Alessandro Turchi, L’Orbetto
Verona 1578 – Roma 1649

Madonna with Child and Saint John
Oil on canvas, cm 123 x 100

 The work, often iterated by Turchi and his school, is part of the catalogue of the artist’s maturity, alongside the altarpieces painted in Rome in the 1930s and probably in conjunction with his election as Prince of San Luca in January 1637. There are numerous replicas of notes made on the subject of the Virgin with Child and Saint John, a piece gently domestic, where the affective bond of the characters prevails over their divine nature. We recall the unpublished version, in private collection, made known by Scaglietti Kelescian in his latest update on the painter’s catalogue raisonné (Scaglietti Kelescian 2019), perhaps coinciding with the one located by the Bolognese historian Marcello Oretti in the Villa Borghese outside Porta Pinciana; the specimen of the Bob Jones University of Greenville, the one kept at the Girolamini painting in Naples and the canvas passed in 2014 on the antique market (New York, Sotheby’s, May 2014, lot. 28).