Madonna mit dem heiligen Petrus und einem Stifter (nach Palma Vecchio)

'Madonna mit dem heiligen Petrus und einem Stifter (nach Palma Vecchio)' (Madonna with Saint Peter and a Donor, after Palma Vecchio), painted in 1865 and held in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is a copy after Palma Vecchio (c. 1480–1528), the Venetian Renaissance master. Copying from the Old Masters was a fundamental part of a nineteenth-century painter's education, and von Marées spent considerable time in Italian museums making careful copies as a means of learning compositional structure, colour relationships, and figure modelling from the masters he most admired. Palma Vecchio's warm, sensuous Venetian palette and his dignified female figures were sources of direct relevance to von Marées's developing style, and this copy demonstrates his sustained engagement with the Venetian tradition. The votive portrait format — Madonna with saints and a donor — was one of the central compositional types of Italian Renaissance painting, and studying it through copy-making gave von Marées access to centuries of accumulated compositional wisdom.

The copy after Palma Vecchio demonstrates von Marées's ability to absorb and reproduce the Venetian master's warm, rich palette and his characteristic way of modelling figures in warm golden light. The copy faithfully reproduces the original's compositional structure while inevitably passing the image through von Marées's own developing sensibility. The warm colour relationships are particularly carefully studied.