Count Augusto Caccialupi (1834–1897), Macerata;1 Rev. Dr. Robert Jenkins Nevin (1839–1906), by 1907; sale, Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome, April 22–27, 1907, lot 141; Gioacchino Ferroni (died 1909), Rome, by 1909; sale, Jandolo e Tavazzi/Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome, April 14–22, 1909, lot 72; Dan Fellows Platt (1873–1938), Englewood, N.J., 1909;2 E. and A. Silberman Galleries, New York, by 1943–44; Hannah D. and Louis M. Rabinowitz, Sands Point, Long Island, N.Y., 1944
The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, has been thinned to a depth of 1.1 centimeters and cradled. Three vertical splits originate at the top of the panel to the right of center: the shortest reaches through the Virgin’s left eye; the longest extends to the right of her head through her left shoulder to a level below her knee; the third passes to the right of her halo through her left arm to about the height of her elbow. None of these splits has resulted in significant paint loss. The panel has been truncated at the top and bottom, and the upper 1.5 centimeters of paint surface were scraped away to accommodate an earlier reframing. Surface losses around the tops of the Virgin’s and Child’s heads indicate the attachment and removal of votive crowns in both places. X-radiographs reveal holes from nails attaching a batten at approximately 62 centimeters from the present bottom edge of the panel.
While much of the paint surface is well preserved, large areas have been entirely reconstructed. Gilding has been abraded to the bolus underlayer, except around the music-making angels; elsewhere, including in all six haloes, it is modern. The upper section of the hanging cloth above the throne is modern repaint, and both decorative garlands are modern additions. The back edge of the dais beneath the throne is modern. The Virgin’s blue robe is much darkened and more heavily abraded from her knees downward, and the top of her cowl is reinforced. Her cuffs and hems have been repainted with new gold.
The panel, once the central compartment of an altarpiece, shows the Virgin seated on a carved throne of gray stone or marble with the Christ Child standing on her lap. The baby’s face is turned toward His mother, who looks down upon Him with a meditative gaze. She wears a blue mantle (now oxidized to black) with a green lining and pearl trim over a pink dress. The Child is dressed in a metallic green tunic fastened by a striped gray, rose, and gold cummerbund, over a diaphanous white shirt. Behind the Virgin, hanging over the back of the throne and extending above it, is a gray cloth of honor, painted to look like creased watered silk. Perched astride the throne’s stone entablature, next to elegant blue-and-white ceramic planters, are two music-making angels. The one on the left, with green wings and pink tunic, plays a bowed mandolin. The one on the right, painted with the same colors in reverse order—pink wings and green tunic—plays a lute; the direction of his upturned gaze suggests that he may have been contemplating an image once located in an upper tier of the original complex. Two more angels, playing the same instruments in reverse order, kneel next to the Virgin on the throne’s ledge. One of them has red wings and wears a blue robe; the other has blue wings and a red robe. Although generally assumed to be part of the original composition, the fruit swags hanging from ribbons attached to the throne appear to be a later, perhaps eighteenth-century addition, painted in conscious imitation of the decorative garlands of Carlo Crivelli and his followers.
The Yale Virgin and Child first appeared on the art market in Rome in 1907, in the famous posthumous sale of the collection of the American clergyman and philanthropist Rev. Dr. Robert Jenkins Nevin.3 The painting was one of only two works singled out by F. Mason Perkins in his introduction to the sale catalogue, where he referred to it as “the beautiful Madonna and Child by Bartolommeo [sic] Vivarini, surely one of that artist’s finest creations.”4 Perkins’s praise, reiterated in a 1908 article that introduced the panel to scholars,5 established its fame as a masterpiece in the early career of Bartolomeo Vivarini (ca. 1430–1491). Bernard Berenson, who admired the workmanship and lacquerlike surface of the image, highlighted the closeness of the Virgin’s face and pose of the Christ Child to the 1458 Arbe Polyptych, cosigned by Bartolomeo and his older brother, Antonio Vivarini, and concluded that the work was “very likely” one of the earliest independent works by Bartolomeo.6 The debt, in form and type, to Antonio Vivarini’s images of the Virgin and Child was also noted by Lionello Venturi, who nevertheless emphasized the “monumental plasticity” of the figures and the metallic quality of the palette, consistent with Bartolomeo’s approach.7 In his monograph on the Vivarini, Rodolfo Pallucchini, following Berenson’s lead, inserted the Yale Virgin and Child among Bartolomeo’s first independent efforts at the beginning of the 1460s, just before the 1464 Coronation of the Virgin in the Pinacoteca Civica, Osimo, generally regarded as the last collaboration between the two brothers.8
The traditional attribution of the Yale Virgin and Child to Bartolomeo was first questioned by Stefano Tumidei, who tentatively suggested that it might be the center of a multitiered altarpiece by Antonio Vivarini that also included two three-quarter-length images of Saint Louis of Toulouse and Saint Anthony of Padua in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours (figs. 1–2), and a Virgin Annunciate formerly on the art market in Munich.9 Tumidei advanced convincing comparisons between these works and Antonio’s documented production in the 1460s, as represented by the polyptych executed for the confraternity of Saint Anthony Abbot in Pesaro (fig. 3), signed and dated 1464, and by the altarpiece commissioned by the Observants of Santa Maria Vetere in Andria, formerly signed and dated 1467.10 While universally embracing the attribution to Antonio, subsequent opinions have been less unanimous about Tumidei’s reconstruction and the proposed association between the Yale Virgin and the Tours Saints. Giuliana Pascucci cautiously advanced the alternative hypothesis that the Virgin and Child might be the missing center of a dismembered altarpiece executed by Antonio for the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Corridonia, in the Marches, which, according to eighteenth-century sources, bore the artist’s signature and the date 1462.11 Mauro Minardi, however, correctly pointed out that such a provenance was unlikely, given the discrepancy between the ogival shape of the frame that originally enclosed the Yale picture and the trefoil arches in the surviving Corridonia panels.12 The same author also cast some doubt on Tumidei’s proposal, arguing that the Tours panels appeared possibly later in date than the Virgin and Child. Whereas the latter, according to Minardi, could not be much later than the 1464 Pesaro Polyptych, the Tours Saints appeared more closely related to the 1467 Andria Polyptych.
As recently emphasized by Gianmarco Russo, the Yale panel takes its place among a number of images that mark a late chapter in Antonio’s activity, beginning “roughly” around 1464, when the artist, it is generally assumed, sought to adopt the more incisive, Mantegnesque vocabulary of his younger brother Bartolomeo.13 Characterized by a more calligraphic approach and an almost caricatural abstraction of forms, most evident in the perfect ovals of the faces, this phase of the artist’s development is first documented by the Pesaro Polyptych, signed by Antonio alone, but it is already anticipated in slightly earlier works, such as the Virgin and Child in the Museo Davia-Bargellini, Bologna (fig. 4), thought to be part of an altarpiece painted by the two brothers in 1462 for the Vitali Chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna.14 Although closely related to the Davia-Bargellini painting in the rounded heads and type of Virgin and Christ Child, the Yale painting is distinguished by a more pronounced monumentality, highlighted by the architecture of the throne and the weightier presence of the figures. Details, such as the ridges of cloth adhering to the robust body of the Christ Child, as if carved in stone, denote Antonio’s own response, unmediated by his brother, to the classicizing conceits of Mantegna, especially as formulated in those works generally dated to the master’s Paduan period, around 1460. Antonio’s debt to the Paduan environment of the 1450s and 1460s is reflected in the athletic angels or, more appropriately, Donatellian spiritelli, casually seated above the entablature. The motif is fully in line with the decorative tropes of contemporary Squarcionesque painters like Marco Zoppo and Antonio Schiavone, but it also recalls the early experiments of Carlo Crivelli.
Notwithstanding the formal correspondence between the Yale Virgin and the Pesaro Polypytch, the execution of the Yale picture reflects Antonio’s conscious imitation of a modern Renaissance vocabulary, whereas the Pesaro altarpiece is still beholden to an earlier, Late Gothic sensibility, most evident in the stiffly posed figures and brighter palette. Similar contrasts may be drawn with Antonio’s figures in the pinnacle and right compartments of the 1464 Osimo Coronation of the Virgin, which reveal more slender proportions and less fully rounded heads than in the Yale Virgin. A date between 1464 and 1467, closer to the Andria Polytpych, which employs the same subdued metallic palette as the Yale panel, seems plausible. Some of the more loosely drawn passages and dark contours of the Yale composition, especially in the figures of the angels, may imply the intervention of Bartolomeo over Antonio’s cartoon. A similar approach distinguishes the rendering of the features of the Tours Saint Anthony of Padua (see fig. 2) and the design of the lily in his hand, while the Saint Louis of Toulouse (see fig. 3) shares the tighter handling of the Yale Virgin. Tumidei’s proposal that the Tours Saints could be fragments of the same altarpiece should not be dismissed. Other elements in his hypothetical reconstruction, such as the Annunciate Virgin formerly on the art market, to which may be added a newly discovered Annunciatory Angel, now also in Tours (fig. 5), are sufficiently close to the Yale panel to merit equal consideration.15 The Tours Annunciatory Angel has the same rounded forms as the Yale Virgin and is distinguished by an identical palette; his pink dress matches the color of the Virgin’s robe, and his green cloak matches the lining of her mantle as well as the green tunic of the lute-playing angel. The dimensions of the Annunciation panels are consistent with those of the Tours Saints.16 While not a determining factor in their association, moreover, the presence of a Virgin Annunciate in a tier above and to the right of the Yale Virgin would be consistent with the upturned glance of the lute-playing angel atop the throne.
To Tumidei’s reconstruction may perhaps be added several other fragments variously attributed in the past to Bartolomeo or Antonio, beginning with a full-length figure of Saint Francis of Assisi in the Brooklyn Museum (fig. 6). Although noting that the Tours Saint Anthony of Padua (see fig. 2) “could be the twin brother of the New York Saint Francis,” Tumidei ruled out the possibility that the two works may have belonged to the same complex based on a mistaken assumption about the width of the Brooklyn panel, which is, in fact, consistent with that of the Tours Saints.17 As first suggested by Carl Strehlke,18 the Brooklyn Saint Francis is clearly related to two other laterals showing Saint Jerome and Saint John the Evangelist(?) in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, which have comparable dimensions and the same lobed-arch top, as well as similar tooling in the haloes (figs. 7–8).19 Most recently, the Bergamo panels were identified by Giovanni Valaguzza as fragments of an unknown altarpiece executed by Antonio, possibly in collaboration with Bartolomeo, between around 1465 and 1470.20 There is little doubt that the three laterals were originally part of the same structure. While the later repaints in the Bergamo Saint Jerome prevent a proper comparison, the figure of the reading apostle, whose identity remains uncertain, bears close comparison to the Brooklyn Saint Francis, which shares the same proportions and handling of the facial features. Based on their size, as well as stylistic correspondences, it is not inconceivable that the three standing Saints could have flanked the Yale Virgin and Child, which was enclosed in the same kind of lobed arch. The height of the laterals, now between 122 and 131.5 centimeters, accords well with the original proportions of the Yale panel, which measured at least 140 centimeters when the missing 15 centimeters at the top and 8–10 centimeters at the bottom are accounted for. If this were the case, the original complex would have been a large pentaptych, with the Brooklyn and Bergamo Saints (see figs. 6–7) and one other unidentified figure in the main register alongside the Yale Virgin and Child; and above them, a central image, possibly of Christ, flanked by the missing Virgin Annunciate and the Tours Annunciatory Angel, along with the Tours Saint Louis of Toulouse and Saint Anthony of Padua (see figs. 1–2; fig. 9). The early provenance of the Yale Virgin and Child and the presence of Franciscan saints would appear to argue for a commission from a Franciscan establishment in the Marche, where the production of the Vivarini workshop had been in demand since the early 1460s.21 —PP
Published References
Venturi, Adolfo. Storia dell’arte italiana. 11 vols. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1901–40., 7, pt. 3: 323, fig. 247; Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome. Catalogo della vendita della collezione del fu Reverendo Dottor Roberto I. Nevin. Sale cat. April 22–27, 1907., lot 141, 10; Perkins, F. Mason. “Una tavola di Bartolomeo Vivarini.” Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna 8, no. 8 (August 1908): 145. , 145; Jandolo e Tavazzi and Gallerie Sangiorgi. Catalogue de la vente après décès de Mr. Joachim Ferroni. Sale cat. April 14–22, 1909. , lot 72, 16, pl. 8; Perkins, F. Mason. “Dipinti italiani nella raccolta Platt.” Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna 11, no. 2 (January 1911): 1–5, 145–49., 146; Berenson, Bernard. “Venetian Paintings in the United States, Part 2.” Art in America, 3, no. 3 (1915): 104–19. , 104, fig. 1; Berenson, Bernard. Venetian Paintings in America: The Fifteenth Century. New York: F. F. Sherman, 1916. , 14, fig. 7; Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition: Loans and Special Features, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1920. , 9; Venturi, Lionello. Pitture italiane in America. 2 vols. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1931., pl. 267; Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932., 601; van Marle, Raimond. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. Vol. 18. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1936., 106–7; Venturi, Lionello. The Rabinowitz Collection. New York: Twin Editions, 1945., 35–36, pl. 15; An Exhibition of Paintings, for the Benefit of the Research Fund of Art and Archaeology, The Spanish Institute, Inc. New York: E. and A. Silberman Galleries, 1955., 17, no. 5; Hess, Albert G. Italian Renaissance Paintings with Musical Subjects: A Corpus of Such Works in American Collections, with Detailed Descriptions of the Musical Features. New York: Libra, 1955., no. 89; Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places: Venetian School. 2 vols. London: Phaidon, 1957., 1:202; Seymour, Charles, Jr. “Louis Mayer Rabinowitz.” Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 23, no. 3 (September 1957), 10–14., 12–13, fig. 5; Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff. “Recent Gifts and Purchases.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 26, no. 1 (1960): 5–58. , 54; Pallucchini, Rodolfo. I Vivarini (Antonio, Bartolomeo, Alvise). Venice: N. Pozza, 1961., 42, 117, no. 139, fig. 139; Seymour, Charles, Jr. The Rabinowitz Collection of European Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1961., 24–25; Seymour, Charles, Jr. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970., 247–49, no. 186; Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972., 601; Katherine B. Neilson, in Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff, and Katharine B. Neilson. Selected Paintings and Sculpture from the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972., no. 12, pl. 3; Seymour, Charles, Jr., et al. Italian Primitives: The Case History of a Collection and Its Conservation. Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1972., 8, no. 186; Kenney, Elise K., ed. Handbook of the Collections: Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1992., 138; Stefano Tumidei, in Italies: Peintures des musées de la région centre. Exh. cat. Paris: Somogy, 1996., 91; Giuliana Pascucci, in Liberati, Germano, ed. Pinacoteca Parrocchiale, Corridonia: La storia, le opere, i contesti. Exh. cat. Corridonia: Parrocchia di SS. Pietro, Paolo e Donato, 2003. , 54n8; Steer, Susan Ruth. “Ell maestro dell anchona’: The Venetian Altarpieces of Bartolomeo Vivarini and Their Commissioners.” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., University of Bristol, 2003. , 1:274–75; Minardi, Mauro. “Studi sulla collezione Nevin: I dipinti veneti del XIV e XV secolo.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 36 (2012): 315–50., 328–31, 346n87, 347n102, z3; Mambelli, Francesca. “La vendita della collezione Ferroni nelle fotografie di Federico Zeri.” In I colori del bianco e nero: Fotografie storiche nella Fototeca Zeri, 1870–1920, ed. Andrea Bacchi et al., 107–13. Bologna: Fondazione Federico Zeri, 2014. https://www.antiquariditalia.it/download/file/138. , fig. 8; Russo, Gianmarco. “Per la tarda attività di Antonio Vivarini.” Albertiana 23, no. 1 (2020): 99–112. , 103, fig. 5; Russo, Gianmarco. “Vivarini, Antonio.” In Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2020. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-vivarini_(Dizionario-Biografico)/., 55
Notes
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According to a note in the 1909 Ferroni sale catalogue; see Jandolo e Tavazzi and Gallerie Sangiorgi. Catalogue de la vente après décès de Mr. Joachim Ferroni. Sale cat. April 14–22, 1909. , 16. This provenance is not mentioned in the Nevin sale catalogue (Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome. Catalogo della vendita della collezione del fu Reverendo Dottor Roberto I. Nevin. Sale cat. April 22–27, 1907.), although in his introduction to that auction, F. Mason Perkins pointed out that Nevin’s acquisition of the “nucleus of the valuable Caccialupi collection, of Macerata, accounts, again, in great part, for the large number of works of the early Umbrian and March [sic] school to be met with in the catalogue” (n.p.). As observed by Mauro Minardi (in Minardi, Mauro. “Studi sulla collezione Nevin: I dipinti veneti del XIV e XV secolo.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 36 (2012): 315–50., 346n87, 347n101), the Yale Virgin and Child is not listed in the 1870 catalogue of Count Caccialupi’s collection compiled by Filippo Raffaelli (Raffaelli Filippo. Catalogo di quadri di varie scuole pittoriche raccolti dal sig. conte Augusto Caccialupi in Macerata. Macerata: Tip. Cortesi, 1870. ), but it should be borne in mind that the latter stops short of at least another twenty years of possible acquisitions. ↩︎
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According to information provided by Dan Fellows Platt in 1923 and 1927, as recorded in the Frick Art Reference Library, New York, the painting was purchased around 1910 from Galleria Sangiorgi. However, Charles Seymour, Jr. (in Seymour, Charles, Jr., et al. Italian Primitives: The Case History of a Collection and Its Conservation. Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1972., 8, no. 186), reports that it was inv. no. 205 in the Platt Collection and that it was purchased from Sangiorgi in 1909. ↩︎
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An avid art collector and one of the leading figures in the Anglo-American community in Rome, Nevin had been the founder and rector, for thirty-seven years, of the first Protestant church in Rome, Saint Paul’s Within the Walls; see Dabell, Frank. “The Reverend Doctor Robert Jenkins Nevin, Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Art.” In Spellbound by Rome: The Anglo-American Community in Rome (1890–1914) and the Foundation of Keats-Shelley House, ed. Christina Huemer, 79–85. Exh. cat. Rome: Palombi, 2005. , 79–85. ↩︎
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Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome. Catalogo della vendita della collezione del fu Reverendo Dottor Roberto I. Nevin. Sale cat. April 22–27, 1907., n.p. ↩︎
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Perkins, F. Mason. “Una tavola di Bartolomeo Vivarini.” Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna 8, no. 8 (August 1908): 145. . Apparently unaware that it had been purchased by the Roman dealer Gioacchino Ferroni, Perkins listed the then owner of the picture as a “mister Ellis of Chicago,” a mistake that was noted by Dan Fellow Platt in 1923 and 1927, according to records in the Frick Art Reference Library, but that has persisted in the modern literature. Mauro Minardi was the first author to correct Perkins’s error; see Minardi, Mauro. “Studi sulla collezione Nevin: I dipinti veneti del XIV e XV secolo.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 36 (2012): 315–50., 329. ↩︎
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Berenson, Bernard. “Venetian Paintings in the United States, Part 2.” Art in America, 3, no. 3 (1915): 104–19. , 104. ↩︎
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Venturi, Lionello. The Rabinowitz Collection. New York: Twin Editions, 1945., 35–36. ↩︎
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Pallucchini, Rodolfo. I Vivarini (Antonio, Bartolomeo, Alvise). Venice: N. Pozza, 1961., 42, 117. The exact chronology of the Osimo altarpiece, currently missing its original inscription and formerly placed between 1460 and 1464, was established in relatively recent times by Marina Massa (in Massa, Marina. “L’arte dei Vivarini nelle Marche and Le Marche nell’arte veneta.” In Pittura veneta nelle Marche, ed. Valter Curzi, 87–100. Milan: Cariverona, 2000. , 90), who cited eighteenth-century sources recording the date as 1464 and the following signature: ANTONIUS ET BARTOLOMEUS DE MURANO PINXERUNT; see Fanciulli, Luca. Osservazioni critiche sopra le antichità Cristiane di Cingoli. Osimo, 1769. , 178n24. ↩︎
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Stefano Tumidei, in Italies: Peintures des musées de la région centre. Exh. cat. Paris: Somogy, 1996., 91. The Tours Saints, otherwise assigned to Bartolomeo or Alvise Vivarini, were first recognized as works of Antonio by Michele Laclotte; in Laclotte, Michele. “Musée de Tours: La donation Octave Linet; I. Peintures italiennes.” La revue du Louvre et des musées de France 14, nos. 4–5 (1964): 181–87. , 187. The Virgin Annunciate last appeared at Sotheby’s, Munich, June 22, 1986, lot 108. ↩︎
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For the history and reconstruction of the Andria Polyptych, disassembled sometime in the late eighteenth century and missing its central element, see Gelao, Clara, ed., Il politico di Antonio Vivarini: Storia, arte, restauro. Venice: Marsilio, 2014. . The date of the polyptych is surmised from the apocryphal signature below the panel with Saint Francis (ANT: DE MURANO. 1467). ↩︎
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Giuliana Pascucci, in Liberati, Germano, ed. Pinacoteca Parrocchiale, Corridonia: La storia, le opere, i contesti. Exh. cat. Corridonia: Parrocchia di SS. Pietro, Paolo e Donato, 2003. , 48–50. ↩︎
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Minardi, Mauro. “Studi sulla collezione Nevin: I dipinti veneti del XIV e XV secolo.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 36 (2012): 315–50., 330–31. ↩︎
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Russo, Gianmarco. “Per la tarda attività di Antonio Vivarini.” Albertiana 23, no. 1 (2020): 99–112. . ↩︎
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The Davia-Bargellini panel has traditionally been associated with two laterals with Saints Petronius and James Major and Saints John the Baptist and Louis of Toulouse in the Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France, inv. nos. 20274 and M.I. 579. While the attribution of the Davia-Bargellini Virgin to Antonio (first proposed by Mauro Lucco, in Grandi, Renzo, ed. Museo civico d’arte industrial e galleria Davia Bargellini. Exh. cat. Bologna: Grafis, Casalecchio di Reno, 1987. , 84, no. 7) is universally accepted by scholars, that of the Avignon Saints has shifted between Bartolomeo and Antonio or both. See Laclotte, Michel, and Esther Moench. Peinture italienne: Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005., 202–3, nos. 277–78, with previous bibliography. For Russo, all three panels are unquestionably by Antonio; see Russo, Gianmarco. “Vivarini, Antonio.” In Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2020. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-vivarini_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.. The generally accepted identification of the partially reconstructed complex as that commissioned for the Vitali Chapel was reasonably questioned by Cecilia Cavalca, based on iconographic evidence; see Cavalca, Cecilia. “Appunti sulla presenza di opere dei Vivarini a Bologna.” Nuovi Studi 8, no. 14 (2008): 39–59. , 41–43. ↩︎
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The Annunciatory Angel, previously known only to a few scholars, was acquired by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours, France, from the Patrick Matthiesen Gallery in London, in 2023. It was first attributed to Antonio Vivarini and dated to the second half of the 1460s by Mauro Lucco, verbal communication to Patrick Matthiesen, 2014; cited in Russo, Gianmarco. “Per la tarda attività di Antonio Vivarini.” Albertiana 23, no. 1 (2020): 99–112. , 102n2. Russo’s proposal (in Russo, Gianmarco. “Per la tarda attività di Antonio Vivarini.” Albertiana 23, no. 1 (2020): 99–112. , 103–11) to relate the Annunciation panels to a different altarpiece that included the standing figures of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Augustine in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, inv. nos. 1326–27, is not convincing. Aside from the discrepancies in width (the Accademia panels are 58 cm, whereas the Annunciation panels are both around 41 cm), the Accademia figures are more mannered in style and appear to postdate the Andria Polyptych. They have been thought by some scholars to reveal the collaboration of Antonio’s son, the young Alvise Vivarini (ca. 1442–1505). See Bonocore, Vincenzo. “Alvise Vivarini rivisitato: Problemi di committenza (Parte I).” Arte cristiana 99, no. 863 (March–April 2011): 81–94. , 81, 87n2, with previous bibliography. ↩︎
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The dimensions of the Tours panels are 63 by 42 centimeters (Saint Louis of Toulouse) and 60 by 42 centimeters (Saint Anthony of Padua). Those of the Annunciatory Angel and Annunciate Virgin are, respectively, 63 by 41.5 centimeters and 59 by 41 centimeters. As confirmed by technical examination (see Élisabeth Ravaud, in Italies 1996, 90; and Tumidei, in Italies 1996, 90), the original gold background of the Tours Saints was completely scraped away and replaced by modern gilding, in the course of which the tooling of the haloes was also redone. Judging from photographs alone, the same procedure appears to have been undergone by the Tours Angel, making it impossible to compare the punches of these works to those of the Yale Virgin’s halo, which are also modern. ↩︎
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The dimensions of the Brooklyn Saint Francis are 130.5 by 39.4 centimeters, only 2.6 centimeters narrower than the Tours Saints. Following a misleading indication of Pallucchini (in Pallucchini, Rodolfo. I Vivarini (Antonio, Bartolomeo, Alvise). Venice: N. Pozza, 1961., 113), Tumidei (in Italies: Peintures des musées de la région centre. Exh. cat. Paris: Somogy, 1996., 91) assumed that the Brooklyn panel originally accompanied a lateral with Saint Bernardino of Siena by Antonio in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. no. 154, https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/101892), whose narrower width (34 centimeters) would preclude an association with the Tours Saints. The Philadelphia painting is now generally recognized as the companion of a different Saint Francis with comparable dimensions in the Cagnola collection, at Gazzada, convincingly dated around 1460–64 by Giorgio Fossaluzza, in Boskovits, Miklós, and Giorgio Fossaluzza, eds. La collezione Cagnola. Vol. 1, I dipinti dal XIII al XIX secolo. Busto Arsizio: Nomos, 1998. , 119–20, no. 24. Minardi’s tentative proposal (in Minardi, Mauro. “Studi sulla collezione Nevin: I dipinti veneti del XIV e XV secolo.” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 36 (2012): 315–50., 347n102) to associate the Yale Virgin with the Cagnola and Philadelphia Saints can be ruled out on the basis of physical evidence as much as stylistic considerations. X-rays of the Philadelphia Saint Bernardine, in fact, show that the batten nails on that panel do not align with those of the Virgin, confirming that the Philadelphia Saint—and by extension its companion in the Cagnola collection—were the laterals of a different complex. The early provenance of the Brooklyn Saint Francis is unknown. It was donated to the museum in 1925 by the American merchant and collector Frank Lusk Babbott (1854–1933). Babbott was a close friend of Platt’s, whom he met on his first trip to Italy in 1911. Platt would write the introduction to the short catalogue of some of the most important works in the Babbott collection, published in 1934; see The Collection of Frank Lusk Babbott, 1854–1933. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1934. , n.p. The Brooklyn Saint Francis is mentioned in the introduction but is not among the catalogued pictures. In more recent times, Andrea De Marchi (in Boskovits, Miklós, ed. Italian Paintings and Sculptures from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century. The Alana Collection 2. Florence: Centro Di, 2011. , 282) proposed that the Brooklyn Saint was part of the same structure as a heavily repainted three-quarter-length figure of Saint Catherine of Alexandria formerly in the Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware (sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, October 22, 2024, lot 5), although he dated both works significantly later in Antonio’s career, between 1470 and 1475. While the handling of the Saint Catherine is very close to that of the Brooklyn and Tours Saints, the panel’s smaller proportions and dimensions preclude its inclusion in the same complex. ↩︎
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Manuscript notes, curatorial files, Brooklyn Museum. ↩︎
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The dimensions of the Saint Jerome and of the Saint John the Evangelist(?) are, respectively, 122.1 by 40.3 centimeters and 122.3 by 40.5 centimeters. Both panels appear to have been cut at the base. Their thickness, 2.4 centimeters, corresponds exactly to that of the Brooklyn Saint Francis. ↩︎
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Giovanni Valagussa, in Valagussa, Giovanni, ed. Accademia Carrara Bergamo: Dipinti italiani del trecento e del quattrocento; Catalogo completo. Milan: Officina libraria, 2018, 260–64, no. 3.11. According to Valagussa, the panels were purchased by Giacomo Carrara in Bergamo in 1759. As pointed out by Valagussa, the fact that they are listed in Carrara’s account books among other works bought around the same date, including some drawings, suggests that they were acquired from an unidentified antiquarian rather than from a church or private individual. Their earlier provenance is unknown. ↩︎
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See Massa, Marina. “L’arte dei Vivarini nelle Marche and Le Marche nell’arte veneta.” In Pittura veneta nelle Marche, ed. Valter Curzi, 87–100. Milan: Cariverona, 2000. , 87–93. ↩︎