THE AUTHORSHIP OF A MADONNA BY SOLARIO
SIR,
The Madonna by Solario which you reproduce in your number for May is a picture by no means unknown in art literature. It is reproduced on Plate XXXVII of Rosini’s ‘Storia della Pittura Italiana,’ and as No. 29bis, IIS. in Muxell’s ‘Catalogue of the Leuchtenberg Collection,’ and such well-known critics as Waagen, Rumohr, Hettner, and Crowe and Cavalcaselle have spoken of it. The last-named writers unhesitatingly ascribe the picture in question to Andrea Solario of Milan, declaring the signature a coarse forgery. Rosini, who seems to have known all about the picture, says:—‘Could we trust this signature—Antonius da Solario Venetus f—there would be no doubt regarding the home of this artist. But are we bound to have a blind faith in a signature, when we happen to know the history of the picture, and how it passed through the hands of restorers and dealers before it was sold to the collection where it now hangs? Experience has taught me to entertain very serious doubts.’[48]
I share these doubts, for I cannot hesitate a moment in ascribing this very charming Madonna to Andrea Solario. Mr. Roger Fry in his admirable note on this picture mentions the points of likeness which it has with the Brera Madonna and Saints, dated 1495. There happens to be another work even closer to this one, and in my opinion certainly by Solario, although not attributed to him.[49] It belongs to Dr. J. P. Richter, and represents the Madonna adoring the Holy Child. So Venetian are its colour, tone, and feeling, that more than one good critic has attempted to find its author in Venice; but so singularly like are the ovals, so identical the eyes and mouths of the Virgins in Dr. Richter’s and in Mr. Wertheimer’s pictures, that they could not have been painted by different hands. A Madonna belonging to Signor Crespi of Milan, never, that I am aware, ascribed to another than Solario, although of later date, again betrays identity of hand, in the landscape at least, with Mr. Wertheimer’s painting.
But Mr. Fry, who, if any one, has a right to an opinion, admits the possibility that the signature is genuine; in which case Mr. Wertheimer’s picture would be by a painter famous in Neapolitan art-mythology, who is supposed to have executed the frescoes in the cloister of Sanseverino at Naples. Mr. Fry, with a candour by no means common among recent writers on art, tells us that he is not acquainted with these frescoes. I happen to know them well, and I can assure Mr. Fry that these paintings and Mr. Wertheimer’s Madonna have nothing in common. The latter, like all of Solario’s works, even the most Venetian, displays many characteristics of an art substantially Milanese, while the frescoes contain no element of the kind. The principal author of the series (he freely employed assistants) seems to have been a Sicilian educated under Antonello, Gentile Bellini, and Carpaccio. In his wanderings up and down the peninsula his fancy seems to have been taken by Pintoricchio’s landscape—a taste for which Carpaccio’s romantic scenery had doubtless prepared him. No other influences are visible in his work, neither Lombard, nor Ferrarese, nor Florentine. I am amazed that paintings so obviously Venetian should have remained so long unrecognized for what they are.
I would gladly say more of the author of these frescoes (there is not a little to be said), but I must now hasten to answer the question that may be asked: But what if the inscription is ancient? Even then Mr. Wertheimer’s picture does not cease to be Andrea Solario. The inscription may in fact never have been intended for a signature, but for a label. Soon after it was painted this picture may have fallen into the hands of a person who, like so many of us to-day when addressing a letter, confused the Christian name of the painter with one resembling it, and, wishing to make sure that he did not forget it altogether, had it inscribed according to his inaccurate recollection upon the panel, with the addition of the fact that the picture was painted in Venice—for that is all that the word Venetus need mean here. Or if it does mean more, this more would tend to establish the value of connoisseurship. It was on internal evidence alone that I came to the conclusion, published in my ‘Lorenzo Lotto’ some nine years ago, that Solario must have made a long enough sojourn at Venice to have become deeply imbued with the ideas of Alvise Vivarini: and now Mr. Wertheimer’s picture, if the inscription be ancient, would confirm this hypothesis to the extent of proving that Solario remained long enough in Venice to be considered a Venetian, just as Lotto, for instance, owing to a residence of two or three years at Treviso, was called a Trevisan.
BERNHARD BERENSON.
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.
Lady Betty Hamilton
by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the collection of the Earl of Normanton.
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LARGER IMAGE