Apollonio di Giovanni, The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

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

The panel, of a horizontal wood grain, has been cut to the barb of its frame on the top, left, and bottom sides, thinned to a depth of 1.2 centimeters, waxed, and cradled. There is no barb on the right edge, where the paint surface has been cut at the edge of the panel. There are no visible seams to suggest that the construction may be more than a single plank. Two prominent splits have opened in the panel at the right edge, 14 and 27.5 centimeters from the top, and one has opened at the left edge, 16 centimeters from the top. The paint surface is very lightly abraded and scratched but in far better condition than is usually found among panels presumed to have come from cassoni. The left half of the panel was cleaned by Andrew Petryn in an undocumented treatment between 1970 and 1972, revealing deep and deliberate scraping, sometimes following the outlines of a single color. The right half of the panel remains uncleaned. Old retouching on this side of the panel is confined to the robe of the figure at the far-right edge, where it is interrupted by the splits in the panel; to the garland over the central vault of the temple; and to limited passages in the vaulting of the temple ceiling. Copper glazes defining shadows on the garlands at the sides of the temple are intact. There is no evidence of a keyhole or of damage from keys banging against the front of the panel.

The story of the meeting between King Solomon and the queen of Sheba (in southern Arabia) is recounted in the Old Testament, in the first book of Kings (10:1–13):

Now when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon . . . she came to test him with hard questions. She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones; and when she came to Solomon, she told him all that was on her mind. And Solomon answered all her questions; there was nothing hidden from the king which he could not explain to her. And when the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and his burnt offerings which he offered at the house of the Lord . . . she said to the king, “The report was true which I heard in my own land of your affairs and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came and my own eyes had seen it; and behold, the half was not told me; your wisdom and prosperity surpass the report which I heard. . . . Then she gave the king a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and a very great quantity of spices, and precious stones. . . . And King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all that she desired, and whatever she asked besides what was given her by the bounty of King Solomon. So she turned and went back to her own land, with her servants.¹

The story came to be treated in Christian Europe as a prefiguration or antetype for the Journey and Adoration of the Magi. In Renaissance Florence, where the Feast of the Magi (January 6) was commemorated with a parade of special magnificence, the meeting between King Solomon and the queen of Sheba assumed the status of a canonical Old Testament episode and was included by Lorenzo Ghiberti among the later reliefs cast for the north doors of the Baptistery, the so-called Gates of Paradise (fig. 1). It also assumed a special significance within the standard imagery celebrating marriage rituals in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, no doubt as an augury of good fortune promised by the union of bride and groom.

The critical history of the present painting has run largely parallel to that of the Aeneas cassone panels from the James Jackson Jarves Collection (see Apollonio di Giovanni, The Shipwreck of Aeneas and Apollonio di Giovanni, Aeneas at Carthage). It was distinguished from them by Jarves and Russell Sturgis, Jr.,² who thought the pair had been painted by Paolo Uccello but this panel by an artist working in the style of Piero della Francesca. Mary Logan Berenson,³ followed in part by William Rankin and Frank Mather, Jr.,⁴ grouped the three paintings together as by a single hand emerging from the orbit of Francesco Pesellino, while Osvald Sirèn separated them again.⁵ Although Sirèn felt that the three paintings were by two unknown artists who were “so closely related in style . . . that we must assume that they kept a workshop together and possibly cooperated in some paintings,” he insisted that “the two men should not be treated as one artist, as some critics have tried to do.” Paul Schubring maintained Sirèn’s sense of a distinction among the works, attributing the first two to his “Dido Master” and the present panel to a so-called Cassone Master.⁶ Richard Offner merged the three works once again into a single personality, whom he christened the “Virgil Master,” and Bernard Berenson listed all three under his label “Master of the Jarves Cassoni.”⁷

Following Wolfgang Stechow’s identification of the Dido, Virgil, or Jarves Cassoni Masters with the workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni and Marco del Buono,⁸ it has been customary to discuss these three panels in the Jarves Collection, together with a fourth representing a Tournament in the Piazza Santa Croce, as all emerging from Apollonio’s studio, possibly at different dates and with differing degrees of participation by assistants. In such discussions, the most outspoken of which are those of Charles Seymour, Jr., and Ellen Callmann,⁹ the Yale Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is, with some consistency, dismissed as an inferior workshop variant of several other compositions of the same subject by Apollonio, the best known of which is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 2).¹⁰ Other examples are recorded in the collection of Lord Crawford at Balcarres, Scotland,¹¹ formerly in the collection of Ellen Callmann,¹² formerly in the Woodward and Butler collections,¹³ and in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.¹⁴ Callmann thought that only three of these—the Boston example, the painting formerly in the Woodward and Butler collections, and her own—were directly related to Apollonio di Giovanni in style or quality. In Seymour’s case, an even more negative impression may in part have been fueled by a radical misunderstanding of the condition of the Yale painting, which he characterized, mistakenly, as “fair only at best. The entire surface appears to be coarsened and dulled with repaints and the gilding that meets the eye is all evidently modern.”¹⁵

Not only is the Yale Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba exceptionally well preserved, but it is also preserved in a manner entirely atypical of cassone panels in that it bears no evidence of a keyhole or a cutout to house a lock mechanism, and it shows none of the standard signs of heavy usage to which cassoni were subject. It is, furthermore, unusually although not unprecedentedly large for a standard cassone panel. Clearly cut on its right edge, which is missing the barb of paint present around all three other sides and where the garland-bearing putto atop the temple portico is cropped in half, it may be presumed to be missing as much as 32 centimeters of its original length, restoring which would return the carefully centralized perspective of the temple to the center of the composition and result in a panel approximately 182 centimeters long. This size is more typically encountered among spalliera panels (the painted wainscotting elements or backboards sometimes exhibited above cassoni) than cassone fronts: while the Boston Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (see fig. 2) is 176 centimeters long, the average size of cassone panels emerging from Apollonio’s shop is between 140 and 150 centimeters. Assuming that the Yale panel was originally a spalliera rather than a cassone front would also explain its fortunate state of preservation as well as the unusually large scale on which the figures in it are painted. Finally, although the argument sounds circular, it could also explain its centralized composition. In versions of the story Apollonio di Giovanni painted for cassone fronts, the right half of the composition depicts the Temple and the meeting of the two protagonists; the left half shows the arrival in Jerusalem of the queen’s retinue. Callmann has shown that not all the commissions recorded in Apollonio’s account book were necessarily for painted cassone fronts and that, from at least 1459, he is documented painting spalliere as well.¹⁶ Although she did not draw a connection between that fact and the physical attributes of the Yale Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, nor indeed identify any other likely spalliere among Apollonio’s surviving work, it is inevitable to conclude that such was the original function of the Yale panel.

When it appeared on the front of painted cassoni, the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was usually paired with a subject apparently invented by cassone painters: the Journey of the Queen of Sheba. Three such pairs survive from Apollonio’s workshop: the Meeting in Boston (see fig. 2) may be connected with a Journey in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama (fig. 3); the Meeting in the Crawford collection at Balcarres is paired with a Journey in the same collection;¹⁷ and the Meeting formerly in the Woodward and Butler collections was probably paired with a Journey formerly in the Merton collection at Maidenhead Thicket.¹⁸ One other version by Apollonio of the Journey of the Queen of Sheba is known, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.¹⁹ It cannot be paired with a known panel of the Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but its existence implies that at least one such panel must be lost. It is not possible to say whether, as a spalliera meant to be situated above a cassone, the Yale panel, too, was once accompanied by a similar panel representing the Journey, nor is it possible to speculate what might have been the subjects of a pair of cassoni above which such a pair could have been installed. —LK

1. This text is repeated with little variation in 2 Chronicles 9:1–13. ↩︎

2. Jarves 1860, 51; and Sturgis 1868, 65. ↩︎

3. Logan 1901, 335. ↩︎

4. Rankin 1906, 288; and Mather 1914, 968–69. ↩︎

5. Sirén 1916a, 91. ↩︎

6. Schubring 1915, 267. ↩︎

7. Offner 1927a, 27–29; and Berenson 1932a, 347. ↩︎

8. Stechow 1944. ↩︎

9. Seymour 1970, 123–26; and Callmann 1974, 66. ↩︎

10. Kanter 1994, 152–54, no. 40. ↩︎

11. van Marle 1928, 562–63, figs. 336–37; and Callmann 1974, pl. 152. ↩︎

12. Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, January 29, 2016, lot 404. ↩︎

13. Callmann 1974, pl. 148. ↩︎

14. Inv. no. 7852-1862, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O109299/the-meeting-of-king-solomon-cassone-apollonio-di-giovanni/; see Callmann 1974, pl. 154. ↩︎

15. Seymour 1970, 124. ↩︎

16. Callmann 1988, 5–18. ↩︎

17. Callmann 1974, pl. 151. ↩︎

18. Sale, Christie’s, London, December 2, 1977, lot 32. ↩︎

19. Inv. no. 23.252, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32013/journey-of-the-queen-of-sheba; see Kanter 1994, 152, no. 39. ↩︎