Cerchia di Leonardo da Vinci (Ambrogio de' Pr... Lot n° 150

Circle of Leonardo da Vinci (Ambrogio de' Predis?) Madonna and Child (Madonna of the Flowers) Oil on panel Panel cm. 45x36. Framed Cerchia di Leonardo da Vinci (Ambrogio de' Predis?) This admirable devotional panel, a refined product of Leonardo's close circle in Milan, presents the Virgin in a half-length pose holding hyacinth and clover flowers to the Child with her right hand. Supported by his mother's left hand, the infant Jesus bends down to pick the flowers, symbols of man's salvation through his future sacrifice: a gesture that manifests awareness of his own destiny, as confirmed by his turning his face toward the viewer, with an expedient that projects him into the scene and reinforces his emotional involvement.The painting develops the theme of the Madonna of Flowers, already elaborated by Leonardo in his youthful Madonna del Garofano. However, several details lead the work in question back to Leonardo's Milanese season and directly call into question his formidable atelier. In fact, the panel is part of a group of replicas of the same subject attributable to Vinci's closest followers, the highest quality version of which may perhaps be considered the Madonna and Child in the Datrino collection, attributed by Carlo Pedretti to Marco d'Oggiono. Three other redactions of the Madonna of the Flowers are mostly referred by specialists to Bernardino de' Conti. A comparison of the multiple declinations of the theme offered by Leonardo's workshop reveals some useful elements for circumscribing the work here in question: if stylistic reasons lead to the exclusion of a derivation of the panel from either Boltraffio's or Marco D'oggiono's sphere, on the other hand the painting also appears rather distant from the versions attributed to Bernardino de Conti. Instead, it deserves to be emphasized how in our painting the little Jesus would seem to stand in direct relation to the putto head of the sheet in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, inv. Inf. 100, a metal-tipped drawing on paper prepared in blue depicting the little Francesco Sforza, generally attributed to Ambrogio de' Predis.The Madonna of the Flowers presented here seems to respond to the typical genre ambiguity offered by Leonardo's models of St. John of the Last Supper from Vinci or the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks, a work that saw the extensive involvement of Ambrogio de' Predis. Associated with this master, moreover, are works such as the Saint Sebastian of the Cleveland Museum and the Maiden with a Plate of Cherries of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which show clear elements of physiognomic assonance with our Madonna of the Flowers. The combination of these clues would lead one to refer our panel to Ambrogio de' Predis or to a painter gravitating in his circle, within which painters such as Francesco Galli and Bernardino de Conti were working: like the latter, our painter elaborated according to his own sensibility the fortunate iconographic model of the Madonna of the Flowers, particularly dear to the Milanese Leonardo workshop in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.