VACCARO, ANDREA
MARIA AND MARTHA
Signature bottom left as a monogram consisting of the intertwined letters AV.
Andrea Vaccaro was strongly influenced in his early years as a painter by the Neapolitans Massimo Stanzione and Bernardo Kavallino and by Caravaggio, Guido Reni and van Dyck among the artists who came to work in Naples. A close variant of this composition, albeit in a horizontal format, is in a private collection in Italy.
Provenance: held in the collection of the Counts Shuvalov in St. Petersburg; acquired by the Pushkin Museum from the Shuvalov palace-museum in Leningrad in 1924.