Bartolomeo Cavarozzi

As Prof Gianni Papi explains, this Madonna painting is an important rediscovery in Bartolomeo Cavarozzi's oeuvre. On the back of the canvas, next to the inscription "Bs Cs Pt" (Bartolomeo Cavarozzi Pinxit), is the coat of arms of the noble Crescenzi family - three crescents arranged in a pyramid shape. Cavarozzi, who was often called Bartolomeo de' Crescenzi, lived and worked for many years in the Crescenzi family palazzo near the Pantheon. As a protégé of Marchese Giovan Battista Crescenzi (1577-1635), an architect and painter of the early Baroque period, he travelled with him from Genoa to Spain for a year in the summer of 1617 to support the work on the Escorial. The coat of arms on the back of our painting shows that the painting was executed under this patronage and proves that it belonged to the Crescenzi collections. According to Papi, the present work can be dated to a decisive transitional phase for the artist around 1612. It marks the beginning of the stylistic change that the biographer Giovanni Baglione described as "cangìo gusto" (change of taste), with which Cavarozzi broke away from his Mannerist beginnings under Cristoforo Roncalli. The pale light falling on the mother and child from the upper left models the figures sharply against a dark, undefined background - a clear characteristic of Caravaggio's painting, whose style and new, realistic pictorial design he followed from 1610 onwards, although, according to Papi, the work shows a certain qualitative brittleness ("acerbità") compared to the artist's later pictorial creations, which points to an early creation. This is particularly evident in the face of the Virgin and in the treatment of the robes, which do not yet display the consummate mastery and painterly fusion of later works. With an expert opinion by Prof. Gianni Papi, Florence, dated 9 December 2019 (copy).