Master of the Cartellini, Two Apostles

Andrew F. Petryn (1919–2013), New Haven, by 2013; Estate of Andrew F. Petryn

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, has been thinned to a depth of 8 millimeters and cradled. Its width has been supplemented by the addition of a 1.5-centimeter-wide plank of old wood at the left and a 2.1-centimeter-wide plank of new wood at the right. The brown paint covering the background is modern. Beneath this brown paint, original gesso defining an arch-shaped area, measuring approximately 56 by 45.5 centimeters, has been stripped of gilding, although some gesso with original gilding survives near the left edge, at the height of the saint’s shoulder. Outside this arch-shaped area, the panel is covered by a thin layer of modern gesso, also overpainted brown. The saints’ haloes were scraped off, regilt over a thin modern gesso, retooled, and then overpainted brown. Large flaking losses interrupt the paint surface to the right of the younger saint’s face, through his left shoulder, and below his left sleeve. Smaller losses are scattered across his book and hands; the older saint’s hands, beard, and cloak; and throughout the background. The bottom 3 centimeters of the composition may have been covered by a later frame and are mostly lost. Aside from large and small total losses, the paint surface is thinly applied but relatively unabraded.

This previously unknown work entered the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection in relatively recent times, with the 2016 bequest of Yale’s longtime conservator, Andrew Petryn, who, it may be presumed, was responsible for large areas of loss and damage to the painted surface. The panel was recognized by Laurence Kanter as a work of the mysterious painter known as the Master of the Cartellini, after the artist’s habit of inscribing the names of the saints depicted in his pictures on pieces of parchment glued to the panel’s surface. The personality of the anonymous master was first isolated by Roberto Longhi in 1928,¹ when he gathered several works around two fragments with angels bearing the Instruments of the Passion in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (figs. 1–2). These works, formerly in the collection of Count Giacomo Carrara (1714–1796), had been attributed by Pietro Toesca to a Veneto-Lombard artist close to Benedetto Bembo.² Tentatively suggesting that they might be remnants of the same altarpiece, Longhi identified the same hand in two other fragments from the Carrara collection, showing full-length images of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (figs. 3–4), and in a panel with half-length figures of Saints James the Lesser and Philip in the Pinacoteca Malaspina, Pavia (fig. 5). Longhi classified the style of these pictures as distinctly Paduan rather than Lombard and related them to the manner of Francesco Squarcione. In 1962 the same author expanded on his initial grouping and added two three-quarter-length images of Saint Ursula and Mary Magdalen in his own collection (figs. 6–7); two full-length saints, James the Greater and John the Evangelist, formerly in the Cini Collection, Venice;³ and another pair of half-length apostles, identified by their attributes as Peter and Paul, then in a private collection in Florence and most recently on the art market at Sotheby’s in New York (fig. 8).⁴ Reiterating his earlier opinion, Longhi attributed these fragments directly to the hand of Squarcione, with a date around 1440.⁵

While accepting the homogeneity of Longhi’s grouping, subsequent scholarship has been less unanimous about its stylistic connotations, with opinions oscillating between Lombardy and the Veneto, or both. Luigi Coletti advanced an attribution to Antonio Vivarini,⁶ whereas other authors sought to emphasize the prevalence of Lombard components over the Veneto influence. In 1955, in her assessment of the Accademia Carrara Angels (see figs. 1–2), Angela Ottino Della Chiesa pointed to their provenance from Bergamo,⁷ attested to by a 1796 inventory of Count Carrara’s collection compiled by the painter and restorer Bartolomeo Borsetti, who stated that they were removed from an altarpiece in six compartments (“una palla [sic] a sei riparti”) from the church of Sant’Agostino in Bergamo, which was dismantled in 1727.⁸ Although labeling the panels as “Circle of Squarcione(?),” Ottino Della Chiesa registered her “honest impression” that their style pointed toward a Lombard personality, in the milieu of Bonifacio Bembo (ca. 1420–1482). The Vivarinesque elements were acknowledged by Rodolfo Pallucchini,⁹ however, who subsequently added to the series a fifth panel, until then neglected, from Count Carrara’s collection showing Saint Nicholas of Bari (fig. 9) and proposed that the anonymous painter was a personality from the Lombard-Veneto region—perhaps from Brescia—active toward the middle of the fifteenth century. Miklós Boskovits also highlighted the influences from the Veneto, not out of the ordinary since Bergamo had been in Venetian hands since 1428, but he returned to Longhi’s initial assessment, and while rejecting an attribution to Squarcione, he emphasized the “Paduan-Squarcionesque” derivations.¹⁰

The Lombard context was reiterated by Francesco Rossi in his 1979 catalogue of paintings in the Accademia Carrara.¹¹ On this occasion, and in subsequent studies, Rossi related the series of panels to an elaborate altarpiece for the main altar of Sant’Agostino, purportedly commissioned with funds provided by a 1458 bequest of Giacomo da Calepio, the son of a prominent Bergamasque family, who entered the Augustinian community in that year.¹² Rossi’s conclusions, which led him to christen the painter “Master of 1458,” were based on an account of Count Giacomo Carrara himself:

An altarpiece consisting of various panels painted on wood, which was on the high altar of Sant’Agostino in Bergamo, was made in 1459 with money from the famous Ambrosio Calepino, and when it was dismantled I bought several pieces, i.e. two or perhaps four larger ones, with figures of standing saints, a little less than life size, and two small ones, with figures among which I seem to recall a bishop saint, and two even smaller ones each with two or three little angels holding instruments of Christ’s Passion in their hands, very beautiful and well painted and designed for those times.¹³

As Count Carrara noted, his information regarding the commission of the high altarpiece was based on the recollections of the seventeenth-century local historian and Augustinian friar Donato Calvi, who specified that “the extremely rich icon in the choir of Sant’Agostino, which with its gold, its ornamentation and its carving may be said to be one of the most beautiful that shine in antiquity, was finished on this day [November 19, 1459], with the help of the bequest left to the Monastery by the famous Ambroggio Caleppino before his profession [i.e., before he joined the order].”¹⁴ The “Master of 1458,” according to Rossi, was a Lombard painter whose style, combining local, Late Gothic elements with an awareness of Paduan models, seemed to parallel the early experiments of the young Vincenzo Foppa.¹⁵

Rossi’s proposition and the sobriquet “Master of 1458” persisted in the literature until the fundamental 2005 study of the convent of Sant’Agostino by Gianmario Petrò, who demonstrated the impossibility of associating the Bergamo fragments with the church’s high altarpiece or with the date 1458.¹⁶ Petrò’s reexamination of the archival evidence and, in particular, the inventory of the convent’s manuscripts compiled in the eighteenth century by the Augustinian archivist Tommaso Verani revealed two things: first, that the construction of the high altarpiece had nothing to do with Ambrogio Calepio’s bequest but was already underway in 1449 with funds from the sale of land donations; and second, that the altarpiece, destroyed in 1776 and described as a “grandiose, ancient Macchina,” which occupied the full height and width of the choir and was decorated with many colored and gilt wooden statues and carved details, was most likely a sculpted rather than painted complex.¹⁷ Petrò also discounted the suggestion, advanced by Rossi, that the Bergamo fragments could be identified with a mysterious “panel in various compartments” mentioned by seventeenth-century chroniclers as being in the sacristy of Sant’Agostino and thought to be by “Vivarini da Murano,” since the latter were still in situ in the nineteenth century.¹⁸

The same sources examined by Petrò were consulted by Aldo Galli, who later published another fragment of the series with a three-quarter-length image of Saint Jerome, then in the Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware (fig. 10), and who renamed the painter “Master of the Cartellini.”¹⁹ Reconsidering the issue in light of the new findings, Galli concluded that Count Carrara’s assertion regarding the panels’ provenance was simply the result of misinformation or hearsay and that the panels in his possession could have come from one or more other unspecified polyptychs in Sant’Agostino. Noting that the ex-Sotheby’s Saints Peter and Paul (see fig. 8) duplicated the full-length images of the same saints in the Accademia Carrara (see figs. 3–4), Galli posited that the ex-Sotheby’s fragment belonged to a different structure, thus separating it from the Pavia Saint James the Lesser and Philip (see fig. 5), usually considered its pendant. While not questioning the inclusion of the Bergamo (see figs. 3–4) and ex-Cini standing Saints and the ex-Alana (see fig. 10) and ex-Longhi (see figs. 6–7) panels into a single complex, Galli left open the question of how the Bergamo Angels (see figs. 1–2) and the Saint Nicholas of Bari (see fig. 9) could be accommodated in the same altarpiece. For Galli, who viewed the culture of the Master of the Cartellini as “essentially Venetian,” the painter was “an artist trained under the influence of both Squarcione and Antonio Vivarini’s workshop and active in Bergamo, and perhaps also in Brescia, during the middle decades of the fifteenth century.”²⁰ Emphasizing the influence of Antonio Vivarini, Galli traced the source of motifs like the polygonal bases and pseudo-perspectival background walls in the Bergamo and ex-Cini Saints to works executed in the Vivarini workshop in the 1440s, such as the 1441 triptych in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.²¹ More persuasively, he highlighted the iconographic relationship between the Bergamo Angels and the putti bearing instruments of the Passion that were painted by Antonio and his collaborator Giovanni d’Alemagna beneath the throne of the 1444 Coronation of the Virgin in the church of San Pantalon, Venice. Other features, such as the decoration of the gold ground and similar punching in the haloes, Galli proposed, further emphasized the links to the Vivarini workshop.

Galli’s position on these works was independently shared by Mario Marubbi, who considered the Master of the Cartellini a Paduan painter influenced by the production of Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna in the fifth decade of the fifteenth century; adding, however, that a certain provincial quality in the simplification of the forms could denote the work of a personality such as Pietro de Mazis, a mysterious Lombard painter active in Padua but known only through documents.²² Marubbi, like Galli, acknowledged the difficulties in associating the ex-Sotheby’s panel (see fig. 8) with the Bergamo Saint Peter and Saint Paul (see figs. 3–4), but he maintained that the Pavia Saints James the Lesser and Philip (see fig. 5) was certain to belong to the same complex as the Longhi (see figs. 6–7) and ex-Cini Saints, since all four fragments preserve the idiosyncratic piece of parchment inscribed with the figures’ names. As for the Bergamo Angels (see figs. 1–2), Marubbi thought they might have been part of a different altarpiece, possibly surrounding an image of the Virgin and Child.

The array of issues surrounding these works and their provenance were scrutinized anew by Lorenzo Mascheretti in the 2018 catalogue of Italian paintings in the Accademia Carrara, where the author carefully reviewed the range of previous opinions on the five panels formerly in Count Carrara’s collection.²³ Based on their number and format, Mascheretti conjectured that the twelve panels then gathered around the same hand comprised the remains of possibly three different altarpieces from Sant’Agostino and that one of them was probably the polyptych in six compartments, dismantled in 1727, mentioned by Borsetti in his entry for the Angels in the 1796 inventory of the Carrara collection.²⁴ Noting that the date of the dismantling coincided with the changes that were made in 1727 to the Calepio Chapel in Sant’Agostino, built between 1452 and 1469 and dedicated to the Assumption, Mascheretti raised the interesting possibility that it may have contained the altarpiece described by Borsetti—a circumstance that would explain the long-standing association between the panels and the Calepio family.²⁵ Following Galli and Marubbi, Mascheretti isolated the ex-Sotheby’s Peter and Paul (see fig. 8) from the Pavia Saints James the Lesser and Philip (see fig. 5) and the Bergamo (see figs. 3–4) and ex-Cini standing Saints. He also cast some doubt on the integration of the Bergamo Angels (see figs. 1–2), distinguished by their blue rather than gilt background, in the same structure(s) as the other fragments. The question of the artist’s formation, the author concluded, remained open, although a Lombard origin seemed more probable. The Vivarinesque components of the painter’s approach, Mascheretti observed, could be explained by Bergamo’s geopolitical situation and the presence in the region of works like Antonio Vivarini’s Saint Ursula Polyptych, executed around 1440–45 for the church of San Pietro in Oliveto, in Brescia.

The recovery of the Yale Apostles, identical in style to the Pavia Saint James Minor and Philip (see fig. 5) and the ex-Sotheby’s Saints Peter and Paul (see fig. 8), and comparable to them in format and size, represents an important addition to the series, helping to clarify, above all, some of the issues regarding the relationship of the various fragments to one another.²⁶ Notwithstanding the doubts expressed in the past vis-à-vis the inclusion in the same complex of the Pavia and ex-Sotheby’s panels, the addition to them of the Yale Apostles all but confirms that the pairs belonged together in a single structure. The identity of the Yale Apostles remains uncertain, given the lack of clear attributes or a label, as in the Pavia example, but they could be the young John the Evangelist and Matthew, the latter displaying the scroll of the Gospel. Both the Yale and ex-Sotheby’s panels are, at present, distinguished from the Pavia Saints James Minor and Philip by their different tooling in the haloes, as well by the absence of the inscribed parchment. The haloes of the Yale figures, however, are a modern invention, executed when the original surface was scraped away and regilt, retooled, and finally overpainted brown. It seems safe to assume that the cartouche that undoubtedly accompanied the apostles was removed during this process, if not already missing. It may also be presumed that the ex-Sotheby’s fragment, which shows an identical design in the haloes and has a regilt surface—as well as new landscape elements where the hedge would have been—underwent a similar treatment, possibly at the hands of the same restorer or dealer. Evidence of gesso preparatory layers of different thickness on the Yale panel, moreover, suggest that the original painted and gilded area was arched, consistent with other saints in the series.

Based on the panels’ dimensions, it could be hypothesized that the Yale, Pavia (see fig. 5), and ex-Sotheby’s (see fig. 8) pairs of saints originally stood in the upper register of a multitiered polyptych, above the ex-Alana Saint Jerome (see fig. 10) and the Longhi Saint Ursula and Mary Magdalen (see figs. 6–7), which share the same width.²⁷ The repetition of the images of Saints Peter and Paul in the Bergamo (see figs. 3–4) and ex-Cini laterals argues for their origin from the main tier of a different altarpiece. Similarly, the blue background of the Bergamo Angels (see figs. 1–2) and of the Saint Nicholas of Bari (see fig. 9) would seem to preclude their association with any of the other fragments. The identical thickness of these panels (1.7–.8 cm) may offer a clue to their inclusion together in a third complex. If the thirteen fragments gathered together thus far were indeed remnants of three separate structures, it cannot be assumed that they were all executed for Sant’Agostino. The only pieces that can be related with some certainty to the Augustinian church, based on Count Carrara’s testimony, are the two Bergamo Angels, the Saint Nicholas of Bari—most likely the “bishop saint” referred to by the count—and probably the Saint Peter and Saint Paul from his collection, together with their companions formerly in the Cini Collection. But there is no indication that the group formed by the Yale, Pavia, ex-Sotheby, ex-Alana, and Longhi panels shares the same provenance or that the dismembered altarpiece was even executed in Bergamo.²⁸ Whether or not the Master of the Cartellini was a local personality from Bergamo, as posited by Rossi and others, also remains open to question. The unmistakable derivations from the production of Antonio Vivarini do not necessarily imply a Venetian or Paduan formation, especially since it is difficult to find any Squarcionesque elements in these works, beyond perhaps a common debt to Donatello’s models in the figures of the naked putti. The placid, doll-like faces with bland expressions and the flat rendering of forms reflect only a surface assimilation of Antonio’s models and are more directly related to the courtly vocabulary of mid-fifteenth-century Lombard painters who also worked as manuscript illuminators, such as Bonifacio Bembo and Cristoforo Moretti (documented 1451–85).²⁹ The possibility that the Master of the Cartellini, like his more famous Lombard counterparts, might have been active as a miniaturist deserves further consideration. —PP

1. Longhi 1928a; reprinted in Longhi 1968, 65n6. ↩︎

2. Toesca 1912, 576n1. ↩︎

3. See Bacchi and De Marchi 2016, 403, figs. 23–24. ↩︎

4. Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, June 9, 2011, lot 29. ↩︎

5. Longhi 1962; reprinted in Longhi 1978, 147–48. ↩︎

6. Coletti 1953, 80n42. ↩︎

7. Ottino Della Chiesa 1955, 52–53. ↩︎

8. Pinetti 1922, 112–13, nos. 26, 36. The date of the dismantling was given as 1527 in Pinetti’s edition of Borsetti’s catalogue but was recently emended to 1727 by Rosanna Paccanelli (Paccanelli 1999, 276, 277n14, no. 26). ↩︎

9. Pallucchini 1961, 86. ↩︎

10. Boskovits 1977, 60. Boskovits’s proposal to add to the artist’s oeuvre a series of predella panels in the Vatican Museum (inv. nos. 283, 285, 287, and 289), was not taken up by subsequent scholars. The ruinous condition of these works prevents proper evaluation, but they seem to have little in common with the paintings under examination. ↩︎

11. Rossi 1979, 85–86. ↩︎

12. Rossi 1987, 115–20. ↩︎

13. Notes compiled by Giacomo Carrara in 1791–92 as an appendix to Tassi 1793; translated by Aldo Galli, in Boskovits 2009a, 92, 97n9. ↩︎

14. Calvi 1677, 3:317; translated by Aldo Galli, in Boskovits 2009a, 92, 97n11. ↩︎

15. Rossi 1987, 118. ↩︎

16. Petrò 2005, 111–21. ↩︎

17. Petrò 2005, 115. See also Luana Redaelli’s observations, in Redaelli 2005, 239. ↩︎

18. Petrò 2005, 121. ↩︎

19. Galli, in Boskovits 2009a, 92–98n17. ↩︎

20. Galli, in Boskovits 2009a, 91. ↩︎

21. Inv. nos. 6816–18, www.khm.at/de/object/2638/, www.khm.at/de/object/2639/, and www.khm.at/de/object/2640/. ↩︎

22. Mario Marubbi, in Zatti 2011, 279–80, no. 121. Marubbi does not seem to have been aware of Galli’s entry on the ex-Alana Saint Jerome, which is not mentioned among the related fragments. ↩︎

23. Lorenzo Mascheretti, in Valagussa 2018, 135–44, nos. 2.9–.11. ↩︎

24. See note 8, above. ↩︎

25. Mascheretti, in Valagussa 2018, 139. ↩︎

26. The original dimensions of the Yale panel, without the later additions on the sides, are 56 by 45.5 centimeters. Those of the Pavia and ex-Sotheby’s fragments are, respectively, 58 by 43 centimeters and 61.6 by 45.7 centimeters. ↩︎

27. The dimensions of the ex-Alana and Longhi panels are, respectively, 90.5 by 46 centimeters, 94.2 by 46 centimeters, and 94.5 by 44.5 centimeters. The widths of the pairs of saints range from 43 to 45.7 centimeters. ↩︎

28. There is no information regarding the date or circumstances of Petryn’s acquisition of the Yale Apostles, aside from a label in English with a lot number on the back of the painting. The fact that the ex-Sotheby’s panel, which underwent a similar treatment, was formerly in a private collection in Florence might suggest that both works were, at one time, on the art market in that city, perhaps along with the paintings acquired by Longhi. The panel in Pavia was formerly owned by the nineteenth-century scholar and collector Giuseppe Chiappa, professor at the University of Pavia from 1819 to 1854; see Marubbi, in Zatti 2011, 201, 279. Nothing is known of the early provenance of the ex-Alana Saint Jerome, prior to its appearance at auction in London in 2003; see Galli, in Boskovits 2009a, 92. ↩︎

29. For the activity of these artists as manuscript illuminators, see Maggioni 2004, 82–84; and Passoni 2004, 801–7, both with previous bibliography. ↩︎