"La Madonnina quasi persiana" by Vitale degli Equi at the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan.

Roberto Longhi had called it “the almost Persian Madonnina who seems to be waiting to give the Child a lesson in the art of perfumes.” Vitale degli Equi’s Madonna and Child is indeed one of the most delightful objects in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, and it is one of the highest expressions of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’s collecting taste. It is one of the most beautiful pieces in the collection, one that alone is worth the visit. One does not notice it immediately, in the Saletta dei Trecenteschi filled with gold backgrounds, precious plates, and small masterpieces of 14th-century art, but the eye that crosses it immediately realizes, even without necessarily being an expert, that it is before one of the highest products of the art of the time. Longhi has well pointed out that this panel represents the happy outcome of the meeting of two cultures: the lyricism of the Bolognese and the luxury of the Venetians.

It is a work that takes up the iconographic motif of the Madonna of Humility: that is, the Virgin is seated on the ground rather than seated on a throne. Humble, then: she places herself at the level of the beholder. Often accentuating the humility of pose with that of attitudes, of expression. In Vitale da Bologna’s panel, the Madonna sits on a beautiful Persian carpet, which is held, further back, by two saints: on the left, St. Catherine of Alexandria shows the relative the wheel of her torment, while on the right an unidentified martyr saint observes the scene.

The expressionistic line of Bolognese art that sees in Vitale one of its most skilled and acclaimed masters is appreciated in the movements of the mother and son: Mary is a loving parent caring for her child, taking him by the hand, caressing him (the gesture of the index finger of her left hand, brushing the Child’s chin, would be enough by itself to demonstrate all the affection of the divine mother). The Child, for his part, reciprocates the attention with his gaze. There is, in Vitale degli Equi, a constant search for expression, for emotional cue.

Observing the Child again, Vitale, with a most original invention, catches him choosing from what Longhi read as ampullae, arranged on the stool beside him “as if, in the guise of an oriental prince,” the great scholar wrote, “he were listening from his mother to his first lesson in the art of perfumes.” Carlo Volpe offered another reading of those colorful, tapered objects on the small table: they are spools of colored thread, and the Child is handing the Madonna a needle, which he holds tightly between thumb and forefinger. This interpretation would tie in with a precedent: a Madonna of Embroidery that Vitale painted for the church of San Francesco in Bologna. The fresco, now detached, has an earlier date than the Poldi Pezzoli’s Madonna and Child (from the 1330s the Bolognese work, from about 1353 the Milanese one: it has been related to the polyptych of San Salvatore in Bologna, a work of those years whose decorativism it shares) and is preserved in the collections of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna, managed by Genus Bononiae. Wanting to read the image of Poldi Pezzoli’s work as that of a Madonna intent on sewing, one could connect it to the religious circles of the time: one of the most popular texts among religious orders was Pseudo Bonaventura’s Meditationes Vitae Christi , a work written in Tuscany around the beginning of the 14th century. One passage restores the image of a holy family engaged in daily chores: thus, St. Joseph was providing support for the family by working with wood, and Mary contributed by doing needlework and distaff work.

The theme of the industrious Madonna was thus particularly dear to the religious orders of the time. In the fresco of St. Francis, grounded in a plasticism that might seem unusual if we keep in mind the work of Milan (Cesare Brandi pointed out, however, how the great fourteenth-century Bolognese was able to move from a plastic to a more pictorial “as a musical motif passes into major or minor”), Vitale tackles the theme of the Madonna of the Embroidery with great sobriety, with an intense and bare image designed for the Franciscans who were supposed to pray before it. The tone, on the other hand, changes in Poldi Pezzoli’s Madonna , marked by a Gothic, courtly, fairy-tale-like elegance: the carpet recalls distant, dreamy lands, the sumptuous blue silk robe with gold embroidery and vaio lining lets us imagine a patron who loved luxury. Madonna of humility yes, but dressed like a queen.

Spontaneous artist, then, imaginative, capable of even sudden changes of register and setting, able to make unusual fusions between different, even distant modes of expression: the solidity of the Bolognese fresco on the one hand, and those “exquisite vilucchi of lines” that, Brandi writes, “chase each other in an inexhaustible arabesque” in the Poldi Pezzoli Madonna, painted with virtuosic flair, for it seems Vitale never took his brush off the surface, to use another image of Brandi’s.

In 1966, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, introducing the volume of Rizzoli’s Masters of Color dedicated to Vitale degli Equi, wrote that the last works of the Bolognese painter, beginning precisely with the Madonna and Child at the Poldi Pezzoli, could be considered as the works that inaugurated the northern translation of the “Madonnas of the Rose Garden” of the various Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano. The last Vitale is, after all, an artist who “continues on the increasingly rich path of courtly art experience.” A courtly art not in the strict sense, but imbued with courtly atmospheres, one might say, not free of Sienese and Avignonese intonations but animated by a verve that is quite original and innovative. This is how we could describe, in short, Vitale degli Equi in the last phase of his career. And the Madonna and Child at the Poldi Pezzoli is the masterpiece of this phase.

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