by Jon Lackman | 23 June 2006 | Renaissance
From the Times of London: “A mystery that has tantalised art scholars for centuries moved closer to resolution today when part of a scandalous Renaissance fresco came to light after almost 400 years. The fresco, painted by the early Renaissance artist Pinturicchio (1454-1513) for the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, showed the Borgia Pope Alexander VI kneeling at the feet of the Madonna and Child and cradling the infant Jesus’s right foot in his hand. But it was an open secret at the Borgia court that the ‘Madonna’ was Giulia Farnese, the 60-year-old Pope’s beautiful young married mistress … According to Franco Ivan Nucciarelli, an art historian at Perugia University, who has reconstructed the saga of the ‘lost fresco,’ the portraits of the Madonna and the infant Jesus ended up in the Chigi family collection, over time becoming misattributed to another artist, Perugino. Professor Nucciarelli said, however, that he had identified them from a contemporary copy of the lost Pinturicchio masterpiece. The fragment depicting the infant Jesus was recently bought for an undisclosed sum from the descendants of the Chigi family by Giuseppe Margaritelli, an industrialist from Perugia. He has donated it to a museum in Perugia, the Guglielmo Giordano Foundation, where it will go on show this year.”
