Mantuan School, 18th century, Madonna nursing the Child

Mantuan School, 18th century Madonna nursing the Child Oil on panel, 27.5x22 cm The softly intimate and collected dimension suggested by the present painting emphasizes the certainly private nature of the painting's commission. The work, a Madonna Lactans with a strong intimate impulse dated around the mid-eighteenth century, features soft and textured brushstrokes, which seem to show the legacies of Venetian and Mantuan culture from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Among the depictions of Mary's motherhood expressed by pictorial art, the iconography of the Madonna of the Milk takes on a particularly important role in establishing the reality of the Mother of God and the effectiveness of her intercession. Whether its origins are in the early centuries of Christianity in Egypt, among the Copts, or in Rome - according to conflicting lines of study for now -, the iconography of the Galaktotrofousa (from the Greek "she who nourishes with milk") or Virgo Lactans spreads especially from the thirteenth century and experiences an extraordinary proliferation between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following a phase of censorship during the years of the Counter-Reformation, the iconography rediscovers a new popularity starting from the eighteenth century, as demonstrated by this painting as well. Mary's milk also becomes a sign and pledge of the graces she obtains from Christ for men, in a suggestive parallelism between blood and milk, between the wounds of the Son and the breast of the Mother. The compositional balance, the quality of the drawing, and the plastic consistency of the drapery allow the painter's hand to be brought closer to the sphere of Giambettino Cignaroli (1706-1770), a Veronese painter, working in different cities of northern Italy and aware of the teachings of Bazzani and the members of the Mantuan school: he underwent, in addition to the aforementioned Bazzanesque-derived suggestions, the influence of Ludovico Dorigny, Antonio Balestra, and Giovan Battista Tiepolo, and in the middle period of his activity, he studied the production of Veronese and Titian. Observing the painting in question, one notes the composed and decorous tone, foreign to excessive virtuosity, even balanced. Linking back to the Baroque tradition, the sacred theme is treated with a softened and persuasive pathos, in which everything is well calibrated and dosed. The oval with the Virgin nursing the Child can presumably also be brought closer to the activity of Giovanni Giacomo Figari (1739-1809), a pupil of Cignaroli and a rising star in the Brescia-Veronese area of the second half of the 18th century. Little or nothing is known about Figari's beginnings, although we find works in the Mantuan environment but especially in that of southwestern Trentino. Noteworthy is the emblematic canvas depicting the Washing of the Feet (in the church of San Floriano in Storo, Trento), which is a demonstration of the leap in quality that the painter made moving from Mantua - a city where he absorbed elements deriving from the direct observation of Bazzani's works - to territories further north. Not far from Storo, also Tavodo (province of Trento), we find works such as the large altarpiece depicting the Assumption of the Virgin, where it is clear the neoclassical path that Figari was about to take, which begins to deviate from the style of works like those taken into consideration, which analyzing the movements of the painter and his stylistic turns, should be placed around 1765. It is clear that, in our painting, the marked chiaroscuro that distinguishes the works of Bazzani and the members of his flourishing workshop in Mantua meets with a quick, loose, indefinite, and textured brushstroke that looks to the Tiepolesque experiences but also to the great innovations introduced in the pictorial field by the great Venetian masters between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.