Caption

A sacra conversazione, or 'holy conversation-piece' is an informal grouping of the Madonna and Child with saints, and sometimes donors, generally in a landscape setting. It was a way of bringing the previously isolated saints of altarpieces into some rapport with one another. It is a quintessentially Venetian type of picture particularly favoured by Palma Vecchio and his successor Bonifazio de' Pitati.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, Sacra Conversazione with Saints Jerome, Justina, Ursula and Bernardino of Siena, attributed to Bonifazio de' Pitati (Verona 1487 – Venice 1553) or Jacopo Palma Negreti, known as Palma Vecchio (Lombardy c.1479 – Venice 1528), 1520s. An informal grouping of the Madonna and Child with saints, the figures are grouped across the foreground with a blue-green sketchy landscape behind. San Bernardino, on the far right was made a patron saint of Venice in 1470; Saint Justina was the patron saint of the Venetian university in the city of Padua and had her own church in Venice, S. Giustina (suppressed in 1810). Saint Jerome on the far left, had two churches under his partronage and a Confraternity with a Scuola and the oratory under the patronage of Saint Ursula (also surpressed in 1810), famously decorated with paintings by Carpaccio, now in the Accademia, Venice.

Full description

The sacra conversazione, or informal grouping of the Madonna and Child with saints, and sometimes donors, generally in a landscape setting, is quintessentially Venetian, and a type of picture particularly favoured by Palma Vecchio, and after him, by Bonifazio Veronese (i). It is a curious hybrid between the altarpiece - with its grouping of saints whose presence is governed by the dedication and relics of the altar it adorns; the private devotional image of the Madonna of Humility; and - above all in scale and format - the gallery picture. Such pictures have a particular poignancy, some of which comes - as here - from the placing in landscape settings of a romantic beauty that only Venetian painters could achieve, of saints whose instruments of martyrdom, or marks of their austerities, suggest a very different world of pain and struggle: the world that drives us to seek solace and balm, formerly by asking for the intercession of the Madonna and these saints, but now (more usually) by the contemplation of such limpid beauty. The saints in the present picture are, from left to right: Saint Jerome, bearded, bronzed, half-naked and holding a cross, in indication of his long period of study and penitence with the hermits in the Syrian desert, where he was befriended by the lion; in his other hand he holds the Vulgate, his translation into Latin of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament and the Greek books of the New, which became canonical for the Catholic Church. Next to him is Saint Justina, the patron saint of Padua, holding a martyr's palm in one hand, and with her other to her breast, from which projects the dagger with which she was stabbed to death by the Roman solider who would not wait for her official execution by the sword. To the right of the Virgin is Saint Ursula, holding a banner, and cradling a model of the ship that brought her and the ten thousand virgins from Christian Britain to their doom at the hands of the heathen Huns of Cologne (ii). Finally, San Bernardino of Siena, habited in Franciscan brown, gives the Christ Child the disc inscribed with the Greek initials for Jesus's name and titles, that he used as an aid to his preaching. He was made a patron saint of Venice in 1470; Saint Justina was not only patron saint of the Venetian university city of Padua, but had her own church in Venice (S. Giustina - suppressed in 1810); whilst Saint Jerome had two, and a Confraternity under his patronage with a Scuola (but which subsequently fused with the Confraternity of S. Maria della Giustizia, whilst the Scuola took its name from the neighbouring church of S. Fantin); and Saint Ursula had another (also suppressed in 1810, and famously decorated with the enchanting cycle of paintings by Carpaccio now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia). All in all, then, a thoroughly Venetian gathering, and so probably painted for some client in the city itself. Rylands convincingly dates the picture to around 1522-24, when Palma Vecchio had fully developed his easy groupings of full-length seated or kneeling figures in a landscape, with the Virgin forming the apex of the group, further set off by a tree behind her - a transmutation of the more formal cloth of state found in earlier representations. It antedates his final group of sacre conversazioni, in which the compositions have become asymmetrical, with the Madonna and Child displaced to one side, and - in consequence - with the introduction of greater movement and use of contraposto. The painting closest in character to this one is the ruined Sacra Conversazione with Saints Anthony of Padua, Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene from the Crozat collection, in the Hermitage (v). Interestingly, the drawing in the British Museum that almost seems like a preliminary design for this is in fact in some senses a mid-term between the Penrhyn and Hermitage paintings. The posture of the body of the - thinner-faced - Virgin is still almost exactly that of the Penrhyn picture, whilst that of the Child is very similar, but reversed. Saint Jerome and a Franciscan saint are common to the drawing and both paintings (though he is Saint Francis himself, rather than Saint Bernardino or Saint Anthony, in the drawing); and whilst drawing and painting both contain St Catherine, the other female saint (whose identity is unclear) seated in the foreground of the drawing and indicating a passage in a book, echoes the St Jerome performing the same action in the Penrhyn painting. The early history of the picture is not known, nor can anything usefully be deduced from the copy that is first recorded in the sale at the Galleria Sangiorgi in Rome in 1899, as coming from the collection of marchese Alessandro Pallavicino dei duchi Grimaldi, in the Palazzo Pallavicino Grimaldi in Genoa . The present picture first surfaces in the interesting collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands, which was largely put together by the Brussels-based dealer, Lambert Jean Nieuwenhuys (1722-1862) and the son whom he put in charge of the London branch of the firm, Chretien Jean (1799-1883), between 1823 and the monarch's death in 1749 . When neither the King's neirs nor the state attempted to save the collection, and after it had twice been bought in, in the not very successful sales that ensued, it was L.J. Nieuwenhuys who repurchased the picture by private treaty in 1855. But it was his son (who had previously made two catalogues of Willem II's collection), who was by then also the trusted friend and adviser of Col. the Hon. Edward Douglas-Pennant, later 1st Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai (1800-1886), who sold it on to his new client. Although not large, the Douglas-Pennant collection was one of the more discriminating to be put together in Britain in the 19th century. Its main strength resides in Dutch painting, but, in addition to this Palma Vecchio, it also contains another Sacra Conversazione with Saint Joseph and Saint Catherine, formerly attributed to Cariani, but now to Rocco Marconi ; and a striking Holy Family with John the Baptist attributed to Perino del Vaga. What makes the collection special now is the mere fact of its survival, when almost all the collections put together in the 19th century - as opposed to those built on earlier foundations - have been broken up. It is thus a rare document of Victorian taste, assembled with the aid of one of the great 19th-century industrial fortunes, and housed in a 19th-century neo-Norman castle that is sui generis. Notes: (i) See Philip Rylands, Palma Vecchio, Cambridge, 1992, ch.4, pp.67-88, and esp. the pungent note 2 on p.86, for Bonifazio de'Pitati, called Veronese. (ii) Philip Rylands, op.cit., no.61, p.203, evidently working from a photograph after seeing the picture in the flesh, mistook the ship for a book, and thought that the banner should have had a red cross on a white ground - in token of the Resurrection - so could not identify this saint. (iii) Rylands, op.cit., no.62, p.204. (iv) Rylands, op.cit., no.D6, pp.253, 115-116, and fig. on p.118. (v) A book is an unusual attribute for a female saint, unless she is the founder of a religious Order, and it is the book of her Rule - but then she is generally shown in the habit of that Order. This saint wears none; could she be, in place of St Jerome, one of the holy and learned women who followed him to Bethlehem: St Paula or St Eustochium? If so, more probably S. Paula than her daughter, St Eustochium, since she seems to be an older woman; otherwise, perhaps St Anne, who is often shown teaching the Virgin to read, and is also shown as an older woman. (vi) Sale of 29 Nov.- 2 Dec. 1899, lot 226; Rylands, op.cit., p.204. (vii) Erik Hinterding & Femy Horsch, "A small but choice collection": the art gallery of King Willem II of the Netherlands (1792—1849)', Simiolus, vol. XIX (1989), No.1/2, pp.4-122. (vii) For Nieuwenhuys and his role as adviser to Col. Douglas-Pennant and the creation of the collection at Penrhyn, see Chapter V, 'The Pictures', by this author in Penrhyn Castle, The National Trust, 1991, pp.36-40. (vii) Anchise Tempestini, 'Addenda to Rocco Marconi', The Burlington Magazine, July 1974, p.391 & fig. 32. (adapted from author's unedited version/pre-publication, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)