The Leeswood Tondo - Summary (Continued)
The London troubles would dictate that, if it were a Catholic image, the painting would be secreted to his country estate in North Wales. The Tondo, with the image of the Madonna, came to light in 1981 in North Wales in the collection of a descendant of the Wynns of Gwydir.
It appears that The Tondo is not a copy. There are pentimenti both in the underdrawing and in the paint layers of The Tondo. These adjustments are inconsistent with the professional expertise and refinement of technique, which a copyist would require to produce a painting of such quality. To quote again from Prof.Julius Held's opinion of the Getty Madonna di Loreto :
"The claims of the panel to be the original are reinforced by the presence of pentimenti… corrections which a copyist would have neither the patience to reproduce, nor would the idea occur to him."585
The pentimenti in the paint layer of The Tondo are consistent with the comments of Dr.Shearman ;
"when he painted the two principal heads of the Virgin and Child in The Sistine Madonna ... he enlarged the essential expressive units, eyes, nose and mouth, to a scale unnatural in relation to the outline of the faces themselves ; the result, and surely the intention, is that the expressions are legible over an exceptional distance ... this is a feature of style that may be interpreted as a progressive response, after the inventive process and during the painting itself ."586
The Tondo's image is that of an intimate portrait, which has been progressively adjusted either in the process of the initial painting or at a later date. The adjustments are to the facial features of the Madonna and Child, and tend to exaggerate slightly the eyes and the Madonna's nose.
Excerpt from Dr Murdoch Lothian's PhD thesis 'The Methods Employed to Provenance and to Attribute Putative works by Raphael'