The conservation of Francesco de’ Franceschi’s Madonna of Humility was generously funded by Chip Oberndorf.

Francesco de’ Franceschi’s Madonna of Humility will be featured in the Venice and the Ottoman Empire exhibition, an ambitious project that documents interactions between the two rival Mediterranean states across multiple cultural arenas—political, diplomatic, economic, artistic, technological, and culinary.

Exhibition Schedule:

Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art 
SEPT 28, 2024 – JAN 5, 2025

Savannah, Telfair Museum 
JAN 31, 2025 – MAY 4, 2025

Nashville, Frist Art Museum 
MAY 29, 2025 – SEPT 1, 2025

Following the exhibition circuit, the painting will return to Venice in September 2025 and be prominently displayed in the permanent collection of the Correr Museum.

The Madonna and Child at the Correr Museum carries an attribution to Francesco de’ Franceschi, a painter who resided in the Venetian parish of San Zulian, nearby Piazza San Marco, between 1443 and 1456. None of the several altarpieces that de’ Franceschi made for the churches in Venice has survived, however, a few panels of his dismembered Saint Mamas Polyptych can be found in Verona (Museo di Castelvecchio), Venice (Museo Correr), and New Haven (Yale University Art Gallery). De’ Franceschi’s only signed work is the Saint Peter Polyptych, an altarpiece he painted in 1447 for the Benedictine convent of San Pietro in Padua. This polyptych is noted for its quality and high technical level and demonstrates that the author was influenced by the work of the great Venetian painters of the time, including Michele Giambono (c. 1400 – 1452) and Antonio Vivarini (c. 1418 – 1476/84).

Once overlooked due to condition issues, de’ Franceschi’s Madonna and Child should be regarded as one of his fine works. The attribution rests on striking stylistic similarities to the Saint Peter Polyptych, especially to the panels depicting Scholastica and Mary the Magdalene. Indeed, the flat and elongated hands are very characteristic of de’ Franceschi, and the same applies to the faces of the female figures, mostly with regard to their round facial features, high foreheads, large eyes, and distinctive noses. Finally, it should be noted that the gold background is decorated with elaborate punched motifs and patterns of floral tracery that de’ Franceschi used to embellish the mantle of Saint Peter in the central panel of the Saint Peter Polyptych. Preliminary infrared reflectography suggests that the artist behind the Madonna and Child in the Correr Museum may have joined the team of painters who collaborated on Michele Giambono’s Coronation of the Virgin. Conservation treatment allowed the exciting opportunity for a closer examination of this panel painting to uncover new insights into the artistic relationship between de’ Franceschi and Giambono.

The painting is an intimate depiction of the Madonna of Humility, or Nostra donna de humilitate, one of the most favored iconographic motifs among Medieval painters. The Virgin holds the Child on her lap in an enclosed garden—in Latin hortus conclusus, a widespread symbol of Mary’s virginity—while sitting directly on the ground as a sign of her humility. This iconography became extremely popular during the 14th and early 15th centuries and widely disseminated across Europe, from Sicily to Catalonia and the Low Countries. The Madonna of Humility had a number of variations—the Virgin could be nursing the Child, sitting on a cushion, and carrying various symbols of the Woman of the Apocalypse (for example a crown of stars)—but the painting at the Correr represents its simplest and unsophisticated form. The only exception would be the decoration that once adorned the heads of the Virgin and the Child (most likely stars of precious metal or stones), as the nail holes over the halos tend to suggest. Close examination of the panel during conservation treatment will provide information about this fascinating side of the devotional function of Francesco de’ Franceschi’s Madonna of Humility.

The panel painting was in poor condition. The Virgin’s blue mantle, painted with lapis lazuli, exhibited significant losses of original paint along with dense cracking and flaking, likely due to old restoration attempts. In addition, a large vertical crack ran through the bottom right of the panel. Conservator Milena Dean began by consolidating and stabilizing areas of lifting, flaking and paint loss. She then turned her attention to the delicate cleaning process, carefully thinning and removing the thick layers of non-original materials—overpainting and oxidized varnish—that had obscured the panel painting. The final stage of the conservation process involved carefully integrating small surface losses with removable conservation paints . To complete the restoration, a protective varnish layer was applied, ensuring the painting’s preservation.

Francesco de’ Franceschi (active 1443 – 1456) [attr.]
Madonna of Humility
1440s, tempera on panel
79 x 53 cm
Correr Museum

Angelelli, Walter. Franceschi, Francesco dei. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 49. Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1999, pp. 615-616. Link to the article

Banzato, Davide, Alberta De Nicolo Salmazo, Anna Maria Spiazzi, eds. Mantegna e Padova, 1445-1460. Milan: Skira

Sandberg Vavalà, Evelyn. “Additions to Francesco de’ Franceschi.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 76, 446 (1940): 154-157

Spiazzi, Anna Maria. “Tre tavole del secolo XV e gli affreschi della scuola di S. Giuseppe in Padova.” Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova, 48 (1979): 31-35

Zeri, Federico, ed. La pittura in Italia. Il Quattrocento. Milan: Electa, 1987, vol. 2