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Renaissance Painting Restoration

Satisfactory Essays

Virgin, Child and St. John the Baptist (1480-65), by Jacopo del Sellaio (1440-93), and Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and Angel (1518-20), by Domenico di Bartolomeo Ubaldini or Puligo (1492-1527), are small (83-86 cm), oil-on-wood paintings by Florentine artists of the second rank, and were most probably commissioned by churches are decorative altarpieces. Their style, color, subject matter and composition are very technically competent but dull, repetitive, imitative and uninspired. These small-scale pictures of the praying Virgin with the infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist were commonplace at the time, especially since John the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence. Even art experts have often had difficulty determining which artist created these unsigned religious paintings given their similarities in style, theme, color and composition, and del Salleo's work was only definitely confirmed as his in 2004, after Stanford University performed exhaustive tests on it. Both Puligo and del Sallaio reflected the influence of the Florentine master artists who taught them, such as Sandro Botticelli, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, so much so that careful examination by specialists is often necessary to distinguish which of the pupils created a particular work of art.
Jacopo del Sellaio's works are very difficult to distinguish from those of other painters of the period, and Virgin, Child and St. John the Baptist was only definitely

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