Madonna and Child

In November 1909 Giulio Cantalamessa, director of the Galleria Borghese, wrote to Venice about a panel the Italian state had just bought from a charitable board in Forlì. It was in poor shape, worn, dirty and darkened by oxidation. He wanted it restored by Giovanni Zennaro, a Venetian painter who also restored pictures. The panel had arrived as school of Bartolomeo Vivarini. Scholars have since agreed that it is his own work, painted around 1475 to 1480. What survived the wear is easy to find. The Child stands on his mother's knee and lifts his right hand to his mouth with the fingers spread, a baby's gesture Vivarini used more than once. On either side of the dark damask curtain behind the throne, a thin strip of landscape runs back to water, hills and small rounded clouds.