: Vierge à l’Enfant avec le jeune saint Jean-Baptiste, atelier de Sandro Botticelli, vers 1510, Tempera et huile sur toile,180 x 134 cm © GrandPalaisRmn (musée de la Renaissance – château d’Ecouen) / Photo : Tony Querrec
The Virgin Mary, Infant Christ, and the young St. John the Baptist from Champigny-en-Beauce underwent extensive restoration work as well as technical and scientific investigation in the C2RMF workshops. Detailed examination using binocular microscopy, micro-sampling and X-ray analysis provided researchers with clues as to the origins and conditions in which the work was made.
It was painted using egg tempera and oil on canvas, two panels joined together, as with the first version in Florence. The colour palette is made up of pigments and lacquers typically used in the 15th to 16th centuries. The presence of zinc in the brown and grains of colourless glass in the red confirm this dating, and Italy as the origin of the work.
The underlying drawing was not made free-hand, it was transferred using the spolvero technique, i.e. pouncing: holes tracing the outlines of the design are pricked on to a copy and then dabbed with powdered carbon black to transfer the figures on to the new canvas. The background decor, however, was painted directly, and so is different in each of the three known paintings.
Several artists worked on creating the piece, some of whom were more experienced than others. The Virgin’s face, for instance, shows greater softness and precision than the children’s.
The Champigny painting is well and truly a studio piece on which the master, Sandro Botticelli, may have worked alongside his pupils.
Vierge à l’Enfant avec le jeune saint Jean-Baptiste, Sandro Botticelli, vers 1505, Tempera et huile sur toile, 134 x 92 cm © Photo SCALA, Florence – Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali e del Turismo, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / image Scala
The painting from the Pitti Palace (c. 1505) gave rise to two replicas executed by Botticelli’s studio: one is housed in Birmingham (England), and the other is on loan to Chambord from the commune of Champigny-en-Beauce. Such variations on the same theme indicate both the productivity of Botticelli’s studio and the fact that a successful painting was frequently copied.
In order to avoid exact duplication, the original scene was repeated with variations involving, in this case, the group of figures being reversed and background differentiation.
The magnificent rose bush with open buds from the first version, symbolic of the Virgin and Christ, was replaced by sober architecture in the following versions. The shadow of the Virgin Mary, added to the Champigny painting, seems to indicate that it was made later (c. 1510).
Other differences are: the sparser and less detailed bed of herbs, the treatment of the haloes, the length of the cross, the Christ Child’s dress, etc.
In both compositions, the figures’ monumentality is exaggerated by the Virgin’s pose as she leans forwards to bring the children closer together. Her closed, melancholy gaze seems to show her weighed down by the impending drama of her son destined to be sacrificed on the cross.
