Adoration of the Christ Child

Author: Klazina Botke

In this drawing Mary has her hands joined in prayer as she looks down on the Christ Child lying on her cloak. The event is not recorded in the gospels but was borrowed from a fourteenth-century vision granted to St Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), in which she was a witness at the Nativity and saw the Virgin kneeling in adoration of the newborn baby. ‘But yet, at once, I saw that glorious infant lying on the earth, naked and glowing in the greatest of neatness. His flesh was most clean of all filth and uncleanness. I saw also the afterbirth, lying wrapped very neatly beside him. And then I heard the wonderfully sweet and most dulcet songs of the angels. And the Virgin's womb, which before the birth had been very swollen, at once retracted; and her body then looked wonderfully beautiful and delicate. When therefore the Virgin felt that she had now given birth, at once, having bowed her head and joined her hands, with great dignity and reverence she adored the boy and said to him: "Welcome, my God, my Lord, and my Son!".'^[1]

The scene was popular in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. A print by Andrea Mantegna (1430/31-1506), in which the Virgin is seated on the ground and lovingly holding the Child, shaped the evolution of the genre.^[2] Certain stylistic elements of the Rotterdam drawing look Venetian, and may have been borrowed from the work of Cima da Conegliano (1459/1460-1517/1518) or Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1460/1465-1525/1526).^[3] That makes it likely that our study was made in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Two collectors’ marks are clearly visible at the bottom of the sheet: on the left the stamp of the art dealer Giuseppe Vallardi (1784-1861) and on the right that of the collector Count Grégoire Stroganoff (1829-1910). Vallardi used a stamp with the letters ‘GV’ in order to mark drawings that he sold, many of which have a letter followed by a number in red chalk. The backing sheet removed from this drawing was marked ‘G. 60’. The meaning of these annotations is still not entirely certain, but it could be a portfolio letter followed by a serial number.^[4] There is a similar notation on the recto verso of another drawing in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen that is attributed to the workshop of Filippo Lippi (c.1406-1469) (I 493).^[5]