Madonna and Child Enthroned

The Madonna sits upon a marble throne carved with classicizing foliate motifs and topped by two bronze candelabra strung with coral (?) beads, the latter serving to protect Mary and Jesus from the evil eye. She tenderly supports the Christ Child on her lap and offers him a small pear, a symbol of immortality. Cut down on all four sides (but possibly not by much), the painting was most likely a devotional work for the home although it cannot be excluded that it was the central portion of an altarpiece, in which the Madonna and Child were flanked by two or more saints. The figures are loosely adapted from a "Madonna and Child" by Giovanni Bellini, one of the greatest Venetian painters of the late 1400s, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The crisp features and sculptural quality of the forms were linked by the art historian Federico Zeri to a painting now in the Museo Correr, Venice, signed by a little-known contemporary of Bellini’s named Sebastiano Zuccato (active by 1467; died 1527).

Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.

Henry Walters, Baltimore, ca. 1915 [mode of acquisition unknown] [probably on the advice of Berenson]; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.