[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/rosso.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Thursday that it had acquired a recently rediscovered Renaissance painting of significant art historical importance.<\/p>\n
\n\tLayers of paint were removed during a recent conservation to reveal the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the canvas\u2019s lower-right portion. With the overpaint now gone, the painting has now been identified as Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist<\/em> (1512\/1513) by 16th-century painter Rosso Fiorentino. The painting\u2019s attribution had previously been questioned, with some scholars assigning it to Rosso and others to a contemporary; it had also been dated to 1520 and titled Madonna and Child<\/em>. <\/p>\n \n\tThe Met has already put the work, which was believed to have been lost for centuries, on view in its European painting wing.<\/p>\n \n\tIn his foundational text Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects<\/em>, Giorgio Vasari, often credited as the first art historian, describes Rosso as having secured his first major commission, a fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin<\/em> (1513) at the Chiostrino dei Voti at Santissima Annunziata in Florence by presenting the work\u2019s patron, Fra Jacopo of the Servite Order, with \u201ca painting of the Madonna and Child with a half-length figure of Saint John the Evangelist.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPaintings by Rosso are exceedingly rare, numbering only about two dozen, and many of his most celebrated works remain undocumented or unfinished,\u201d Stephan Wolohojian, curator in charge of Met\u2019s European painting department, said in a statement. \u201cThe discussion of this painting in Vasari\u2019s\u00a0Lives of the Artists<\/em>, often described as the first book of art history, gives the work the added distinction of having been part of art-historical discourse since the discipline\u2019s inception.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tVasari called his and Rosso\u2019s approach maniera moderna<\/em>, or \u201cmodern style.\u201d That term would eventually become Mannerism. <\/p>\n \n\tIn typical Mannerist fashion, Rosso\u2019s renderings of the painting\u2019s subjects have exaggerated features. This is often seen as a response to, and in some cases even a critique of, the sense of harmony and proportion engineered by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael during the High Renaissance. Though seemingly garish at first, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist<\/em> has flourishes that appear intentionally off\u2014for example, the coy smirk on the baby Jesus\u2019s face and his extremely muscular butt.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWith his unusual placement of the figures and daring postures,\u00a0Rosso transforms a familiar devotional type into a charged encounter that draws the beholder into a complex interplay of seeing, feeling, and believing,\u201d Met director and CEO Max Hollein said of the rediscovered painting.<\/p>\n \n\tGiovanni Battista di Jacopo, who would later called Rosso Fiorentino, or \u201cFlorentine Redhead\u201d for his red hair, was born in 1494 in Florence and enrolled in the artist guild Arte degli Speziali in 1517 when he was 23 years old. The following year, he would receive his breakthrough commission, the Santa Maria Nuova Altarpiece, from 1518. With that work, he would establish himself as one of the era\u2019s most important Mannerist artists.<\/p>\n \n\tLittle is known of the artist\u2019s early life, though he spent the first decade of his career before moving to Rome and finally France, where he died in 1540, at 45. In France, he became a court painter to Francis I, establishing, with Francesco Primaticcio, the First School of Fontainebleau.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThis painting is a rare and pivotal early work by one of the most important painters of the 16th century, striking in its experimental ambition and psychological intensity,\u201d Hollein added in his statement. \u201cThe rediscovery of this work reshapes our understanding of Rosso\u2019s early oeuvre and the emergence of more expressive and dynamic compositions in 16th-century Florentine painting.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/met-museum-acquires-rediscovered-rosso-fiorentino-painting-1234778208\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/rosso.jpg?w=1024″] The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Thursday that it had acquired a recently rediscovered Renaissance painting of significant art historical importance. Layers of paint were removed during a recent conservation to reveal the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the canvas\u2019s lower-right portion. With the overpaint now gone, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1838537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1838537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1838537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1838537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1838537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}