Mater Dolorosa

This elegant work was created around 1655 when Carlo Dolci was 39 years old. The dark background yields to a faint light surrounding a beautifully sad image of the Madonna, wrapped in a blue robe created in deep lapis lazuli pigment. These factors all conspire to deeply appeal to the viewer. According to F. Bardinucci, the first to write a detailed biography of Dolci, from an early age Dolci was deeply faithful and was a lifelong member of the Order of St. Benedict. In addition to his large-scale religious works, around 1650 he began to paint relatively small-scale works depicting various half-length portraits of saints. This work is an extremely fine example of this type. The model for this image of the Madonna with folded hands can be found in the Madonna images of Titian, and the source for Titian's images may be found in the images of the Madonna that were extremely popular in Spain during the 16th-17th centuries. Dolci's paintings of the Madonna in this style became quite popular; there is one known extant copy of this work and other images of the Madonna with slightly different compositions are known. For many years the model for this painting was thought to be the painter's wife Teresa Bucherelli, whom he married in 1654, but comparisons with known portrait drawings of his wife reveal some questions about this attribution of the sitter. (Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no. 22)