The Virgin Mary is seated on the ground in a rocky landscape with the Christ Child on her knee. He reaches out for the flower that his mother has just picked.
D‘Oggiono trained in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop and both the style and composition of this painting seem to reflect models he had learned during his youth. He is clearly trying to imitate Leonardo’s famous sfumato (’smoky’) technique – blurring the outlines of a form – and his palette is softer than in earlier works, such as Portrait of a Man aged 20 (also in the National Gallery). D'Oggiono never mastered anatomy or expression, however: Christ’s hands are podgy and boneless, and he looks somewhat vapid.
The Virgin Mary is seated on the ground in a rocky landscape with the Christ Child on her knee. He reaches out for the flower that his mother has just picked. This way of showing the Virgin is known as the ‘Madonna of Humility’.
The artist, Marco d‘Oggiono, was a follower of Leonardo da Vinci. The style and composition of this painting seem to reflect models d’Oggiono had learned during his youth, when he trained in Leonardo’s workshop. He must have been aware of Leonardo’s Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, begun in the 1490s, where the Virgin similarly sits in a fantastic landscape.
Renaissance artists often made preparatory drawings or studies for paintings or parts of paintings. There’s a drawing of a woman’s head in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London that is very close to the head of the Virgin here, and of a similar scale. It also has prick-marks, evidence of pouncing (a way of transferring a design from paper to another surface). But the link between the drawing and painting isn’t straightforward. Infrared reflectography shows that the artist revised the underdrawing, moving the Virgin’s head: it was originally lower down, with the top of the nose roughly where the upper lip is now. The first drawn head does not seem to derive from the V&A drawing and, while the final painted version is very close to it, there are no clear signs of pouncing on the canvas.
You can see how d‘Oggiono’s style has developed from his earlier works, like Portrait of a Man aged 20 and Madonna of the Violets of about 1498–1500 (Collection de Navarro). He is clearly trying to imitate Leonardo’s famous sfumato (’smoky’) technique – blurring the outlines of a form – and his palette has become softer. D‘Oggiono never mastered anatomy or expression, however: Christ’s hands are podgy and boneless, and he looks somewhat vapid. By the time this was painted Leonardo had long left Milan, and d’Oggiono was largely working with formulas he had learnt long ago.
