Madonna del Libro in the Collection of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore: The First Data of Attribution and Technical Study of the Picture

Abstract

This article is devoted to the attribution of the Madonna and Child painting from the collection of the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore (Yekaterinburg), corresponding to the image of Madonna del Libro distributed in Italy in the sixteenth century. Referring to works of Italian researchers, the author reveals the original source that served as the basis for creating the iconographic work, i.e. a work of Perino del Vaga, an Italian artist. Further research helps establish the fact that the Ural canvas is a copy of an original painting of the Spanish artist Pedro de Rubiales who worked in Italy in the 1640s–1660s and reinterpreted P. del Vaga’s work. However, a technological analysis of the Ural canvas demonstrates that it was created much later, between the second quarter and the mid-nineteenth century. The unknown author of the picture studied in the article made attempts to reconstruct the technology of the original, but the discrepancies between them and the materials and methods of the Italian painting from between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revealed in the analysis of the canvas, ground, the stratigraphy of the paint layer, and paint binder make it possible to speak about the author’s insufficient awareness of the principles of painting of the era and region he referred to in his reinterpretation. Thus, the work in question demonstrates the peculiarities of creating imitations of sixteenth-century works at a later time. The article also proposes a version on the place and time of restoration of the painting, formulated on the basis of comparing data on the use of duplication technology, the design of the subframe, the presence of a signature on the subframe, and the correlation of said features with records from the catalogue of the Nizhny Tagil collection of paintings by D. P. Shorin. They suggest that work to improve the preservation of the painting was performed in the workshops of the imperial Hermitage by restorer N. A. Sidorov.