Met Museum to Acquire Rediscovered Renaissance Painting Admired by Vasari
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Thursday that it has acquired a rediscovered Renaissance painting now identified as Rosso Fiorentino’s “Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist” (1512/1513), after conservation removed overpaint revealing Saint John in the lower-right. The work, previously questioned in attribution and sometimes dated to 1520 under the title “Madonna and Child,” is now on view in the Met’s European painting galleries and was believed lost for centuries. Met curator Stephan Wolohojian noted that paintings by Rosso are “exceedingly rare,” numbering about two dozen, and highlighted that Giorgio Vasari discussed this very painting in “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” linking it to Rosso’s early career around 1513 in Florence. Met director and CEO Max Hollein said Rosso’s unusual composition and postures transform a familiar devotional subject into a psychologically charged encounter associated with the emergence of Mannerism.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Museums on the Brink, Heritage Under Fire