The Virgin in Prayer, c.1640/50 Giovanni Battista Salvi Sassoferrato (1609-1685)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Giovanni Battista Salvi Sassoferrato also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Virgin in Prayer is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Her fingertips meet with a firmness that is almost architectural: ten small uprights gathered into a narrow steeple. Just below them, a flash of red sleeve warms the blue and white like a coal under cloth. This is The Virgin in Prayer, painted by Sassoferrato around 1640/50, and its modesty is deceptive. Nothing much happens, yet everything is concentrated.

Against a darkness that gives away no room, no window, no earthly furniture, Mary bows her head. Her face is pale, smooth, and inward-looking, with lowered lids casting soft shadows over the eyes. The white headdress is not merely a sign of purity; it is a landscape of folds. Notice the little ridges above her brow, where the fabric gathers like pressed linen after being lifted from a chest. One can almost feel its coolness. Around it, the ultramarine mantle falls in broad, saturated waves, a blue made from lapis lazuli and therefore as costly as it looks. Sassoferrato uses it without fuss, letting the pigment carry both luxury and reverence.

Simplicity, here, is a form of intensity. Red, white, blue, flesh, black: that is nearly the whole orchestra. Light strikes from the left and slightly above, modelling cheek, nose, throat, and hands with a clarity that has something of sculpture about it. Yet the image never becomes chilly. The blush on the cheek and the tiny red band at the neckline keep the body present, vulnerable, human.

Sassoferrato, born Giovanni Battista Salvi in the Marches and active largely in Rome, made a speciality of devotional pictures like this, intimate works suited to private prayer in the Catholic world of the seventeenth century. His ancestry is visible. Raphael is there in the serenity of the oval face and the measured fall of the drapery; Guido Reni hovers nearby in the polished grace and luminous flesh. But Sassoferrato is less theatrical than many Roman Baroque painters. He removes incident. He quietens the room.

Perhaps that is why the painting feels so near. Mary is almost life-size, cropped close, with no narrative setting to place her safely in the past. Even the dark background has an unexpected role: it is not dramatic thunder, but silence, the kind that thickens in a chapel when footsteps stop. At the National Gallery in London, among louder pictures, this Virgin can seem almost reticent. Stay with her, and the reticence changes. It becomes attention.