Description

ART REPRODUCTION by Silvia Salvadori - (from Duccio di Buoninsegna school). Madonna and Child. Holy gold tempera icon. Icon attributed to the school of Duccio di Buoninsegna. Painted in the same pictorial style as Duccio di Buoninsegna. Painting of refined beauty and quality painted by Silvia Salvadori and performed with the same artistic know-how using the same pictorial techniques of the Sienese school. According to an ancient tradition, the Madonna and Child (Duccio di Buoninsegna icon - Workshop icons) was fortuitously discovered by a farmer amazed by the fact that his oxen had stopped and knelt in front of the sacred image, which was placed under a roof, as in a devotional road tabernacle. This miraculous vision, which took place in 1434, initiated the veneration of the Madonna and led to the concession of Pope Eugene IV to build a hospice for the poor and an adjoining chapel (1443), from which the current church of the company of the Madonna della Grotta. Here there is still a small processional banner, in which the Sienese painter Sebastiano Folli - at the end of the seventeenth century - represented the unusual miracle, also reproducing the table in question with its current curved shape and the Duccesque figuration in its essential features. The polyptych to which this Icon of the Madonna and Child belonged has been dismembered over the centuries, therefore it remains impossible to establish what its original destination was and from which and how many images of saints it was accompanied. Based on recent studies and on the hypotheses made by excellent scholars such as Frederick Mason Perkins and Enzo Carli, this work has been recognized as a work conceived in the workshop of Duccio di Buoninsegna, invented and set by the master, but largely painted by his pupil , which is also found in that apical area of ​​the Majesty. For the execution, we can probably suppose times close to the start of that great enterprise destined for the cathedral of Siena, considering also the fact that this Madonna and other similar works had to serve as a reference model for young students operating in the early fourteenth century. Indeed, Simone Martini, in an initial and extraordinary Madonna and Child, and Ugolino di Nerio with the Madonna Tadini Boninsegni referred to such examples.