Madonna and Child in a Landscape

Probably Bartolomeo della Nave, Venice; James, 3rd Marquess (later 1st Duke) of Hamilton [1606-1649], London, by c. 1638; Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria, by 1651.[1] (sale, Robinson, Fisher & Harding, London, 11 May 1922, no. 101, as _The Virgin and Child_ by Bernardino Zacchetti); (Julius Böhler, Munich); sold 1922 to Ralph Harman [1873-1931] and Mary Batterman [d. 1951] Booth, Grosse Pointe, Michigan; gift 1946 to NGA. [1] Ellis Waterhouse claimed, it would seem correctly, that the Bellini _Madonna and Child_ depicted in Tenier's painting of Leopold Wilhelm's gallery in Brussels was identical with number 116 in a list of pictures, probably from the della Nave collection, compiled around 1638-1640, when the collection was offered for sale to the Marquess (later Duke) of Hamilton ("Paintings from Venice for Seventeeth-century England: Some Records of a Forgotten Transaction," _Italian Studies_ 7 [1952]: 9, 18 [1-23]). Entry 116 reads "Our Lady p. 3 1/2 & 2 1/2 idem." The artist for number 116 in the inventory is given as "John Belin" in the previous item (115). Though Fern Rusk Shapley, _Catalogue of the Italian Paintings_, 2 vols., Washington, 1979: 1:51 n. 3, claimed that the measurements for number 116 are inconsistent with the NGA painting, in fact they agree both in the proportion of height to width and in the overall dimensions: the unit of measurement in the list is described as "palmi," or palms, a measurement used in Rome and elsewhere in Italy and equivalent to about 22 centimeters (Angelo Martini, _Manuele di metrologia_, Rome, 1883: 596 [reprint 1976]). This would make the dimensions of number 116 about 77 x 55 centimeters--very close to the current measurements of the NGA painting. Waterhouse calculated from comparing the 1638-1640 inventory and the engravings in Tenier's _Theatrum Pictorium_ (Brussels, 1660) that over sixty pictures in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm came from the della Nave collection. The possibility that the NGA painting originally belonged to della Nave is increased by the fact that such a painting is not likely to have been purchased individually, given the taste for later art that informs the Leopold Wilhelm collection as a whole.