Madonna and Child in Glory over the City of Bologna

It is unanimously identified with the work seen in the private chapel at Palazzo Caprara in Bologna by Giovanni Pietro Bellori and entitled "Madonna [and Child] in Glory with Angels over the City of Bologna seen in the distance" in his 1672 Vite dei Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Moderni.

[1] The Caprara family was powerful and active in politics, producing several noted soldiers, which probably explains the clear civic symbolism of the work, almost certainly commissioned by them.

Influenced by Correggio and Venetian painters like the same artist's 1593 Madonna and Child with Saints,[3] its composition is similar to Madonna of the Earthquake, a Francesco Francia work commissioned by the city of Bologna just under fifty years earlier as an ex voto for ending a series of earthquakes that had terrorised the city's inhabitants in 1505.

[4] Its balanced composition also suggests influence from Renaissance artists from Florence and the rest of central Italy[3] and from works by Raphael such as his Ezekiel's Vision, which was for a long time in Bologna - the proportions of the vision's foreground and the far-off bird's eye background landscape both seem to have been a strong influence on the centre of the work now in Oxford.

[6] Two preparatory drawings survive in the Albertina, Vienna and two in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House in the UK,[1] though all four differ from the final painted composition.