Madonna and Child with Angels

Description A drapery has been pulled back to reveal the Virgin Mary standing inside a chapel, tenderly holding her infant son. In this sophisticated combination of high and low relief, the actual light in the room creates shaded drapery folds. The illusionism of the relief (as in the leg of the angel that extends into the viewer's space) is indebted to trends in earlier baroque sculpture, but here the impression is much airier: the Virgin's wavy draperies almost seem to move upwards. Giosafatti would have learned this style while working in Rome, where the influence of Gian Lorenzo Bernini remained strong. This is possibly a model for a larger work in stone or stucco that is now lost.

Provenance Don Marcello Massarenti Collection, Rome (?) [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1902, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Credit Acquired by Henry Walters with the Massarenti Collection, 1902 (?)