Madonna and Child

This fine Madonna and Child has been the subject of scholarly debate over several decades. It has been given to both Timoteo Viti and Francesco Francia, but it is its relationship to the oeuvre of Antonio Rimpatta that is most convincing. Although the details of his life are scarce, Rimpatta was most likely born in Bologna in around 1475. His early work shows the influence of the key Bolognese artists of the late fifteenth century, namely Francia, Lorenzo Costa and Giovanni Antonio Aspertini, but he travelled south to Rome, where he would draw on the great Umbrian artists, Perugino, Pinturicchio and Raphael, who had moved to the papal city. His earliest signed work, from 1501, was the Mormile polyptych for the Dominican convent of Saints Peter and Sebastian in Naples (now Florence, Cenacolo di Fuligno), and a decade later he completed an altarpiece for the church of San Pietro ad Aram (now Naples, Museo di Capodimonte). It was the latter picture that provided the starting point for Federico Zeri to attempt the initial reconstruction of his oeuvre in 1963 (see F. Zeri, 'Antonio Rimpatta’, Bollettino d’arte, XLVIII, 1963, pp. 46-49). The present panel, with its evident Umbrian influence, relates closely to the composition in Galleria Sabauda, Turin, formerly given to Timoteo Viti, but reassigned, first by Zeri, to the Master of the Sacra Conversazione Setmani, whom he identified as Antonio da Bologna, and then by Andrea Ugolini to Rimpatta in 1994. Ugolini, following the article by Anchise Tempestini, believed Rimpatta should be identified with Antonio da Bologna and the Setmani Master (see A. Tempestini, ‘Antonio da Bologna, uno o due?’, in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut, XXV, 1981, 3, pp. 341-54).