Biagio d’Antonio, The Crucifixion

James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, retains its original thickness of 2.6 centimeters and has been trimmed slightly on the right edge. It is composed of two planks with a seam approximately 16 centimeters from the right edge (viewed from the front). There is no barb of paint or gesso along any of the four edges of the composition, but a scribed line with a thin fillet of black paint outside it circumscribes the full perimeter of the picture field, suggesting that the panel was meant to be inserted into a frame, possibly made of a different material (stone or metal?) rather than designed with engaged frame moldings. Two scribed lines running the full width of the panel on the reverse, one 2.5 centimeters from the top edge and the other 3 centimeters from the bottom, may be original, but if so, their purpose is unclear. The paint surface is heavily abraded, more so in the flesh tones and in the Virgin’s blue draperies than through the landscape background or sky. The body of Christ and the left arm of the Cross are virtually obliterated, as are the face and hands of the Virgin. Saint John’s face has been reduced to underpaint and visible drawing, while numerous scattered flaking losses interrupt Saint John’s rose-colored robe and the foreground around the foot of the Cross.

Attributed without comment to Andrea Mantegna by James Jackson Jarves, this Crucifixion was returned to the Florentine school by William Rankin who, however, proposed no definite identification for it.¹ Osvald Sirén first called attention to its striking relationship to the work of Andrea del Verrocchio by citing similarities of drawing and detail to several paintings then thought to be by an anonymous but distinctive apprentice in Verrocchio’s studio, christened the “Pseudo-Verrocchio.”² Most of these, although not the Yale Crucifixion, were later swept into the ongoing debate over Verrocchio’s identity as a painter, and two that had been called out by Sirén as especially close to the Yale panel—a Virgin and Child in Berlin and a Raphael and Tobias in London³—are currently believed to be core works in the small group of paintings accepted as autograph examples of Verrocchio’s style.⁴ Charles Seymour, Jr., himself the author of a monograph on Andrea del Verrocchio, did not add to this discussion, commenting only that the designation Pseudo-Verrocchio “in recent years has declined in scholarly usefulness.”⁵ He accepted a suggestion for which he credited Everett Fahy and listed the painting as “attributed to Biagio d’Antonio.”⁶ Fahy’s attribution ultimately appeared in print in 1976, in the Garland Press edition of his doctoral dissertation written for Harvard University.⁷ Although it was not accepted by Federico Zeri, who listed the painting as by Lorenzo di Credi, and was rejected outright by Roberta Bartoli in her monograph on Biagio d’Antonio, Fahy’s identification is correct.⁸

It had been observed already by Sirén in 1916 that the preservation of the Yale Crucifixion was “far from satisfactory” and by Seymour in 1970 that “rubbing of flesh tones is uneven, revealing technique from lowest layer to finished surface.”⁹ Presumably it was familiarity either with its previously overpainted state or with the state to which it was reduced by the harsh cleaning of 1960–67, leaving little more than the shadow of an image, that may account for the relative paucity of mentions of this painting in the scholarly literature and that prevented both Zeri and Bartoli from recognizing the logic of Fahy’s attribution. Additionally, the composition and figure style of the Yale Crucifixion are both radically unlike two paintings of the same subject accepted by Bartoli as works by Biagio d’Antonio and dated by her close to 1480, in relation to the artist’s contributions to frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli in the Sistine Chapel (1481–82): a triptych of the Crucifixion with Saints Dominic and Peter Martyr in the Pinacoteca Comunale, Faenza,¹⁰ and a Crucifixion with the Holy Women and Saint Mary Magdalen in the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (fig. 1).¹¹ Both of these paintings were relegated by Anna Tambini to the status of workshop products, possibly attributable to a Romagnole assistant of Biagio d’Antonio named in a document of 1476, Nicola d’Antonio.¹² Whether or not the hand responsible can be identified with such precision, removing these paintings from Biagio d’Antonio’s oeuvre appears to be correct.

That the Yale Crucifixion, by contrast, should be assigned to Biagio d’Antonio is evident from a consideration of the figure of Saint John the Evangelist, whose distinctive profile is recognizable in dozens of paintings by Biagio in which he depended upon the drawings by Verrocchio with which he is believed to have executed the altarpiece from San Domenico del Maglio, now in Budapest (fig. 2), on behalf of the older master.¹³ The simplicity of the composition, airiness of the landscape, and facial types of the Virgin and Christ (to the extent that the latter can still be read in the painting) do not point to a dating as precocious as the Budapest altarpiece, however, which may have been painted in the early 1470s. They instead beg comparison to an altarpiece by Biagio d’Antonio showing the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome in the Propositura dei Santi Jacopo e Stefano at Gambassi (fig. 3) or to a Man of Sorrows (fig. 4) in the Pinacoteca Comunale at Faenza.¹⁴ The latter was dated by Bartoli after 1492, the year in which the Banca del Monte di Faenza, its donor to the Pinacoteca, was founded, although no document indicating when the painting might have become property of the bank has been uncovered. Antonio Corbara preferred a date for the painting close to 1487 on stylistic grounds, and this seems more easily defensible.¹⁵ Similarly, Bartoli dated the Gambassi altarpiece to the second half of the 1490s, but this date should be advanced to the second half of the preceding decade by comparison not only with Biagio’s contribution to the Albizzi Tornabuoni spalliera cycle of 1487—the Betrothal of Jason and Medea in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris¹⁶—but also with contemporary altarpieces by Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, Filippino Lippi, and others that employ the same architectural screen with three tall arched openings as a backdrop and projecting hexagonal base as a dais to the Virgin’s throne.¹⁷ The poses of the two saints in the Gambassi altarpiece and, to a degree, of the Virgin and Saint John in the Yale Crucifixion are inspired by the lateral figures in Verrocchio’s Pistoia altarpiece, commissioned probably in 1475 and composed between that date and 1478 but completed and delivered by Lorenzo di Credi only after November 1485.¹⁸ While it might be assumed that Biagio d’Antonio had access to the unfinished altarpiece in Verrocchio’s studio, there is little reason to believe that it would have exercised a strong influence over him until it was revealed in its fully completed form and installed in the chapel of the Sacrament at Pistoia Cathedral, probably in 1486 or 1487. —LK

1. Jarves 1860, 54; Sturgis 1868, 57; and Rankin 1895, 149. ↩︎

2. Sirén 1916a, 137–38. ↩︎

3. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. no. 108, https://id.smb.museum/object/871341/maria-mit-dem-kind; and National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG781, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/workshop-of-andrea-del-verrocchio-tobias-and-the-angel. ↩︎

4. For a summary of opinions and bibliography concerning these two paintings, see Aldo Galli, in Caglioti and De Marchi 2019, 124–27, 134–35. A case was made by David Alan Brown to identify Verrocchio’s assistant in the London Raphael and Tobias as the young Leonardo da Vinci; see Brown 1998, 51–52. This argument was accepted by the present author (in Kanter 2018b, 64–66), but rejected by Galli (in Caglioti and De Marchi 2019, 134). ↩︎

5. Seymour 1970, 128. ↩︎

6. Seymour 1970, 127. ↩︎

7. Fahy 1976, 207. ↩︎

8. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 599; and Bartoli 1999, 240. ↩︎

9. Sirén 1916a, 137–38; and Seymour 1970, 127. ↩︎

10. Inv. no. 125. ↩︎

11. Bartoli 1999, 73–74, 203–4. ↩︎

12. Tambini 1991, 25n6. ↩︎

13. For a summary of the extensive literature on this painting, one of only two mentioned by Vasari as the work of Verrocchio, see Bartoli 1999, 186–87. The tendency of most recent scholarship is to regard the painting as datable to the early 1470s and attributable in its entirety to Biagio d’Antonio. Contrary opinions have been expressed by Konrad Oberhuber (in Oberhuber 1978, 63–76), who believed the painting was a largely autograph early work by Verrocchio, and the present author (in Kanter 2018b, 59), who felt that Biagio d’Antonio may have been employed as an assistant on this work but that he does not demonstrate a comparable level of technical or aesthetic accomplishment in any of his independent paintings and therefore must have been working alongside rather than instead of Verrocchio on this commission. ↩︎

14. Bartoli 1999, 87, 119, 218–19, 227. ↩︎

15. Antonio Corbara, in Golfieri and Corbara 1943–46, 454. ↩︎

16. Inv. no. PE 102. ↩︎

17. Serena Padovani, in Natali 2015, 200–205. ↩︎

18. For the known documents and complex attributional history of this altarpiece, see Andrea De Marchi and Marco Campigli, in Caglioti and De Marchi 2019, 248–55; and Kanter 2018b, 23–38. ↩︎