Copy after Sassoferrato, Madonna and Child

For sale at Galerie Moderne as 17th century Flemish School, but I would think that this style of painting is more Italian than Flemish (could be a Flemish copy of an Italian work of course). Only estimated at 700/1000 Euro, mainly because it is anonymous, but the good quality of the work should lift the price higher, and if one could put a name or circle on it, it would probably be worth a lot more. The style of the painting, mainly the face of the Madonna, seems familiar, but I can't put a name on it. Still, I'ld estimate it at 2,000 to 3,000 Euro instead.

There are many paintings of a Madonna and Child where the child lovingly reashes for the neckline of the Madonna, even with a similarly raised left knee, e.g. by Raphael, but the immediate model for the painting seems to be a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Battista Sassoferrato (1609-1685), a version of which was sold at Christie's New York in 2011 for $158,000 (or both the Sassoferrato and the auction painting are based on some common example I'm not immediately aware of). The version currently for sale is less pictural, more drawn; less Venetian and more Roman, in the Michelangelo style perhaps. And indeed a bit more fleshy in a Rubensian style, which could explain the Flemish attribution of the auction house.

Another version of the same painting, atributed as "Manner of Sassoferrato", was also sold in 2011, but now at Christie's Amsterdam, for 5,000 Euro. The colour scheme of this version is much closer to the one now up for auction though, but the Madonna is much closer to Sassoferrato, more soft and lovely than the somehow more French looking one for sale. It generaly is also somewhat better painted, with more detail in the faces, and the one for sale seems to be in a somewhat worse or dirtier condition, but it still is in my view a worthwhile painting to buy, more so than the more common copies of Sassoferato's Madonna praying or in extasy.

UPDATE 9 January 2015

On Artvalue (hence the watermarks), I've found two further copies of the same painting by "Followers of Sassoferrato".   The first is a reverse copy, sold in Munchen in 2007 for 2400 Euro by Nagel Auktionen. A nice quality work, finely painted, that perhaps lacks a little character.

More interesting for us still is the second one, also sold at Nagel in 2007 a few months later. It is either a fragment or a partial copy, but it has the same face of the Madonna as the one up for sale now, not the version of the (known) original and the other copies.  More crudely painted, with certainly the infant Christ less attractive, and with weaker colouring, it still fetched 2000 Euro.

UPDATE 13 January: it was sold for 1,200 Euro in the end.