Antiveduto Gramatica
Roman, 1570/71–1626 ca.

Virgin and Child with St. Anne, 1614–17 ca.
Oil on canvas
38 13/16 x 53"

Glasgow Museums, Archibald McLellan Collection, purchased 1856
141

COMMENTS

The Christ Child, seated on a couch or cradle, reaches out for a pair of cherries offered to him by his grandmother, St Anne, while Mary gazes on. As is usual in representations of the Virgin and Child and the Holy Family, the presence of the fruit almost certainly alludes to the Garden of Eden, and hence to mankind’s redemption from original sin by Christ and his mother.

Traditionally attributed to the Pesarese painter Simone Cantarini (1612–48), the picture was reattributed to Gramatica in 1965.

- Glasgow Museums Collections Navigator
http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/starobject.html?oid=166721

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

The Madonna gazes affectionately at her Child as he reaches for a pair of cherries offered by his grandmother, St. Anne. The cherries allude to the Garden of Eden and Original Sin, the white cloth to Christ’s burial shroud.

This painting reflects many of the trends of early 17th-century religious painting in Rome. Several were inspired by the great artistic revolutionary, Caravaggio: placing the figures very close to us in space, spotlighting them against a dark background, using strong contrasts of light and shadow for dramatic effect and to make the figures look sculpturally believable; depicting the elderly St. Anne as an unidealized older woman.

The mood of sweetly sentimental piety is very unlike Caravaggio, but typical of the spirit of Counter-Reformation Rome.

- Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond, 2015