Details
ATTRIBUTED TO ANTONIO RIMPATTA (BOLOGNA, ACTIVE NAPLES, EARLY 16TH CENTURY)
Madonna and Child
oil on panel
2518 x 1938 in. (63.8 x 49.2 cm.)
Provenance
Colonel Walter Alers Hankey (1839-1921), Beaulieu, Hastings.
with Sedelmeyer, Paris, by 1901, as 'Francesco Raibolini, called Francesco Francia'.
Heugel Collection, Paris.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 14 December 1977, lot 54, as 'Viti'.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 May 1997, lot 10, as 'After Antonio Rimpatta'.
Literature
S. Reinach, Répertoire de peintures du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (1280-1580), Paris, 1907, II, p. 162, as an 'Umbro-Bolognese master'.
A. Venturi, Storia dell'arte Italiana, Milan, 1914, VIII, part 3, pp. 992 and 994, fig. 774, as 'Timoteo Viti'.
R. van Merle, The Development of the Italian School of Painting, The Hague, 1934, XV, p. 162, as 'after the Turin version'.
A. Venturi, 'Alcuni dipinti emiliani', Critica d'Arte, February 1937, p. 39, as 'Timoteo Viti'.
C. Ragghianti, 'I falsi artistici', Critica d'Arte, no. 43, January-February 1961, pp. 11-17.
A. Tempestini, 'Antonio da Bologna: uno o due?' Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 25, 1981, pp. 344, 352, no. 6, fig. 4.
P. Dal Poggetto, Urbino e le Marche prima e dopo Raffaello, exhib. cat., Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 1983, p. 276.
A. Brejon de Lavergnée, 'Les tableaux italiens de la collection Heugel (1844-1916)', Hommage à Michel Laclotte, 1994, p. 471, no. 7, as 'Francesco Francia'.
A. Ugolini, 'Per Antonio Rimpatta', Paragone, XLIV, nos. 535-7, September-November 1994, pp. 11 and 21, no. 10.
M.E. Avagnina, Museo civico di Vicenza. Catalogo scientifico delle collezioni: Pinacoteca Civica di Vicenza, Cinisello Balsamo, 2003, p. 254.
F. Rinaldi, Timoteo Viti (1469-1523), Ph.D. diss., Università degli studi di Roma 'Tor Vergata', Rome, 2014, I, p. 259, as 'not Timoteo Viti'.
Special notice
Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.
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Lot Essay

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).

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