself. Bernard Berenson, presumably one of the few scholars who had seen the painting first hand when it was in the Loeser collection in Florence, had already given it to the young Bellini, according to Reinach in 1910, and it appears in his 1957 lists.

FIG. 2 GIOVANNI BELLINI, MADONNA AND CHILD, GIFT OF THE AHMANSON FOUNDATION (M.85.223), LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART.

Most recently, in writing his definitive catalogue raisonné on the works of Bellini, Mauro Lucco was able to examine the painting firsthand in February 2016 together with Peter Humfrey after its recent restoration. Like Berenson, Lucco considers this an early work, and places it at the very beginning of Bellini’s canon. He notes that the photographs he had himself previously seen were not indicative of the painting’s “level of quality and invention.” Stylistically, it reflects the moment when the young Bellini, still influenced by Jacopo, is beginning to “trovare la sua propria strada.”^[5] It would appear to date to slightly later than a Madonna and Child in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (inv. no. M.85.223) which has generally in the past been given to Jacopo Bellini, but which he and Humfrey now consider to be by the young Giovanni (fig. 2). The facial type of the Madonna and especially of the Infant Christ in both works are clearly analogous. However, the present panel would appear to antedate other Madonne by Bellini, including ones in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam^[6] and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin^[7] showing a similar approach to the subject, with the Virgin standing at a parapet, an apple emblematic of the original sin placed on the ledge in the front right foreground.

^[1] As translated, "Zuan Belin, optimo pytor, [...] la cui fama è nota per il mondo, et cussi vechio come l'era, dipenzeva per excellentia…" Marin Sanudo, 1516.

^[2] Lucco 2019, p. 291; La Primavera del Rinascimento, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence 2013, p. 342.

^[3] The Berenson archive at I Tatti states that the painting was with Steinmeyer in New York in 1914, but as Julius Bohler and Fritz Steinmeyer worked closely together and formed a partnership in the early 1920s, it seems likely that this was a painting that they were working on together.

^[4]  Bondt-Somer 1978 notes that this was suggested orally.

^[5] Lucco 2019, p. 290 [“to find his own way”].

^[6]  Inv. no. A 3287.

^[7]  Inv. no. 1177.