Beschreibung:

Follower of Giovanni Battista Salvi, Il Sassoferrato (Italian, 1609-1685) "Madonna in Prayer" oil on canvas unsigned. Framed. 21-7/8" x 16-1/4", framed 27-1/4" x 22-1/2" Provenance: Private collection, Chicago, Illinois. Literature: de Lapinay, Francois Mace, Il Sassoferrato: La Devota Bellezza: con i disegni della Collezione Reale Britannica (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2017), no. 46. Notes: Giovanni Battista Salvi, known as the Sassoferrato after the small town from which he came bearing the same name, was an Italian Baroque painter, who trained under Domenichino, a Bolognese master and apprentice to Annibale Carracci Sassoferrato carved a lucrative niche under the cloak of the Counter Reformation that advocated personal devotional imagery to counter the Protestant iconoclasts. Under the Jesuits, Catholic imagery had to be bold, dramatic, inviting and as personally meaningful as the newly translated Bible, mass published for individual worship. To draw the wayward back to the faith, the image had to meet the word, and beauty and divinity were paramount; beauty so surreal it invoked the mysteries of faith or a revelation, and Mary was the image par excellence of piety and motherhood. Sassoferrato capitalized on this demand, creating numerous variations of Mary in prayer that invoke the young mother on the eve or aftermath of the Annunciation or Visitation. Here Mary is caught in a quiet interlude, vulnerable and mortal, yet divine in her secular beauty. Rendered through the masterful modeling of High Renaissance color and shadow, she becomes a veritable visual aid through which the mysteries of the rosaries are prayed. This depiction, particularly popular among Sassoferrato's patrons and followers, was painted by the artist and his studio well into the early 1700s. As Pope John Paul II wrote in an April 4, 1999 letter to artists regarding Sassoferrato and past masters, "To all who are dedicated to the search for new epiphanies of beauty so that through their creative works as artists they may offer these gifts to the world - seem to live again in them."