The Madonna and Child in a landscape has an extraordinarily well-preserved surface: details like the thickness of the brushstrokes, the gradation of the shadows, and the highlights in the landscape teeming with grasses and little figures can still be fully appreciated. This painting fits well in the oeuvre of an artist who remains anonymous and whose meager body of painted work is gathered under the name of Master of the Scandicci Lamentation. Everett Fahy was the first scholar to identify a number of paintings similar to the Lamentation with Saints John the Evangelist, Joseph of Arimathea, Sebastian, Nicodemus, Agatha and Magdalen in the church of San Bartolo in Tuto in Scandicci. The works had been variously attributed to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio or to an artist close to Francesco Granacci, a true “deus ex machina” of the expressive tendencies undermining Florentine classicism in the early 16th century. To understand the attribution of this group of works to the same artist, we need only compare the face of the St Agatha of the altarpiece in Scandicci with that of the Madonna in our painting, which although of much higher quality, it fits well into the artist’s corpus and with a dating in the first half of the second decade of the 16th century. From the late 1510s to the late 1520s, many artists from the workshops of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo and Filippino Lippi began criticizing and dismantling the restraint and the equilibrium of classicism prevalent at the beginning of the century.

The most bizarre of these masters (Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani, Antonio di Donnino del Mazziere, the Master Allegro and the Master of Serumido) were grouped together by Federico Zeri, who identified their common stylistic excesses, analyzed in two masterful 1962 articles entitled “Eccentrici fiorentini”. The Master of the Scandicci Lamentation had not yet been identified in 1962 but would have fit easily into this group, with his critical view of a tradition that continued to impose tired repetitions of old models. The anonymous master’s works achieved a very high level of quality immediately after the completion of the Scandicci altarpiece. At that time, the Master of the Scandicci Lamentation re- elaborated Raphaelesque or Leonardesque examples, bringing in modern and eccentric influences. This turned into a dialogue with some of the oddest and most novel artists of the second decade of the 16th century, in particular Larciani for his landscapes and Granacci, in his most Michelangelesque period, for figures. In addition to these varied sources,the Master of the Scandicci Lamentation also aimed for an enchanted atmosphere derived from the School of San Marco. There is also a distant echo of Leonardesque landscapes translated into modern language which had begun to inspire the “Florentine eccentrics” by the second decade of the 16th century. This made way for stylistic influences from northern Europe, discovered through exposure to German engravings. The most likely dating is between the first and the second decades of the century, due to the evident influence of Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca, a composition that seems to have been revisited here, reversing the spatial relationship between Madonna and Child, depicted in a pose that is both unnatural and more dynamic thanks to the intertwining of the child’s legs and the mother’s hands. It is also quite significant that the verso of this work bears the emblem of Cardinal Carlo Barberini, from one of the most important noble families in Rome and Italy both in terms of ecclesiastical appointments and art collecting. In fact, the Barberini family had great influence in Rome and among all of the artists who worked there in the 17th century, not only in terms of quantity - they commissioned an astonishing number of works - but also quality, thanks to the importance and grandiosity of the commissions and the great artists they engaged. Among the many who worked for the Barberini clan were - to name just a few - Pietro da Cortona, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini. The family’s collections amassed both works from their day and antique ones, as this painting tangibly demonstrates.