Zanobi di Jacopo Machiavelli, Virgin and Child with Two Angels

Paul Grand, Lyon, France; Edouard Aynard (1837–1913), Lyon, France; sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, December 1–4, 1913, lot 56; Robert Langton Douglas (1864–1951), London; Dan Fellows Platt (1873–1937), Englewood, N.J.; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1929

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, is composed of two planks of wood joined by a seam 5 centimeters from the right side, the narrower plank joined to the main plank by three large nails driven through the side. The panel retains its original thickness of 3.5 centimeters and has not been trimmed in any dimension: gesso drips from its original preparation are visible on the sides. The paint surface is unevenly preserved. Large sections of the pink and blue draperies and the curtain at the top are in beautiful state, while green pigments throughout have flaked severely, and the (copper resinate?) greenish glaze of the tunic worn by the angel on the right is much degraded. The flesh tones have been abraded, and damage to fingers and hands and to the Christ Child’s feet have exposed the gesso priming. Localized damage to eyes, mouths, and the profile of the Child’s arm, again all but obliterating the paint layers in those areas, suggest that these features must once have been strengthened or reinforced and that the reinforcements were too aggressively removed, probably by Andrew Petryn during cleaning in 1957–58. Gilding in the curtains, haloes, and the hem of the Virgin’s robe is well preserved.

The Virgin, shown half length and turned three-quarters toward the viewer, supports her Child standing on a short stone ledge before her at the left. The Child is naked. He draws close to His mother with His left arm wrapped around her neck. His right hand rests at the collar of her dress, and the Virgin gently stretches her left hand forward with a pinch of her veil to cover Him. Behind the Virgin and Child are two small angels adoring the figures in front of them. The angel on the left wears a pink dress slit to the thigh and has green wings. The angel on the right wears a green-glazed dress and has pink wings. Behind them is a hedge of vegetation (now difficult to read due to damage of the green pigments) and a blue sky, all seemingly revealed by a gold damask curtain painted as though parted in the center of the composition and tied back at the upper corners. The haloes are rendered as burnished disks of gold with rims of punched ornament and tightly engraved radial incisions. The Child’s (cruciform) halo is inscribed IHESVS CHRISTVS, outlined by radial incisions, while the Virgin’s bears the inscription AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA DOMINUS, similarly outlined. The gilded hem of the Virgin’s blue robe is also lettered, with excerpts from hymns of praise. Over her left arm is a quotation from Canto 33 of Dante’s Paradiso (lines 13–14), the incipit of Saint Bernard’s rapturous vision: DONNA, SE’ TANTO GRAN[de e tanto vale] CHE QUAL VUO[l grazia] E A TE NORRICORRE. Over her right arm is a fragment of Petrarch’s Canzone 366, the concluding song of the Canzoniere: [Vergine] BELLA CHE [di sol vestita . . . piac]ESTI SI CHE [’n te sua luce ascose].

This painting, whose attribution to Zanobi Machiavelli has not been questioned since it was first recognized at the Edouard Aynard sale in Paris in 1913, is one of a group of four Virgin and Child compositions by the artist that are frequently discussed together, not only for the similarity of their cartoons but also for their use of Petrarchan texts as decorative motifs. A Virgin and Child with Two Angels in the Pallavicini Collection, Rome (fig. 1), is virtually identical to the Yale painting in size (81.4 × 56.7 cm) and figural arrangement, differing primarily in the attitudes of the two angels and in substituting a cloud-streaked sky for the hedge of vegetation in the background. The ledge on which the Christ Child stands is narrower, its forward projection at the right is cropped at the bottom edge of the panel rather than capped by finished moldings within the picture field, and it projects eccentrically backward at the left. The net result of these alterations is to destabilize the pictorial space of the composition, moving the viewing angle further toward the left edge of the painting. The changes also defy the correct rendering of right angles and thereby confuse the function of this architectural prop as a clue to the notional measurement of the painted space.

This eccentricity is emended in a third painting, a Virgin and Child in the Museo di Fucecchio (fig. 2), in which the two adoring angels are absent, and the curtain closing off the top is simplified and allowed to extend halfway down the sides of the painting. In this case, the Christ Child is seated on a cushion propped on the forward-projecting arm of a varicolored marble ledge, the orthogonals of which correctly establish the sense of a measurable space occupied by the two figures and, at the same time, shift the viewing angle to the right of center. The final painting in the group, and undoubtedly the latest in the series, now in the Musée du Petit-Palais, Avignon, France (fig. 3), imitates but simplifies the ledge from the Fucecchio version and, with it, the viewing angle from the right. It adapts the cartoon of the Virgin from the Yale and Pallavicini compositions but turns the Christ Child away from His mother and toward the viewer and deploys the background angels—again, simplified and more childlike than in the Yale and Pallavicini paintings—as reggifestoni, dispensing altogether with the motif of the parted curtains. A fifth painting that should be added to this group but that is not referred to in most of the literature is a slightly smaller (68.3 × 47.2 cm) replica of the Yale and Pallavicini paintings that was sold in 1991 at Christie’s in London (fig. 4).¹ Like the Fucecchio painting, this version omits the attendant angels and simplifies the gestures and attitudes of the Virgin and Child. It also omits the inscriptions on hems and in haloes that distinguish the other four paintings.

It was remarked by Gigetta Dalli Regoli² that the Pallavicini, Fucecchio, and Avignon paintings are uniform in their citation of Petrarch’s Canzone 366 and distinguished, in this sense, from the Yale painting, which alone of the group refers instead to Canto 33 of the Paradiso.³ Possibly, Dalli Regoli based her observations on Dario Covi’s compendium of inscriptions on fifteenth-century paintings⁴ rather than on firsthand inspection of the work at Yale; neither she nor Covi recognized that the Yale painting also quotes the same Petrarchan source. Charles Seymour, Jr., does not mention the inscriptions at all.⁵ No author has brought forward evidence to suggest that these citations are meant to have a specific iconographic significance. Although this passage from Dante does not recur in other works by Zanobi Machiavelli, it was used by a Florentine contemporary, the Master of the Castello Nativity, to decorate the framing curtain painted in his Adoration of the Christ Child in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno,⁶ and later by Botticelli in his Bardi altarpiece from Santo Spirito. If the inscriptions functioned decoratively as erudite substitutions for more commonly encountered Marian hymns, it is unclear whether the erudition should be imputed to the artists or to their patrons (who are unknown, except in the case of Botticelli).

Surviving works by Zanobi Macchiavelli are few, and only two are dated, both within the last two decades of his career. These show Machiavelli to have been profoundly influenced by Benozzo Gozzoli, and it is commonly assumed that the two artists worked together in Pisa in the 1470s and possibly in San Gimignano in the 1460s as well.⁷ The signed and dated works also reveal a marked oscillation in quality, varying from stiff but atmospheric and well-modeled interpretations of Gozzoli’s compositions that nearly approach the palette and sophistication of Pesellino’s altarpieces of the 1450s to dry and almost brittle imitations of Gozzoli’s late style. This second group of works includes the dated Coronation of the Virgin altarpiece of 1474 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France,⁸ as well as altarpieces in Pisa and Lucca, leading to a general supposition that Machiavelli became less ambitious and his style less nimble with age and with distance from Florence. Conversely, it is generally assumed that the first group must all be earlier in date, but there is nothing to indicate how much earlier than 1463—the date inscribed on an altarpiece lateral now in Berlin portraying Saint James Major⁹—any other work might be. Mario Salmi sought to fill the undocumented gap of a hypothetical early career, which would have lasted as long as or longer than the artist’s better-understood late career, by attributing to him all of the works that had then been isolated by Mary Logan Berenson and christened by her the “Compagno del Pesellino.”¹⁰ This proposal has not been adopted by any later scholar: the group of paintings once called Compagno del Pesellino are now generally attributed to the Master of the Castello Nativity, Fra Carnevale, Pesellino himself, or Filippo Lippi.

The few scholars to have discussed the Yale painting by Zanobi Machiavelli assign it a generic date of ca. 1460, but only Federico Zeri has argued this point in any detail.¹¹ Zeri dated the Pallavicini Virgin and Child with Two Angels (see fig. 1) to ca. 1450–55, based on its relationship to contemporary works by Filippo Lippi and Pesellino, and a “non indifferente” echo of Domenico Veneziano. The Yale painting, he claimed, must be slightly later because of the landscape background that it includes. Such a background, however, had become common in Florentine painting following its decisive appearance in Fra Angelico’s high altarpiece for San Marco (ca. 1440–42). If anything, the greater spatial coherence of the Yale version of the composition, including the sophistication in rendering the folds of the Virgin’s draperies or the projection forward of her three-quarter-profile pose, might argue that it precedes rather than follows the Pallavicini version. Neither of these paintings, however, is likely to be datable earlier than 1460. Despite the impaired legibility of its present condition, the Yale Virgin and Child strongly recalls the style of the Berlin Saint James of 1463, while the pose of the Christ Child and His interaction with His mother are reminiscent of two relief compositions by Luca della Robbia, both datable to the first half of the 1460s: the stemma of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali on Or San Michele and the Bliss Madonna in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.¹² The Livorno Adoration by the Master of the Castello Nativity, in which the quotation from Canto 33 of the Paradiso that decorates the hem of the Virgin’s robe in the Yale painting also appears, is certainly to be dated to the 1460s at the earliest and may have been painted at the end of that decade or at the beginning of the next. Although not subject to proof, it is unlikely that Zanobi Machiavelli anticipated any of these sources. —LK

1. Christie’s, London, May 24, 1991, lot 42. ↩︎

2. Dalli Regoli 1988, 30, 112n21; and Dalli Regoli 1991, 213–14. ↩︎

3. See also Giannini and Baratta 2017. ↩︎

4. Published in facsimile (see Covi 1986), Covi’s study was submitted as a doctoral dissertation at New York University in 1958, and a typescript of his inventory/appendix was available from that date at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Covi did not record the inscription on the other side of the Virgin’s mantle in the Yale painting. ↩︎

5. Seymour 1970, 156, no. 109. ↩︎

6. Salmi 1938, 217–56; and Lachi 1995, 113–15. The painting (inv. no. Dep. n. 12) incorporates abbreviated citations of lines 1–9 of the Canto. The same lines (13–15) from Canto 33 are recorded as having appeared on a painting by Paolo di Giovanni Fei in the pieve di San Maurizio in Siena, in the chapel of the Mannelli family; see Milanesi 1854–56, 1:37. ↩︎

7. For the few known documents concerning Machiavelli’s career, see Poggi 1916, 67–69; and Shaw 2011, 794–96. ↩︎

8. Inv. no. CA31. ↩︎

9. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. no. 94A, https://id.smb.museum/object/866020/der-apostel-jakobus-d-ä-. ↩︎

10. Salmi 1916, 54n1; and Logan [Berenson] 1901, 18–34. ↩︎

11. Zeri 1959, 170. ↩︎

12. Inv. no. 67.55.98, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/204722. See Pope-Hennessy 1980, 247, 255, where the stemma is dated ca. 1464–65 and the Bliss Madonna ca. 1460. The Shaw Madonna in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. no. 17.1475, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/58905/virgin-and-child?ctx=ae08a866-e691-48bb-aec9-05d08778603f&idx=0) is an autograph replica, with minor variations, of the Bliss Madonna and is probably datable very slightly later. ↩︎