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Old Master Paintings

Thursday 28 November 2024, 03:00 PM • Rome

27

Deifebo Burbarini

(Siena 1619 - 1680)

Transit of Virginis

Estimate

€ 2.500 - 5.000

Sold

€ 3.225

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

oil on canvas
95 x 203.5 cm

Provenance

Probably from the suppressed monastery of Santa Margherita in Castelvecchio, Siena, as reported by Ettore Romagnoli in the Biografia cronologica de’ Bellartisti senesi, (before 1835), XI, p. 33.

Literature

M. Ciampolini, Pittori senesi del Seicento, vol. I (Antonio Angelini-Dionisio Montorselli), Poggibonsi 2010, pp. 52 – 54 illustrated and indicated in unknown location.

Professor Marco Ciampolini viewed the work in person, confirming the attribution to Deifebo Burbarini and appreciating its high pictorial quality. The scholar, to whom we are grateful, specified that he knew the work on the basis of a photo from the Lensini archive in Siena and that, in publishing it in his repertoire, he advanced the hypothesis that the canvas once belonged to the suppressed Santa Margherita in Castelvecchio, reporting what was observed, by the Sienese scholar Ettore Romagnoli, who listed a painting of the same subject  in the Sienese monastery. In an interior, caught in the shadows and illuminated by torches and a divine light, the apostles and saints appear gathered around the sleeping Virgin, in a pathos of measured wisdom and balance; the bier on which the young woman is lying, placed in the centre of the composition, is decorated with the coat of arms of the Sienese brotherhood of the Olivetan order, a homage from the painter to his patron.