(Arbe/Raab circa 1500–1540/41 Venice)
Madonna and Child and Saint Jerome,
oil on panel, 55.6 x 74.8 cm, unframed

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for suggesting the attribution and for his help in cataloguing the present painting.

The present panel, which appears to be unpublished, is according to Lucco a work by the Dalmatian Stefano Cernotto who largely operated in Venice. The artist has been recently retrieved from obscurity by Mauro Lucco, who has gathered many of his works together (see: M. Lucco, ‘Occultato nell’ombra di Bonifacio Veronese: disvelamento di Stefano Cernotto’, in: Artibus et Historiae. Papers dedicated to Peter Humfrey, part II, n. 68, 2013, pp. 165-201). Despite the widely held tradition connecting Cernotto to Bonifacio, he was probably a pupil of Titian and likely left the master’s studio around 1525 to begin an independent career.

The present composition derives from the canon of Titian, as well as that of his followers, including Bonifacio, Palma il Vecchio and others. Here various sacred figures are assembled in the landscape, as if for a festive occasion. Such paintings overlook history to unite divine characters who lived centuries, if not millennia, apart. In this case, as is well known, Saint Jerome lived three centuries after Christ and the Virgin.

The attribution of this work to Cernotto can be supported by a series of direct comparisons. The face of the Christ child is similar to that in the Sacra Conversazione formerly at Sotheby’s, New York (see: M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 179, fig. 16) and the face of the Virgin is similar to that of the Saint Catherine of Alexandria in a private collection in Budapest (see: M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 186, fig. 24). Saint Jerome’s features are repeated in the first apostle in the lower right of the Last Supper at Treviso (see M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 166, fig. 1) and in the jailer who holds the brazier in The Test of Fire of Moses in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (see: M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 182, fig. 21) and again in the Saint Jerome of the Sacra Conversazione in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. A939), which is still incongruously attributed to Sebastiano Secante. Areas of the striated intarsia sky resemble areas in the Finding of Moses in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (see: M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 173, fig. 9). The present composition compares favourably with that of the Sacra Conversazione formerly in the Leuchtenburg Collection, Munich and now in Saint Petersburg (see: M. Lucco, op. cit. p. 197, fig. 37), which can be considered the artist´s masterpiece. In terms of quality, the present panel painting is also placed highly in Cernotto’s corpus. Given its particular stylistic closeness to the Saint Petersburg´s painting, a similar dating is likely, around 1528-30.