The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has been quite recently restored. The canvas has been lined with glue. The paint layer is stable and in very good condition. Under ultraviolet light restorations are visible in the cuffs of the outstretched hands of the saint on the left and there is a fair amount of restoration in the sky above his head. In the upper center in the sky there are restorations to the right of the putti. In the lower sky there are a few spots and pentiments visible around teh hands of the praying woman in black, yet other than this, the condition is unusually good. The restoration is accurate and concise and the picture should be hung as is.
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In one of the most important and influential commissions of his early maturity, Ludovico Carracci was charged with the decoration of an entire chapel in SS. Filippo e Giacomo, the church of the Monache Convertite in via Lame, Bologna.  The chapel was the property of the Buoncompagni, the family of Pope Gregory XIII, and the artist was to create frescoes subtly glorifying the recently deceased pontiff as well as a painting for the altar.¹ The patron was Donna Cecilia Bargellini, the widow of the late pope's brother, and for her Ludovico created one of his most famous images.  The Bargellini altarpiece of 1588, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, depicts the Madonna and Child enthroned, attended by Saints Domenico, Francesco, the Magdalen and angels.  In a particularly effective (and chauvinistic) touch, the artist painted the skyline of his native Bologna in the distance, the light of the setting sun shining through the city's famous towers. The saints are posed in adoration of the Virgin and her Son, who are enthroned above them, while in quiet reverence, dressed in simple widow's weeds, kneels the figure of Donna Cecilia herself. ²

The present canvas would appear to be an autograph, reduced replica of this famous altarpiece, and its reappearance is a singular event in the understanding of Ludovico's career and of one of his most important paintings in particular.  Alessandro Brogi, who has examined the painting in the original, was the first to attribute the picture to Ludovico in full and considers it to be a modelletto painted by the artist for the Bargellini family.  The commission of the altarpiece, by such a prominent figure in Bolognese society and in such a prominent position in the city had occasioned much comment at the time, and it seems that this amongst other concerns was a prime motivation for the family to request a version to be kept for their own private use.  The practice of making such repetitions had been in common use later, although was somewhat more unusual at this early date.  Brogi notes, however, a number of examples by artists and as diverse as Andrea Boscoli, Claudio Ridolfi, the Cavaliere d'Arpino and, not surprisingly, the methodical Federico Barocci, all of whom produced such works in the last years of the 16^th century.³  It is likely that Ludovico too, as an artist coming into his own in the competitive artistic environment of late cinquecento Bologna, would have wanted to paint a smaller version of an altarpiece by whic♋h he planned to make a very im🌞portant and very public statement.

The painting itself reflects perfectly Carracci's style of the late 1580s.  Indeed, Brogi notes the extremely high quality of the execution throughout the composition: "Le caratteristiche di stesura, di materia e di colore esibite dal dipinto corrispondono pienamente.... a quelle espresse da Ludovico sia nella pala che nelle altre opere certe di quel felice momento, al second metà degli anni Ottanta.  La ricchezza compatta degli impasti e la sicurezza della fattura, l'eccellente qualità dei dettagli, dei rialzi di luce sulle pieghe delle vesti, sull'acquasantiera con l'aspersorio, sui volti o sulle mani, o ancora la libertà di resa del cielo e delle nuvole confermano, a mio parere, la piena autografia del dipinto."⁴  Indeed, the present canvas is filled with pentimenti, and slight shifts and variations in the composition, as if to suggest that the artist was either working out the composition before he painted the final version, or adapting it slightly to make it work better visually on a reduced scale.  Many of these are visible to the naked eye, and some are detectable by examination with x-rays.  One of the most marked of these is the movement of the Madonna an🥂d (to a lesser extent) Child's head downward, moving it much further away from the crown held by the putti just above than in the final Bologna altarpiece.  Others are around the open hands of the male Bargellini/Saint Dominic at middle left, along the column at upper left, and in other places.  In all there are at least some 15 pentiments or shifts in the painting.  Other changes are made again probably to satisfy concerns of scale; Ludovico has shortened the height of the composite capitals on the columns to better fit the space needed, and changed spatial relationships between some of the figures (the musical angels, for example, are given more prominence in the smaller canvas). 

We are grateful to Dr. Ales🅘sandro Brogi for making his unpublished notes on this painting available and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

1.  The Buoncompagni chapel must have been particularly impressive in its original form.  Malvasia described its rarified and illusionistic decoration (nel volto, con una certa scala doppia e bizzarra, che porta ad un grazioso corridore nel mezzo, ove certi Angeli spargono fiori, tutto visto da sotto in su, con una rigorosa intelligenza).   The church, which has since been rededicated to Santa Maria del Buon Pastore, was suppressed during the Napoleonic administration of northern Italy, when it was converted into a mint.  At that time the walls were whitewashed, covering both the ceiling, clearly in debt to Correggio, as well as the wall frescoes, depicting the Madonna offering the Carmelite Habit to Elijah, and the Dream of Saint Gregory.  A print probably after a drawing Fragonard of the Gregory episode is the most complete record of the frescoes.  The church was further badly damaged in 1943. 
2.  In his description of the altarpiece, the first signed and dated work of the artist, Ludovico's biographer Malvasia fancifully suggested that Carracci included the images of Donna Cecilia and her family in the painting, all in the guise of various saints (cf. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, 1841 ed., vol. I, pp. 279-80).  Donna Cecilia, clearly the most traditionally portrayed as a donor figure, is meant to represent Saint Martha.  Ludovico was said by Malvasia to be "nemicissimo" with the tradition of painting living patrons in sacred works; this interpretation of the picture, however, seems to be a case of Malvasia's romantic imagination.
3.   These examples are redactions or versions of works that were in very public locations and thus affirmed the status of the artist. A Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew of 1587 by Boscoli (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) which is a quote from his frescoes in the Cloisters of San Pierino, Florence; An Assumption in the Molinari Pradelli collection by Claudio Ridolfi relates to an altarpiece in the church of the Madonna di Campagna, Verona; the Cavaliere d'Arpino painted another version (Rome, Villa Borghese) of his very famous fresco of the Battle of Tullius Hostilius, which is in the very public Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome.  Barocci produced at least two such finished modelli, one for the Christ Forgiving Saint Francis in the church of Saint Francis, Urbino and another for the Entombment in Santa Croce, Senigallia (both smaller canvases in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino).  Brogi in addition notes a mention of a picture then in the Palazzo Sampieri by Marcello Oretti as a "pensiero" by Ludovico of a Saint John the Baptist Preaching.  It is tempting to connect this reference with a painting of the identical subject in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.  Indeed, Lanzi, a few years later, saw the same picture and described it as a "bellissima copia in piccolo." See A. Brogi, Ludovico Carracci, Bologna 2001, vol. I, p. 293, cat. no. P81.
4.  [Trans. "The characteristics of the handling, of the paint and of the color evident in the picture correspond fully... to those used by Ludovico whether in the altarpiece or in any of the other securely attributed works of this happy moment, tha🌊t second half of the 1580s.  The thick richness of the impasto and the sureness of the application, the excellent quality of details, of the highlights on the folds of the drapery, on the aspersorium with its aspergillum, on the faces (of the figures) and their hands, or even the freedom with which the sky and clouds are rendered confirm in my opinion the full autograph status of the painting."] In an unpublished document by Alessandro Brogi, dated September 2008.