This tender representation of the Madonna and Child, a glimpse into the everyday life of a mother and her son, has long roots stretching back to the Flemish art of the Renaissance period and was a very popular subject in the production of Strozzi and his workshop.

The painting was formerly part of the highly mobile collection of Mario Viezzoli, an interesting art lover, collector and dealer resident in Genoa after World War II.1
The work’s original quality is compromised by a problematic state of preservation including widespread deterioration of the painted surface and repainting in order to mask small lacunae, which is particularly evident on the Child’s skin.
The image of the Virgin who is feeding the Child, while holding him to her breast, retains all of its charm intact, however, as an intimate scene of family life underscored by the young mother’s informal attire. The perfect oval of her radiant face constitutes the fulcrum of the composition as a whole.
This tender representation of the Madonna and Child, a glimpse into the everyday life of a mother and her son, has long roots stretching back to the Flemish art of the Renaissance period and was a very popular subject in the production of Strozzi and his workshop.2
The dating of this work, where the use of reds in the rosy flesh tones shows the influence of the chromatic innovations introduced into Genoa by Rubens, is based on comparison with more demanding but similar paintings of higher quality by Strozzi, such as the St Cecilia in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the St Catherine of Alexandria in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, formerly in the Doria Collection, which are both dated slightly before 1620 (figs. 1, 2).3 

[Alessandro Morandotti]

1 Gonzáles-Palacios 1997, pp. 180-181; Orlando 2000, ad indicem.

2 For a number of autograph versions with minimal variants with respect to the Cerruti canvas, see Manzitti 2012, pp. 130-131, nos. 125 and 127. For a further list of variations on this theme, see Mortari 1966, p. 136. 

3 For these two works, see Manzitti 2012, p. 96, no. 53; p. 98, no. 56.