Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist Italian school of the 19th cen

After the painting of 1508 by Cesare da Sesto (1477-1523) preserved in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon.

From the 17th century onwards, the "Grand Tour" became the privilege of English aristocrats and members of European high society in search of a new world offered by ancient excavations and the beauties of the Italian renaissance.
In the eighteenth century, the enthusiasm of amateurs for these marvels was such that a real trade was quickly organized with English merchants based in Italy. This is how great collections were formed such as those of Jacquemart-André, Ephrussi de Rothschild, Sir John Soane. All palaces and castles had to have antique sculptures or copies from Rome as well as
from Rome as well as collections of Venetian paintings,
Florentine paintings evoking the new taste of the "Grand Tour".
After 1830, Italy continued to inspire both traditionalists and innovators, visited by the laureates of Rome and by artists who came freely from all parts of Europe. It remains the most innovative source of inspiration for artists in search of new formulas (looking for landscapes or costumes).
In addition to this, there were religious preoccupations that intellectuals like Humbert de Supperville supported: the art of the ancients could regenerate Christian art (Ingres with his Virgin of Ostia in 1854), and poets took part in it, notably Goethe. It was "Revival Art".
This European artistic movement was going to initiate with the artists of each country a stylistic current of its own:
In Germany with the Nazarenes, in England with the Victorian painting and in France with the Troubadour painting which will lead to the "Romantic" painting.
Ingres, Odilon Redon, Degas and many other artists made numerous copies after the great masters (Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci...).
The technical processes developed in the nineteenth century in the arts have allowed such perfection that aimed to compete or even surpass the old. The paintings on porcelain are the testimony of it taking again the compositions of the Italian Masters of the Renaissance.
This same phenomenon occurred in England where passionate artists went to Italy to learn Italian techniques in order to reproduce works to meet the many orders.
It is probably in such a context that Lady Ponsonby's family acquired our painting although it is not possible to identify the origin of its creation. The 1916 sale catalog mentions that it was attributed to Fra Bartolomeo, another famous Florentine master.
The perfect technique combined with the gracefulness of the Virgin has baffled many a specialist. Cesare da Sesto, in his time, also practiced direct copying from the works of the most famous painters, moreover the influence of Leonardo da Vinci can be delicately perceived combined with the Raphaelesque softness.
For the theorists of neo-classicism, the art of the Italian Renaissance is the closest to their vision of the ideal of the purity of ancient art.
The first great pictorial project of neo-classicism, "The Parnassus" by Anton Raphael Mengs, painted for the ceiling of the Villa Albani, takes its inspiration directly from Raphael's fresco "The Parnassus", painted for the decoration of the Signing Chamber in the Vatican.
Our painting is part of an artistic, intellectual and aesthetic movement of a richness that is part of a world that is now past.