Boccaccio Boccaccino (Ferrara 1466-1525 Cremona)

Boccaccio Boccaccino was the most gifted painter active in Cremona in the early sixteenth century. Born in Ferrara, he received a major commission at Genoa in 1493, but he also worked in his native town, responding to both Ferrarese and Lombard trends. Early in the new century he was in Venice but by 1506 he was effectively based at Cremona. This panel is evidently the central panel of an altarpiece dated 1511 recorded in the Church of San Francesco at Cremona by Lancetti in 1820: the lateral panels, representing Saint John and Saint Francis, had already been removed from the church and have not subsequently been traced.

As Puerari noted, the Child, and to a lesser extent the Madonna, correspond with those of the half-length Madonna and Child formerly in the Wedells Collection, Hamburg (Puerari, fig. 68) of which a variant is in the Museo Civico, Vicenza. The type recalls that of Giovanni Bellini's Barberini Madonna, now in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow. It is not surprising that for a major Cremonese commission Boccaccino returned to a Venetian convention, although by the time this was executed, he had also come under the influence of Giorgione and the softer manner of Bellini's own late work.

A copy after head of the donor was painted on panel by Seraphin Maurer in 1898, for the Liechtenstein Collection (inv. no. 874).