Madonna and Child with St Anne

1610 · Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

religious

Saraceni executed this altarpiece for the first altar to the right in the Church of San Simeone Profeta, which was reconstructed and decorated by Cardinal Lancellotti in 1610. The canvas came to the museum in 1929, following the suppression of the church. Scholars agree on attributing it to Saraceni, and as the commission is securely datable it constitutes (along with the Frascati Rest on the Flight into Egypt, securely dated to 1606) an important point of reference for the reconstruction of the painter's first Roman period.

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About the Artist

Carlo Saraceni

1579 – 1620

Saraceni spent almost all his career in Rome, where he formed his style under the influence of Caravaggio and Elsheimer, painting small luminous pictures of figures in landscapes as well as much larger altarpieces, including the replacement of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin (Louvre, Paris), which the church of Sta Maria della Scala had rejected in 1606. Saraceni's picture is still "in situ". He painted several other smaller variants or versions of the picture, so the design was evidently popular. His style was sensitive and poetic, showing a delicate feeling for colour and tone. His liking for turbans, tasselled fringes, and stringy drapery folds, and his richly impasted paint may have influenced Dutch artists in Rome such as Lastman and Pynas, and through them Rembrandt.

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