North Italian School early 16th century - Madonna with Child in a Rocky Landscape - image-1

Lot 1007 Dα

North Italian School early 16th century - Madonna with Child in a Rocky Landscape

Auction 1049 - overview Cologne
16.05.2015, 11:00 - Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings
Estimate: 130.000 € - 150.000 €
Result: 297.600 € (incl. premium)

North Italian School early 16th century

Madonna with Child in a Rocky Landscape

Tempera on panel. 77 x 57.5 cm.

Wilhelm Suida (1877-1959), the famous advisor of Samuel Kress and great art expert who examined this work in person and wrote an expertise, considered it to be “an excellent and highly characteristic work of Andrea Solario”. He published it as such in his book “Leonardo und sein Kreis” in 1929 and listed it shortly after in his Thieme-Becker entry for Solario. After Luisa Cogliati (1966) and David Alan Brown (1987) refused to include the work, which has remained largely unnoticed in a German private collection for over 80 years, in their monographs, no alternative attribution has been suggested since. However, the current sale provides a surprising occasion for this.
Suida's allocation of the piece to the first decade of the 16th century can be agreed upon, as well as his localisation of the painter to Northern Italy. However, more so than Venice, which has been considered as an origin due to the depiction of the southern Alpine landscape, the painter of this work was most certainly a follower of Leonardo da Vinci. Not only do the facial features of the figures, especially the Madonna's characteristic eyes, point to Leonardo, but the bizarre rock formations are clearly more akin to his Virgin of the Rocks than to any of the picturesque Alpine landscapes of Venetian painters such as Bellini or Cima da Conigliano.
The work formerly belonged to the Berlin collector Viktor Hahn, whose collection was liquidated in 1932. The auction catalogue of this sale illustrates the universal aspirations of collecting culture in early 20th century Germany during the so-called “Gründerzeit”. Many museums in the country have profited from the precious works bequeathed from these collections.

Provenance

The Viktor Hahn collection, Berlin. - Collection of E. Schweizer, - Private collection, South Germany.

Literature

W. Suida: Leonardo und sein Kreis, 1929, p. 198 & 290, illus. 243. - H. Ball/ P. Graupe Falke: Die Sammlung Viktor Hahn. Beschrieben und eingeleitet von Otto von Falke, 1932, illus. 243. - L. Cogliati Arano: Andrea Solario, 1966, no. 132.