James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859
The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain, was thinned and cradled sometime after 1915, and the cradle was removed in an undocumented treatment around 1998. A major split runs the length of the panel, approximately 23 centimeters from the bottom edge, while three partial splits occur at 13, 27, and 32 centimeters from the bottom edge. Paint loss along the major split has been retouched, while the smaller splits have provoked very little damage to the paint surface. A cutout for the lock mechanism of the original chest, measuring 2.3 by 6.2 centimeters, is excavated into the depth of the panel at its top, 74.5 centimeters from the left edge. Percussion damage to the paint surface within an arc of approximately 30 centimeters from this cutout is typical of this class of object, but the surface otherwise has suffered relatively few losses. Silver-leaf decoration has oxidized, but gilt details throughout are exceptionally well preserved. The painting was described by Charles Seymour, Jr., in 1970 as “not cleaned.”1 It is presently covered by a thick and heavily yellowed varnish that both obscures retouching of local losses and blunts the clarity of details in the composition.
The painting depicts a tournament or joust in the Piazza Santa Croce—a rare example of a Florentine cassone front illustrating a contemporary event rather than an allegorical subject, a chivalric romance, or a scene from classical mythology or ancient history. The unfinished facade of the church of Santa Croce is seen at the left: Donatello’s gilt-bronze statue of Saint Louis of Toulouse is installed in a niche above the central portal, with four adoring angels, presumably frescoed, around it and the arms of the Parte Guelfa at its feet. The same arms, accompanied by larger shields bearing the arms of the city of Florence (the Croce del Popolo), appear over each of the side portals. Extending across the back is a wooden stand to accommodate six judges and a notary recording the names of the contestants and the results of their jousts, erected in front of a line of palaces including those of the Corsi, the Ricoveri, the di Ridolfi, and the Alberti—from the windows of which groups of elegantly dressed ladies (at the far left and far right) and gentlemen lean on expensive carpets to watch the proceedings below. Filling the length of the panel across its center is a melee of mounted knights tilting in pairs or being prepared by their pages and esquires for upcoming events and, at the rear, a workbench with a carpenter and a smith repairing broken lances and arms. The jousting area is closed off in front by a line of wooden palings. A smattering of well- but not expensively dressed spectators stand on benches or stools or look through peepholes to catch a glimpse of the tournament beyond. A mounted nobleman at the left carries a large banner emblazoned with an emblem of Time: a naked, winged figure striding across two clouds, holding an hourglass up to the sun. In a corresponding position at the right of the composition is another noble carrying a banner traditionally interpreted as the goddess Fortuna but more likely to be an emblem of Love.2 To the left of the latter is visible the top of a gilded triumphal cart surmounted by Venus holding her son’s bow and standing on an orb wreathed in flames.
Like the three other cassone or cassone-like paintings in the James Jackson Jarves Collection now attributable to Apollonio di Giovanni (see The Shipwreck of Aeneas, Aeneas at Carthage, and The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba), the Tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce has figured prominently in the extensive literature on Florentine domestic decoration and has appeared under a range of different names. James Jackson Jarves and Russell Sturgis, Jr., assigned it to Dello Delli, a name applied in the nineteenth century to numerous cassone paintings on the strength of Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that this artist was famous for perfecting the art form.3 William Rankin initially did not question this classification4 but subsequently described the painting as “Uccellesque”5 before finally coming to agree with Mary Logan Berenson’s assessment that this and Jarves’s Aeneid scenes and Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were all by one artist, a follower of Francesco Pesellino.6 Frank Mather, Jr., did not venture an attribution for the painting, while Osvald Sirén followed the opinion of Paul Schubring, who, in disagreement with Logan, created a separate artistic identity with the Yale panel as the eponymous work, a Master of the Tournament of Santa Croce, to whom he assigned half a dozen loosely related compositions.7 Richard Offner and Bernard Berenson emphasized the unity in style among the four cassone fronts at Yale, the former labeling them as by the Virgil Master (after the Aeneid scenes) and the latter the Master of the Jarves Cassone.8 That the work of this painter should be associated with the workshop jointly operated by Apollonio di Giovanni and his partner Marco del Buono was first established by Wolfgang Stechow, whose observations were subsequently refined by Ernst Gombrich, who suggested that Apollonio was the practicing head of the shop and the artist chiefly responsible for its output.9
The main contribution of Schubring to the study of the Yale Tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce, aside from his creation of a separate artist responsible for it, was his proposal to identify the joust depicted as one ordered by the Signoria of Florence to celebrate the arrival of Pope Eugenius IV and his entourage—including the patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus—in 1439, on the heels of the Council of Ferrara earlier that year. This suggestion was accepted by Sirén and Stechow, who both dated the painting to 1439, whereas it was doubted by Aby Warburg and Gombrich, who noted that no pope, emperor, or Byzantine patriarch appears in the scene and that the Piazza Santa Croce was used annually as the setting for tournaments.10 Schubring’s contention that the figure of Saint Louis of Toulouse portrayed above the central portal of the church recorded a lost fresco by Bicci di Lorenzo that occupied that position prior to the transfer there of Donatello’s gilt bronze statue from Orsanmichele, sometime after 1451 and before 1459, permitted a relatively early dating for the scene. Thus, for Ellen Callmann, who focused on the unresolved perspective of the composition, the painting could be considered an early work by Apollonio and his assistants, datable to the mid-1440s.11 Seymour instead considered the Yale panel a late work, possibly emerging from the artist’s studio after Apollonio’s death in 1465, and suggested that the image of Saint Louis of Toulouse might as easily refer to Donatello’s statue as to some undocumented painted precursor.12 This contention was adopted and expanded by Patricia Lurati, who advanced further arguments for identifying the tournament as one celebrated on April 29, 1459, in honor of the arrival in the city twelve days earlier of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, son of the duke of Milan, sent by his father as an escort to the newly elected pope Pius II Piccolomini, processing from Rome to Mantua in hopes of organizing a crusade against the expansionist policies of the Turkish Empire.13
Aside from elaborate excursive interpretations of various details in the painting as allegorical references to a Medici/Sforza alliance that underpinned the 1459 joust, Lurati called attention to the presence, at the right of the scene, of the triumphal cart surmounted by a statue of Venus, which she identified as the one drawn through the city on the night of May 1, 1459, the first time such a trionfo d’amore was instituted as part of a tournament. Additionally, she noted that the combatant on a brown charger unseating his opponent in the foreground below the judges’ pavilion at the center of the composition is accompanied by the inscription “ANTONIO B,” possibly indicating Antonio Boscoli, who is recorded as the victor of the 1459 joust. She then enumerated several links between the Boscoli and the Pazzi, who were at that time ardent Medici supporters and, with the Medici, prominent patrons of the 1459 tournament. As a conclusion, she proposed that among the clients listed in Apollonio di Giovanni’s account book after 1459, it is the Pazzi who are the most likely to have requested a work commemorating the familial and political references enshrined in the scene that decorates the Yale cassone panel and that, by extension, it may have been the front of one of the pair of chests ordered from Apollonio to celebrate the marriage in July 1463 of Giovanni di Antonio de’ Pazzi and Beatrice di Giovanni Borromeo, heiress of a Milanese banking fortune closely allied to the Medici. In the absence of the arms of either the Pazzi or the Borromeo, these connections are indirect and inductive, but in the aggregate, they are plausible, as is Lurati’s further contention that a painted cassone lid by Apollonio di Giovanni in the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington (fig. 1), featuring an image of two putti riding dolphins and bearing the arms of the Pazzi and the Borromeo, may have originated from the same chest as the Yale panel. —LK
Published References
Jarves, James Jackson. Descriptive Catalogue of “Old Masters” Collected by James J. Jarves to Illustrate the History of Painting from A.D. 1200 to the Best Periods of Italian Art. Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1860., 49, no. 55; Sturgis, Russell, Jr. Manual of the Jarves Collection of Early Italian Pictures. New Haven: Yale College, 1868., 52, no. 45; W. F. Brown, Boston. Catalogue of the Jarves Collection of Early Italian Pictures. Sale cat. November 9, 1871., 19, no. 45; Rankin, William. “Some Early Italian Pictures in the Jarves Collection of the Yale School of Fine Arts at New Haven.” American Journal of Archaeology 10, no. 2 (April–June 1895): 137–51., 146; Logan, Mary. “Compagno del Pesellino et quelques peintures de l’école.” Gazette des beaux-arts, 3rd ser., 26 (1901): 18–34, 333–43., 335; Rankin, William. Notes on the Collections of Old Masters at Yale University, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum of Harvard University. Wellesley, Mass.: Department of Art, Wellesley College, 1905., 10, no. 45; Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts in American Collections.” Burlington Magazine 9, no. 40 (July 1906): 288. , 288; Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts in American Collections—IV.” Burlington Magazine 11, no. 50 (May 1907): 128, 131–32., 131; Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts in American Collections—V, Part I.” Burlington Magazine 11, no. 53 (August 1907): 338–41., 340; Sarre, Friedrich. “Mittelalterliche Knüpfteppiche kleinasiatischer und spanischer Herkunft.” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 10 (1907): 503–25., 505; Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts and Salvers in American Collections, VII.” Burlington Magazine 13, no. 66 (September 1908): 377, 380–82. , 382; Schiaparelli, Attilio. La casa fiorentina e i suoi arredi nei secoli XIV e XV. Vol 1. Florence: Sansoni, 1908., 285; Breck, Joseph. “Noch ein Beispel für einen Drachen- und Phoenix-Teppich.” Der Cicerone 4, no. 4 (1912): 133–35., 133; Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. “The Jarves Collection.” Yale Alumni Weekly 23, no. 36 (1914): 965–70., 969; Schubring, Paul. Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance. Leipzig, Germany: K. W. Hiersemann, 1915., 108, 253–54; Sirén, Osvald. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Jarves Collection Belonging to Yale University. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916., 83–85, no. 33; Borenius, Tancred. “Unpublished Cassone Panels—V.” Burlington Magazine 41, no. 234 (September 1922): 104–5, 109., 109; Schubring, Paul. “Cassone Pictures in America, Part Two.” Art in America and Elsewhere 11, no. 6 (October 1923): 314–22., 316; Offner, Richard. Italian Primitives at Yale University: Comments and Revisions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927., 6, 27–30; van Marle, Raimond. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. Vol. 10. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1928., 548–54; Erdmann, Kurt. “Orientalische Tierteppiche auf Bildern des XIV und XV Jahrhunderts: Eine Studie zu den Anfängen des orientalischen Knüpfteppichs.” Jahrbuch der preußischen Kunstsammlungen 50 (1929): 261–98., 285, 291–92, figs. 38a–c, 39a–e; Salmi, Mario. Review of Italian Primitives at Yale University: Comments and Revisions, by Richard Offner. Rivista d’arte 11 (1929): 267–73., 272; “Handbook: A Description of the Gallery of Fine Arts and the Collections.” Special issue, Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 5, nos. 1–3 (1931): 1–64., 29; van Marle, Raimond. Iconographie de l’art profane au Moyen-Âge et à la Renaissance: Le décoration des demeures. Vol. 1. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1931., 146; Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932., 347; Wackernagel, Martin. Der Lebensraum des Künstlers in der florentinischen Renaissance. Leipzig, Germany: E. A. Seemann, 1938., 189; Paatz, Walter, and Elizabeth Paatz. Die Kirchen von Florenz. 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1940–54., 1:700n671; “Pagan Imagery in Renaissance Art: An Exhibition and Five Lectures.” Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 11, no. 1 (February 1942): 1–3. , 2; Stechow, Wolfgang. “Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni: Cassone Painter.” Bulletin of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College 1, no. 1 (June 1944): 5–21., 17, 20; “Picture Book Number One: Italian Painting.” Special issue, Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 15, nos. 1–3 (October 1946): n.p., 15, nos. 1–3, fig. 11; “Dido Meister.” In Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, ed. Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker, and Hans Vollmer. Leipzig, Germany: E. A. Seemann, 1950., 79; Gombrich, Ernst H. “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18, nos. 1–2 (1955): 16–34., 21–22, 24; Janson, H. W. The Sculpture of Donatello. Vol. 2. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957., 48n1; Ketchum, Richard M., ed. The Horizon Book of the Renaissance. New York: American Heritage, 1961., 160–61; Shapiro, Irwin. The Golden Book of the Renaissance. New York: Golden, 1962., 48–49; Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places: Florentine School. 2 vols. London: Phaidon, 1963., 1:18; Elsen, Albert E. Purposes of Art: An Introduction to the History and Appreciation of Art. 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967., 132–34, figs. 160–62; Degenhart, Bernhard, and Annegrit Schmitt. Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300–1450. Pt. 1, vol. 2. Berlin: Mann, 1968., 561; Mercer, Eric. Furniture, 700–1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969., 96, pl. 104; Callmann, Ellen. “Apollonio di Giovanni.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1970., 2, 5–7, 9–10, 129, 186–89; Seymour, Charles, Jr. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970., 116–19, no. 80; Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972., 599; Callmann, Ellen. Apollonio di Giovanni. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974., 1, 62–63; Rizzatti, Maria Luisa. I geni dell’arte—Botticelli. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1976., 14–15; Scalini, Mario. “The Weapons of Lorenzo de’ Medici: An Examination of the Inventory of the Medici Palace in Florence Drawn up upon the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492.” In Art, Arms, and Armour: An International Anthology, ed. Robert Held, 1:12–29. Chiasso: Acquafresca, 1979., 16–17, 21; Schiaparelli, Attilio. La casa fiorentina e i suoi arredi nei secoli XIV e XV. Vol. 2. Ed. Maria Sframelo, Laura Pagnotta, and Mina Gregori. Florence: Le Lettere, 1983., 82n243, 84n257; Scalini, Mario, ed. Il saracino e gli spettacoli cavallareshi nella Toscana granducale. Exh. cat. Florence: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1987., 38–39; Callmann, Ellen. “Apollonio di Giovanni and Painting for the Early Renaissance Room.” Antichità viva 27, nos. 3–4 (1988): 5–18., 8; Kenney, Elise K., ed. Handbook of the Collections: Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1992., 135; Morrison, Jennifer Klein. “Apollonio di Giovanni’s Aeneid Cassoni and the Virgil Commentators.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1992): 27–47., 42, 47n61; Pacciani, Riccardo. “Immagini, arti e architetture nelle feste di età laurenziana.” In Le tems revient: ’L tempo si rinuova; Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico, ed. Paola Ventrone, 119–37, 176–77. Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana, 1992., 124–25, 176–77; Callmann, Ellen. “Apollonio di Giovanni.” In The Dictionary of Art. New York: Macmillan, 1996., 2:228; Randolph, Adrian W. B. Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002., 197–98; Lasansky, D. Medina. The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004., 146, fig. 140; Belozerskaya, Marina. Luxury Arts of the Renaissance. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005., 238–39; Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. “The Triumph of Everyday Life.” In The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance, ed. Cristelle Baskins, 31–46. Boston: Gutenberg Periscope, 2008., 41, 43, fig. 26; Wegner, Susan E. “Unpacking the Renaissance Marriage Chest: Ideal Images and Actual Lives.” In Beauty and Duty: The Art and Business of Renaissance Marriage, 10–49. Exh. cat. Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2008., 24, 26–27, 50; Francesca Pasut, in Boskovits, Miklós, ed. Italian Paintings from the 13th to the 15th Century. The Alana Collection 1. Florence: Polistampa, 2009., 32; Lurati, Patricia. “Giostra in piazza Santa Croce.” In Virtù d’amore: Pittura nuziale nel quattrocento fiorentino, ed. Claudio Paolini, Daniela Parenti, and Ludovica Sebregondi, 256–57. Exh. cat. Florence: Giunti, 2010., 256–57; Lurati, Patricia. “‘In Firenze non si fè mai simile festa’: A proposito del cassone di Apollonio di Giovanni con scena di giostra all Yale University Art Gallery.” Annali di storia di Firenze 7 (2012): 35–71., 35–71; Martelli, Chiara, and Anna Claudia Palmieri. Palazzo dell’Antella in Piazza Santa Croce, Florence: History, Families, and Building Phases from the 15th Century to the Present Day. Florence: Mandragora, 2023., 12
Notes
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Seymour, Charles, Jr. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970., 116. ↩︎
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For example, Osvald Sirén (in Sirén, Osvald. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Jarves Collection Belonging to Yale University. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916., 83) described the figure as sitting in a boat. Ernst Gombrich (in Gombrich, Ernst H. “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18, nos. 1–2 (1955): 16–34., 24n1) corrected this description to a figure sitting in a meadow looking at a gilded cage enclosing a fettered youth and holding a key in her lap. Although Gombrich did not interpret the symbolism, Patricia Lurati (in Lurati, Patricia. “‘In Firenze non si fè mai simile festa’: A proposito del cassone di Apollonio di Giovanni con scena di giostra all Yale University Art Gallery.” Annali di storia di Firenze 7 (2012): 35–71., 41, 57nn72–73) did not hesitate to view this as an allegory of love. ↩︎
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Jarves, James Jackson. Descriptive Catalogue of “Old Masters” Collected by James J. Jarves to Illustrate the History of Painting from A.D. 1200 to the Best Periods of Italian Art. Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton, 1860., 49; Sturgis, Russell, Jr. Manual of the Jarves Collection of Early Italian Pictures. New Haven: Yale College, 1868., 52; and Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. With new annotations and comments by Gaetano Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1878–85., 2:148–49. ↩︎
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Rankin, William. “Some Early Italian Pictures in the Jarves Collection of the Yale School of Fine Arts at New Haven.” American Journal of Archaeology 10, no. 2 (April–June 1895): 137–51., 146. ↩︎
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Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts in American Collections.” Burlington Magazine 9, no. 40 (July 1906): 288. , 288. ↩︎
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Rankin, William. “Cassone Fronts in American Collections—IV.” Burlington Magazine 11, no. 50 (May 1907): 128, 131–32., 131; and Logan, Mary. “Compagno del Pesellino et quelques peintures de l’école.” Gazette des beaux-arts, 3rd ser., 26 (1901): 18–34, 333–43., 335. ↩︎
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Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. “The Jarves Collection.” Yale Alumni Weekly 23, no. 36 (1914): 965–70., 969; Schubring, Paul. Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance. Leipzig, Germany: K. W. Hiersemann, 1915., 108, 253–54; Sirén, Osvald. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the Jarves Collection Belonging to Yale University. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916., 83, 85; and Schubring, Paul. “Cassone Pictures in America, Part Two.” Art in America and Elsewhere 11, no. 6 (October 1923): 314–22., 316. ↩︎
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Offner, Richard. Italian Primitives at Yale University: Comments and Revisions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927., 6, 27; and Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works with an Index of Places. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932., 347. ↩︎
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Stechow, Wolfgang. “Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni: Cassone Painter.” Bulletin of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College 1, no. 1 (June 1944): 5–21., 5–21; and Gombrich, Ernst H. “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18, nos. 1–2 (1955): 16–34., 16–34. ↩︎
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For Warburg’s remarks, see Gombrich, Ernst H. “Apollonio di Giovanni: A Florentine Cassone Workshop Seen through the Eyes of a Humanist Poet.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18, nos. 1–2 (1955): 16–34., 21n2. ↩︎
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Callmann, Ellen. Apollonio di Giovanni. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974., 62–63. ↩︎
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Seymour, Charles, Jr. Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970., 118–19. ↩︎
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Lurati, Patricia. “Giostra in piazza Santa Croce.” In Virtù d’amore: Pittura nuziale nel quattrocento fiorentino, ed. Claudio Paolini, Daniela Parenti, and Ludovica Sebregondi, 256–57. Exh. cat. Florence: Giunti, 2010., 256–57; and Lurati, Patricia. “‘In Firenze non si fè mai simile festa’: A proposito del cassone di Apollonio di Giovanni con scena di giostra all Yale University Art Gallery.” Annali di storia di Firenze 7 (2012): 35–71., 35–71. ↩︎