The Virgin and Child flanked by two angels, 16th-century Italian school

The work housed at the Château de la Motte-Tilly can be compared to several Italian tondi on panel painted in the late^15th century. Depicted within a landscape, the Madonna is seated with the Child on her lap, in the tradition of early^16th-century Florentine painting, influenced by the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. A devotional work in which Christ’s tragic fate is foreshadowed by the mother’s sorrowful gaze upon her son, as well as by symbolic elements (cherries or a goldfinch), the panels follow in the tradition of Raphael’s ‘Madonna Terranuova’ (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie).

A tondo bearing great similarities is held at the Petit Palais Museum; it was initially attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, then to Verrocchio and Pierro di Cosimo, and finally to Tommaso. It depicts the Virgin leaning her head towards her child on the left, as in our painting. Tommaso devised a symmetrical compositional scheme which he reused on numerous occasions (‘Madonna and Child between Two Angels’, Dion, Museum of Fine Arts, and ‘The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John and Saint Margaret’, Avignon, Petit Palais Museum). The Virgin, in the centre, is flanked by two angels. She is offering the Infant Jesus cherries, a symbol of his future sacrifice.

However, as the tondo at the Château de la Motte-Tilly does not feature Saint John the Baptist, it is certainly to be compared with the work by Giovanni Antonio Sogliani (1492–1544) held at the Capitoline Picture Gallery in Rome, particularly as the colour palette is very similar. The composition is inspired by the painting attributed to the school of Perugino and held at the Louvre, though with a reduced number of figures: only two angels carrying flowers remain, evoking the two saints in the Louvre painting.