In 1866, this painting of the seated Madonna holding the Christ Child, with a young John the Baptist, was sold as an authentic work of Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483–1520) to wealthy Bostonian Peter Chardon Brooks (1830–1920). Although competently painted in a naturalistic style, the painting lacks the insistently tangible figures, confident brushstrokes, and saturated palette of a Raphael painting. The painting is an inventive reinterpretation of Raphael’s famous Madonna of the Chair by either Giambettino (1706–70) or Giuseppe (1727–96) Cignaroli, from Verona, Italy. In creating a devotional picture or a collector’s item, Cignaroli was following the time-honored practice of learning through emulation. He had no intention of passing off his Madonna as a Raphael.

How do we explain its mistaken attribution? At an unknown moment, the size of the original canvas was altered, possibly to fit the painting into the frame that is a near replica of the frame of Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair (1513–14, see image). The frame hides Cignaroli’s signature just below the arm of the chair (see image). In 1866, when Brooks bought the painting, Bostonians lacked the visual resources to authenticate a painting attributed to the master. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, the situation had changed dramatically. Along with the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts and the reproducibility of photography, Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired the first authentic paintings by Raphael in the US, the Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami (c. 1515–16) and the Pietà predella (c. 1503–05) respectively in 1898 and 1900. By 1898 Brooks knew that his painting was not an original Raphael. In 1939 Brooks’s daughter gifted it to a Catholic priest in Chestnut Hill, who, in turn, must have given it to Boston College.¹

1. Stephanie C. Leone, “A ‘Raphael’ in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Biography of the McMullen Museum of Art’s Madonna and Child with John the Baptist,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (2018).