The Leeswood Tondo - Summary (Continued)
This exaggeration is the process by which the artist has translated an intimate personal portrait into the exemplar for a large public altar-piece, The Sistine Madonna. This being so, then the picture may not be identifiable with the Bibbiena or Castiglione collections, but rather with a painting which remained in Raphael's studio after he, or his studio, had copied the image as the core of the larger painting. In this case the painting could have passed by inheritance to Giulio Romano and then on into the Mantua collection.
The image of the Madonna in The Tondo, save for some obvious and important discrepancies, is identical to the half-length Madonna and Child in The Sistine Madonna. Marielene Putscher believed that there must have been a cartoon for the painting- Previous researchers have hypothesised a tondo format for the Mother and Child in The Sistine Madonna, identifying the- importance of this to the composition of the painting as a whole.
It has been established scientifically that the materials of The Tondo are compatible with an artefact produced at or around the same date as The Sistine Madonna. The Tondo and The Sistine Madonna, share the same image, and the same scale. They also share the same painting technique, which Putscher and others have said was uniquely used by Raphael in one painting. The Sistine Madonna. This affinity of production raises the question of the original conception of the image.
The presence of the pentimenti in The Tondo, both in the underdrawing and in the paint layers, indicates that aesthetic decisions have been taken during its production, and that it is an original work. There is no evidence of such empirical working in The Sistine Madonna : indeed the impression of careful and laborious handling in The Sistine Madonna suggests that the artist made use of a prior production for reference.
Excerpt from Dr Murdoch Lothian's PhD thesis 'The Methods Employed to Provenance and to Attribute Putative works by Raphael'