Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (16.1975)

This painter's activity may be traced during a rather short period of time, between the year
1506, the date of the first known work of his hand, executed at the moment when he still was
in the studio of Albertinelli'2, and the year 1524, when he prematurely died at the age of 42,
the victim of bubonic plague3. There is a number of motifs and forms in the Warsaw tondi which
find close analogies in the works painted by Franciabigio at various stages of his career. Mary
betrays features which the figures of women invariably assumed in Franciabigio's paintings.
She is rather heavy and rounded and modelled in a soft manner; she conveys the atmosphere of
mildness. The color composition is no less typical of his pictures. Cold colours prevail;
the blue, the violet and the green occur in various tones and in subtle combinations, opposed by
the lively red, graduating into pink which progressively looses in intensity until it becomes white
in places where light is shed.

2. J. Shearman was the first to recognize Franciabigio's participation in the two pictures of Albertinelli, both executed
in 1506: a fresco of the Crucifixion in Certosa di Val d'Ema in Galuzzo (J. Shearman, Andrea del Sarlo, Oxford, 1965,
I, p. 24 f.) and a Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Zenobius in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse (J. Shearman,
"Le seizième siècle européen", The Burlington Magazine, CVIII, 1966, p. 64.). These observations were accepted by
S.R. McKillop, Franciabigio, Berkely, Los Angeles, London, 1974, p. 22—24, 123—125, cat. no. 1 and 2.

3. Vasari-Milanesi, Vite, V, 1906 (reedited 1973), p. 190—200. McKillop, op. cit., p. 14.

2. Franciabigio, Virgin Mary, Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw

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