The Virgin in Prayer

Sassoferrato is the name of a town that Giovanni Battista Salvi was born in, and he took it on to represent himself as an artist. Although he was born in this town and named himself after it, he still spent most of his life working in Rome. The Virgin in Prayer, a painting currently held in the National Gallery in London, is one of the known works of Sassoferrato. This painting is considered to be one of the many versions the painter chose to represent the image of Mary. There are actually well over a dozen versions like this made by Sassoferrato himself, along with many copies made by his studio. His main focus was on devotional paintings, and he also created many altarpieces along with this. This painting, probably created around 1640–50, wishes to draw attention to the importance of personal and alone prayer and devotion as part of the spiritual lifestyle, which was an idea that was arising in the seventeenth century. This painting is an artistic piece with its simple and neat use of only three attention-grabbing colours, which are red, white, and blue, and it fills the background with darkness so as to focus all the details on the figure of Mary. Interestingly, the blue that is used here is one of the most precious colours, ultramarine, which is made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone discovered in Afghanistan. Back then, this blue was actually more expensive than gold, so using it here shows just how much value and importance was given to this image of Mary. This detail of using ultramarine blue has made the painting even more precious. Mary is seen painted in a very devotional and humble demeanour, with her head bowed down and covered with a white headdress, her hands gently folded together in prayer. This painting has made sure to pull the entire attention of the viewer toward the act of devotion that Mary is portraying, without any distracting detail that shifts the eyes of the viewer away. The figure of Mary takes up almost the entire space in the canvas, and even though the actual painting is not very big in size about 73 x 58 cm, the way she is painted so close and so large within the frame creates a lifelike figure with an almost life-size presence, like she's really there in the room with you. Sassoferrato's style here owes a lot to Raphael and Perugino, two artists who had already died more than a hundred years before he was painting, but their influence shows clearly in the elegant robes and the smooth, sculpted look of the face. The painting joined the National Gallery's collection in 1846, left to them by Richard Simmons, at a time when Sassoferrato's work was becoming popular again in London.