Madonna of the Rose

In the lower right corner of this canvas are the letters EQ MX, for Eques Maximus, Massimo the knight. Stanzione liked to sign with that title, a mark of the standing he had reached, and he had collected three knighthoods to justify it. Pope Gregory XV made him a knight of the Golden Spur in 1621, he became a knight of Saint George around 1625, and in 1627 Urban VIII gave him the Order of Christ. The Corsini inventories of the 19th century list the picture simply as a Madonna by the Cavalier Massimo.

He painted it in the late 1640s or early 1650s, when collectors in Naples were asking him for many pictures of this kind for private devotion. The rose is Mary's old emblem. Saint Bernard called her a rose, white for her virginity and red for her charity, and a rose without thorns stood for her conception free of original sin. The museum points to the vermilion and ultramarine of her clothes against the green of the trees, and to the patch of blue sky on the right.