The Madonna of the Cat ('La Madonna del Gatto')
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Held in the National Gallery, London (catalogue number NG29) |
| Location History: | Barocci painted the work for Antonio Brancaleoni, Count of Piobbico, a village about twenty miles west of Urbino. Around the same time, Brancaleoni also commissioned a separate, larger work from Barocci, a Rest on the Return from Egypt (now in the Vatican Museums) for the parish church at Piobbico. Given its smaller scale, square format, and intimate domestic subject, the painting is thought to have been intended not for the church but for the Brancaleoni household itself — likely the countess's own apartments, which were completed in 1574 (the count's apartments weren't finished until 1585). The painting is recorded as having passed down the female line of the Brancaleoni family, inherited by the countess's daughter, Isabella, further supporting the idea that it was associated with the women of the household. |
Barocci sets a holy scene in a sumptuously commonplace space. Instead of a heavenly or a ceremonial setting, the Holy Family is shown in a small bed-chamber of a renaissance family, with a crib set up before them. Ventured into the middle, the Virgin's body twists in a gentle movement that captures the viewer's gaze around the ensemble, rather than fixating on one figure. Infant Christ has just pulled away from nursing, to watch his young cousin, John the Baptist, teasing a cat on his lap. It is one of the quietest, most restless creatures; alert, wary, caught mid-reaction, becomes the unexpected focus of a quiet, maternal scene. Barocci's palette is soft, chalky: dusty rose, muted blue, warm ochre, blended with a hazy softness at the edges, not hard outlines. This is very different from the more sculptural contour of early sixteenth century Central Italian painting. Faces are illuminated with a light that is far more diffused and inward than those in a devotional image and the inward light here creates the psychological presence of the figures, rather than the stiffness of a posed image. The cat is not just a prop, it's the centerpiece and the emotional pivot of the picture. It's so tense between the goldfinch and John's teasing finger, it trades in a bit of the domestic turmoil that happens everyday in a setting composed of maternal tenderness. This is typical of Barocci, who always places devotional themes in small movements of the human heart and in everyday objects as well as by symbolic convention.
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