Problems of Attribution and Dating of Early Baroque Paintings: The Case of the Painting Rest on the Flight to Egypt in the Collection of the Mykolas Žilinskas Art Gallery

Abstract

The painting Rest on the Flight to Egypt in the Mykolas Žilinskas Art Gallery of the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art was previously attributed to Giovanni Antonio di Francesco Sogliani. Later, this attribution was rejected, and the painting was thought to have been created by an unknown artist of the first half of the sixteenth century. The aim of this article is to reexamine the dating and possible authorship of this painting on the basis of an iconographic and stylistic analysis.
The composition of the painting is very close to that of Francesco Vanni’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt, also known as the Madonna della pappa (Virgin of the Porridge). The similarities can be noticed in the arrangement of the figures and the colouring of their clothes, but the details are different: the combing of the Virgin’s hair, the baby’s blanket, and the bowl held by the angel. Compared to Vanni’s work, the lines are coarser, the physiognomy less precise, and the figures disproportionate.
It seems that the painting may have been based on the copies of engravings of Vanni’s image, such as those by the Flemish engraver Cornelis Galle or the Italian engraver Raffaello Guidi. Made around 1600-1602, the latter seems to be the closest to the painting in Žilinskas’s gallery. In addition, the version of Rest on the Flight to Egypt in RIISA, the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland, which dates to the seventeenth century according to the dating of pigments, also suggests that the painting in the collection of the Žilinskas Art Gallery is an imitation of popular seventeenth-century engravings and must have been painted no earlier than the first half of the seventeenth century.