Virgin and Child (1400s): Art, History and Details

Virgin and Child (1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Icilio Federico Joni (Italian, 1866–1946); Sano di Pietro (Italian, 1406–1481).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This picture has at times been seen as a forgery due to its seemingly excellent state of preservation and the simplicity of the composition. It was cleaned, retouched, and re-varnished in the 1960s, giving it an even, shiny surface, hiding to some extent its original appearance. This treatment was probably undertaken to address the losses to the Christ child's hair and the discoloration and abrasion of the Virgin's mantle. Also problematic is the restoration of the frame and sides of the panel, which obscure the age of the work. However, both the panel itself and the pigments employed prove that this is a 15th-century painting—though of lesser quality than the CMA's Virgin and Child Adored by Saints (1924.199). In particular, the Virgin's robe appears to have been painted originally with the pigment azurite, a less costly mineral pigment used as an alternative to ultramarine (made of powdered lapis lazuli). The use of this less expensive material, along with the picture's small size and simple composition, suggest that it was made by a member of Sano's workshop and not Sano himself.

Object facts

• Title: Virgin and Child
• Date: 1400s
• Creator attribution: Icilio Federico Joni (Italian, 1866–1946); Sano di Pietro (Italian, 1406–1481)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera and gold on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 30.5 x 22.9 x 3.2 cm (12 x 9 x 1 1/4 in.); Unframed: 24.2 x 16.6 cm (9 1/2 x 6 9/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1944.56

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "'Madonna and Child' by Sano di Pietro: Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 7 (September 1944): 143-144.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 1. European Paintings before 1500. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Saunders, Linnaea, E., "A Question of Forgery", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 43 no. 04, April 2003

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.