Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Clare Blessing the Bread before Pope Innocent IV

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

The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain with a slight convex warp, has been thinned to between 11 and 13 millimeters and waxed but not cradled. A partial split, approximately on center, runs from the left edge of the panel through the face of Saint Clare and extends as far as the figure of the deacon holding the trailing end of the pope’s mantle. Fragments of a barb are visible on all four sides of the composition. The paint surface is beautifully preserved with only light overall abrasion from an energetic cleaning in 1950–52. Small local retouches to discreet flaking losses near the left edge and along the bottom, along a fill in the split, and in the pavement near the pope’s extended left foot were added by Elisabeth Mention during a treatment in 1998, as were repairs to the gold in Saint Clare’s halo. At that time, unsightly gray fills were added along the outer margins of the panel to raise those areas flush to the picture surface.

One of the few paintings in the James Jackson Jarves collection for which the artist was correctly identified by its owner, this scene from the life of Saint Clare has never been the topic of an attributional debate, although its subject was long misunderstood as being a scene from the life of Saint Catherine of Siena. The error was first rectified by John Pope-Hennessy,¹ who recognized the painting’s subject as Saint Clare blessing the three loaves of bread, an imaginative conflation of texts derived from Thomas of Celano’s official biography of the saint, commissioned by Pope Alexander IV in 1257, and Fra Bartholomew of Pisa’s De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu of 1399.² Stopping at Assisi three days before her death in 1253, Pope Innocent IV and his retinue visited the bedridden Clare at the convent of San Damiano, where, according to Thomas of Celano, Clare humbly begged for permission to kiss the pontiff’s foot. Fra Bartholomew added that, shortly afterward, the pope asked Clare to bless the meal they were about to eat. She made the sign of the Cross over the prepared loaves of bread, and two audible cracks revealed the sign of the Cross visibly imprinted on each loaf. Giovanni di Paolo shows the saint on her knees before a refectory table set with a white linen cloth. She raises her right hand, two fingers extended in a gesture of blessing, while the pope, attended by a deacon dressed in blue and by two cardinals, recoils in surprise at the sound and the miraculous appearance of the crosses. The scene opens into depth at the left, with a compressed view of the overlapping facades of two conventual buildings.

Recognizing the correct subject of the Jarves panel, Pope-Hennessy also asserted that it formed part of a suite of four predella panels illustrating episodes from the life or posthumous miracles of Saint Clare. The first in narrative sequence (fig. 1) was at that time in the Fuld collection in Frankfurt; subsequently acquired in 1940 by the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, it was restituted to the heirs of the Fuld family, sold at Christie’s in London in 2019, and is now in a private collection in New York.³ It represents the investiture of the young Saint Clare by Saint Francis at the shrine of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi. Following this scene in the predella was the Jarves Blessing the Bread: a split through the left half of the panel at Yale, just above the center of the composition, continues into the right edge of the ex-Fuld Investiture. These two episodes from the life of Saint Clare were balanced on the right side of the predella by two posthumous miracles. The first was a scene of Saint Clare rescuing a shipwrecked crew at sea (fig. 2). Also formerly in the Fuld collection, and sold alongside its companion scene of the investiture,⁴ this panel, too, is now in a private collection in New York. The shipwreck scene is one of Giovanni di Paolo’s most imaginative and fantastic depictions of a miraculous event and, together with its extraordinary state of preservation, is one of the most compelling images in his entire oeuvre. It was followed in the predella by a scarcely less imaginative but sadly overcleaned panel now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, representing Saint Clare rescuing a child attacked by a wolf (fig. 3). It may be presumed either that further scenes from the life of Saint Clare are missing or that the two known pairs of scenes were separated from each other by a Crucifixion or another scene from the life of Christ, as is typical in the predellas of Sienese altarpieces from the fifteenth century.

Assuming that the four Saint Clare panels functioned as the predella to an altarpiece, Carl Strehlke accepted a suggestion offered to him by Keith Christiansen that this might have been Altarpiece 191 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, representing the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter Damian, Thomas, Clare, and Ursula (fig. 4).⁵ He observed that the works correspond to each other in style and that the widths of the lateral panels in the altarpiece closely approximate those of the individual predella scenes. One other Clarissan altarpiece by Giovanni di Paolo—representing Saint Nicholas Enthroned with Saints Bernardino, Francis, Clare, and Louis of Toulouse—while also related in style is considerably larger (251 cm wide, as compared to 183 cm wide) and less plausible a source for the predella.⁶ In both of these altarpieces, Saint Clare stands immediately to the right of the center panel rather than in the conventional place of honor on the left, leading Carolyn Wilson to reject the idea that either might be reconstructed as part of a single complex with the Saint Clare scenes.⁷ This convention seems not to have been observed rigidly either by Giovanni di Paolo or his patrons. A predella including four scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist now in the National Gallery, London,⁸ has reasonably been associated with an Augustinian altarpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,⁹ in which the Baptist similarly stands on the right. Wilson’s alternative suggestion that the scenes may have formed part of a custodia or vita retable is unlikely given their size, the horizontal wood grain of their supports, and the apparent continuity of those panel supports.

While the Saint Nicholas Enthroned altarpiece may be presumed to have come from the Clarissan convent of San Niccolò in Siena, it is unclear which of the other three Clarissan establishments in Siena—Santa Petronilla, San Lorenzo, or Santa Chiara—might have been the original provenance of the Saint Clare predella or whether it might have been painted for a convent elsewhere in the Sienese territories. Strehlke explained the appearance of the Camaldolese Saint Peter Damian (1007–1072) in the leftmost lateral panel of Altarpiece 191 in Siena (see fig. 4) as a semantic confusion with the early Christian martyr Damian, after whom the church of San Damiano in Assisi was named. This was the church in which Saint Clare first established her order—her followers were initially known as Damiane rather than Clarissans—and in which she is portrayed in the Yale predella panel. The apostle Saint Thomas standing alongside him, in the traditional position of honor at the Virgin’s right, is undoubtedly a reference to the name-saint of the altarpiece’s unknown patron.

Altarpiece 191 in Siena is commonly assumed to be a work of the 1450s and is described by most writers as following shortly after Giovanni di Paolo’s dated San Niccolò altarpiece of 1453. Only Miklós Boskovits has suggested that it might instead precede the San Niccolò altarpiece, and this appears to be correct.¹⁰ Comparison of the Augustinian altarpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated 1454, to the San Niccolò altarpiece indicates a development in the artist’s style toward the harder abstractions and heavier palette of his late works already beginning at that time. Altarpiece 191, instead, shares some of the softer linearity and lighter chiaroscuro of the Guelfi altarpiece of 1445 in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.¹¹ The figure style and projection of space in the Saint Clare scenes also relate more strongly to those in the fragments of the Guelfi predella at the Metropolitan Museum¹² or the Madonna of Humility at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,¹³ than they do to the London Saint John the Baptist predella or the Philadelphia Miracle of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino¹⁴ of 1457. There are no dated works by Giovanni di Paolo that fall within the period between 1445 and 1453, so finer judgments of chronology are difficult. Lacking any further external evidence, a date for the Saint Clare panels of ca. 1450 is justified but must be understood to be approximate. The date of 1461 assigned to the panels by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby is to be dismissed as a confusion with Giovanni di Paolo’s predella panels with scenes from the life of Saint Catherine of Siena.¹⁵ —⁠LK

1. Pope-Hennessy 1937, 78–79, 109n58, 145n56. ↩︎

2. Lazzeri 1920, 147–48, 200–201. See Wilson 1996a, 168–69, for a discussion of the iconography and textual sources for the suite of four predella panels illustrating the miracles of Saint Clare. ↩︎

3. Sale, Christie’s, London, December 2, 2019, lot 9. ↩︎

4. Sale, Christie’s, London, December 2, 2019, lot 8. ↩︎

5. Carl Brandon Strehlke, in Christiansen, Kanter, and Strehlke 1988, 204–7, no. 34a. ↩︎

6. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, inv. no. 173. ↩︎

7. Wilson 1996a, 168–69. ↩︎

8. Inv. nos. NG5451–54, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/giovanni-di-paolo-the-baptism-of-christ-predella-panel. ↩︎

9. Inv. no. 32.100.76, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436508. ↩︎

10. Miklós Boskovits, in Boskovits and Brown 2003, 334, 336n23. ↩︎

11. Inv. no. 3255. ↩︎

12. Inv. nos. 1975.1.31, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/458971; and 06.1046, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436512. ↩︎

13. Inv. no. 30.772, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32399/madonna-of-humility?ctx=bd217e73-799f-4c23-a87a-b89934d9ce2f&idx=0. ↩︎

14. Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. no. 723, https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/103722. ↩︎

15. Debby 2014, 81–84. ↩︎