Madonna and Child with St Petronius and St John the Evangelist by Domenichino

Madonna and Child with St Petronius and St John the Evangelist by Domenichino (1629)

Two patrons for one church

This altarpiece was painted for a particular church: Santi Giovanni Evangelista e Petronio dei Bolognesi, the church of the Bolognese community in Rome. It was commissioned in the Holy Year of 1625, and Domenichino, himself from Bologna, did not deliver it until 1629. The two saints at the foot of the throne are the church's two patrons.

On the right sits Petronius, bishop of Bologna in the fifth century and patron saint of the city. He is an old man with a long white beard, in a cope heavy with gold embroidery, a crozier in one hand and the other opened towards the Virgin. He has taken off his mitre, and at the bottom of the picture two naked putti have got hold of it; one is putting it on his own head.

On the left is John the Evangelist, not John the Baptist. He is young and beardless, wrapped in a red mantle, a quill raised in his right hand and his left hand on his breast, looking upward as if listening. His attributes are gathered round him. An open book lies at the left edge. An eagle's talons show in the bottom corner beside a small child. Above him another child holds up a chalice with a serpent rising from it, which recalls the story from the apocryphal Acts of John in which he was challenged to drink a cup of poison.

Between the two saints, on the base of the throne, a lion's-head mask sits over a shield marked LIBERTAS. The word comes from the arms of Bologna.

The throne and the music

The Virgin sits high on a carved throne against a pale sky, in blue over rose, her head a little bowed, with the Child on her lap and a red cushion on the throne beneath them. Three winged cherub heads hover over her, and at the top corners putti cling to a dark curtain. On either side angels make music. On the left one plays a wind instrument, and on the right one draws a bow across a violin while another holds a large bowed bass. The Web Gallery of Art's note on the painting connects the angel musicians with new trends in instrumental music of the time. Domenichino cared a great deal about music and worked at designing instruments suited to the new style.

A deliberately old-fashioned design

The same note describes the layout as a conscious return to Renaissance models: the Madonna enthroned at the centre, saints below, everything symmetrical. The Virgin and Child quote Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges. Some of Domenichino's contemporaries criticised it as fifteenth-century in structure. In the eighteenth century the neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs and the sculptor Antonio Canova praised it highly.

Domenichino

Domenico Zampieri was born in Bologna in 1581, a shoemaker's son. He trained first with Denis Calvaert and then in the Carracci academy, where his short stature earned him the nickname Domenichino, "little Domenico". In 1602 he went to Rome and worked under Annibale Carracci. His Last Communion of St Jerome (1614) made his name. When a Bolognese pope, Gregory XV, was elected in 1621, Domenichino became papal architect, and through the 1620s he painted altarpieces for several Roman churches, this one among them. In 1631 he left for Naples to decorate the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in the cathedral. He was still at work there when he died in 1641.

From the high altar to Palazzo Barberini

The painting stood over the high altar of the Bolognese church until the Napoleonic period, when the French removed it to the Brera in Milan. It stayed there until 1953, when it returned to Rome. It now hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini. It is oil on canvas and large, about 4.3 metres tall and 2.8 metres wide.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole altarpiece, in its tall, narrow format, from the curtain and cherubs at the top down to the putti with the mitre at the foot.

Sources: Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome · Web Gallery of Art · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia, "Domenichino", "Santi Giovanni Evangelista e Petronio", "John the Apostle", "Petronius of Bologna"