Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, Adored by Two Bishop Saints and a Donor in Armor

The inscription near the lower edge of the sheet, by the drawings collector and connoisseur Padre Sebastiano Resta, neatly sums up the artistic lineage of Marco Pino, also known as Marco da Siena, to whom this drawing has traditionally and convincingly been attributed. It can be translated as “Marco da Pino from Siena painted this in 1575. Pupil of Domenico Beccafumi, then of Perino del Vaga, then he painted under Daniele da Volterra. Lomazzo [i.e. the biographer Gian Paolo Lomazzo] says that he was a follower of Michelangelo.” Although he was indeed a collaborator of the Michelangelo pupil Daniele da Volterra in Rome (see 2001.39), where Pino is first recorded in 1544, neither Michelangelo nor Daniele appear to have exerted much influence on Pino’s draftsmanship. The style of Pino’s pen-and-ink drawings is instead fully indebted to his Sienese beginnings under Domenico Beccafumi and to his time working with Perino del Vaga. The horror vacui and the rapid, interrupted pen line that characterize this drawing are typical of Pino’s work, as are the figural types, their gestures, and the way the pen line methodically sets the boundaries for all forms.

The Morgan sheet must have been a late preparatory study or a presentation drawing for a specific commission. The unidentified male donor, either a soldier or a noble with military ambitions, has removed his plumed helmet and gauntlet and kneels in adoration of the heavenly apparition above. He is presented by a bishop or possibly an abbot, presumably his namesake, who in turn is accompanied by a second, older bishop saint or abbot. The motif of the Virgo Lactans presenting her naked breast and the church or abbey in the middle distance at right may have had some significance for the commission that eludes us today.

Despite the tantalizing and plausible reference and date recorded in the inscription on the Morgan drawing, there is no known related painting.¹ The drawing was made during Pino’s last long sojourn in Naples, which lasted from 1570 until his death in the 1580s. He had already spent long periods in the city in the late 1550s and 1560s, but his last decades were dominated by the production of large, handsome altarpieces for churches in the city and its surroundings. A painting after the Morgan study would easily have ranked among the most ambitious of these works. Compositional similarities with numerous altarpieces and drawings, especially from later Neapolitan years, have been remarked upon.²

Two altarpieces in particular are quite similarly conceived, with the Virgin and child adored by angels in the upper register and two prominent male saints in the lower one. One is an autograph work by Pino in the church of Gesù Vecchio, Naples, of ca. 1566–69, that depicts in the lower register SS. Lawrence and Ignatius of Antioch.³ The landscape background consisting of a river winding its way between rolling hills is an especially good point of comparison. The other altarpiece is Pino’s autograph Virgin of the Rosary with Saints, dated 1576, also represented in a workshop copy attributed to Michele Manchelli. These show a similarly clad Virgin and an abbot and a younger saint below.⁴ Interestingly, the Manchelli version shows the Virgin with a bared breast, a complete incongruity in this context, suggestive of a workshop cartoon of a Virgo Lactans being blindly copied. And lastly, a study in red and white chalk of the Virgin and child in the Louvre corresponds in several details— such as the pose of the Virgin and the inclination of her head—with the upper part of the Morgan drawing.⁵ This plethora of analogies illustrates how Pino and his workshop were supplying a buoyant market with complex altarpieces for which they continuously adapted and reused cartoons and figure studies.

—REP

Footnotes:

1. For lost works by the artist, see de Domenici 1742–45 and 1786, Filangieri di Candida 1898 and 1902, and Zezza 2003. Recorded works are also listed in a booklet at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence consulted in 1999 by William Griswold, who observed that none corresponds to the Morgan’s drawing.
2. Wolk-Simon in New York and Chicago 1994, 110–11.
3. Zezza 2003, 114–15, 144, and 265–66, no. a.29, fig. III.35.
4. Zezza 2003, 230 and 264, no. a.23, fig. v.50 (Pino) and 250, fig. v.78, 250, fig. v.78 (Manchelli).
5. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 10028. See Mon- beig Goguel 1972, no. 114; Zezza 2003, no. c.28, fig. v.35.