Madonna and Child with a Carthusian Monk

Around 1900 this small panel hung in Rome, in the palace of Count Grigory Stroganov, a Russian collector who had settled near the top of the Spanish Steps, between Via Sistina and Via Gregoriana. The connoisseurs of the day went to see it there, among them the Italian critic Gustavo Frizzoni and Bernard Berenson, and none of them doubted it was by Bergognone. After the count died in 1910, it moved to a collection in Turin.

The kneeling man in the white habit is a Carthusian monk. Lionello Venturi dated the panel to Bergognone's years at the Certosa di Pavia, between 1488 and 1494, and thought it was made for this monk's own cell. The same face seems to come back in Bergognone's Christ Carrying the Cross in the Musei Civici of Pavia, on the monk at the head of a group of Carthusians.