Benvenuto di Giovanni, Desco da Parto with Love Bound by Maidens

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

The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain and comprising two planks of approximately equal width, has been thinned to a depth varying between 6 and 12 millimeters. It had been cradled at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1930; the cradle was removed at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2000 and replaced with a more flexible system of braces. A secondary panel measuring 26.8 by 23.2 centimeters, painted with a coat of arms and presumably salvaged from the reverse of the original painting, had been glued to the back of the panel but was separated from it during the treatment of 2000 (fig. 1). All the segments of the original engaged frame are missing, but partial barbs of gesso and paint along all twenty-one sides suggest that the size of the picture field has not been altered. The paint surface has been severely compromised by abrasion from aggressive cleaning by Andrew Petryn in 1960. Major losses have been inpainted along the seam—at the level of the right arm of the maiden in pink—and along a split running through the upper plank on a slight diagonal, rising from the horizon at the right of the scene to the top of the mountain at the left. Further complete losses in the background have been filled around the head of Cupid and of the two maidens on the right, above the horse’s mane, between Cupid’s legs and along the outside of his left thigh, and around both of his calves and feet. Abrasion in the sky is especially severe and has been liberally repainted.

This segmented circular (twenty-one sections once comprised its now-missing original engaged frame) and formerly double-sided painting functioned as a desco da parto, a painted tray presented to new mothers lying in as an expensive gift, usually celebrating the birth of a male heir.¹ It portrays a Petrarchan subject of Love disarmed and bound by five maidens. Just to the left of center in the foreground of an airy and expansive landscape, Cupid (Love) stands nude, frontally, and blindfolded. Two young women, one on the left in a rose dress with gold brocade sleeves and one on the right in a white shift over a light blue dress, again with gold brocade sleeves, prevent Cupid’s flight by holding his arms and the feathers of his wings. Behind the woman at the right is another, in a gold brocade dress, binding the arms of the god of love behind his back. A fourth young woman at the far left, in a yellow shift over a darkened silver dress, also reaches up to grip Cupid’s wings and holds his broken bow in her right hand; his quiver and spent arrows are scattered on the ground behind him. A fifth woman, wearing a silver and vermillion dress and kneeling before the others, removes the wings at Cupid’s ankles. At the far right, a mounted knight rides into the landscape, his back turned to the scene of Cupid’s capture and taming. He bears a shield with the arms of the Piccolomini and Marsili families impaled. The same arms were painted on the reverse of the panel (see fig. 1). Two butterflies, a cricket or grasshopper, a stag, a hound chasing a hare, a dog, a lizard, and seven birds animate the landscape in the foreground, sky, and background.

Interpretations of the subject of this desco—one of the most frequently published works in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery—have included references to Ausonius and Boccaccio, but they more often and correctly relate its imagery to the Trionfi of Francesco Petrarch, specifically to the triumph of Chastity over Love.² Illustrations of that poem were common in Florence in the fifteenth century, especially in the context of marriage cassoni, and usually took the form of Chastity riding in triumph on a processional cart, with a smaller figure of Cupid bound and kneeling at her feet. Less commonly encountered in Siena, where scenes of a metaphorical combat between Love and Chastity were preferred, the triumphal procession does appear in the background of a fresco painted by Luca Signorelli for the studiolo in the Palazzo Petrucci and now in the National Gallery, London (fig. 2). Believed to have been commissioned by Pandolfo Petrucci, the tyrant of Siena, to celebrate the marriage of his son Borghese to Vittoria Piccolomini on September 22, 1509, the fresco shows as its principle subjects the prelude to the triumph. In its middle ground, Cupid is chased and captured by a group of virtuous women, and in its foreground, the women disarm and bind the god of love. Signorelli’s fresco is more dramatic and dynamic than the image portrayed on the Yale desco and, in some respects, more closely follows the text of Petrarch’s poem, but the two scenes are evidently intended to convey an identical moral precept. Among the throng of virtuous women named by Petrarch in the company of Laura, his embodiment of Chastity, “Lucretia da man desta era la prima; L’altra Penelope. Queste gli strali avean spezato, e la pharetra a lato a quell protervo, e spennachiato l’ali” (Lucretia [on the right] and Penelope were first, / For they had broken all the shafts of Love / And torn away the quiver from his side, / And they had plucked the feathers from his wings.”³ Early editions of Petrarch also included a versicle describing Cupid’s hands bound behind his back: “e legarli per forza ambe le palme dietro dal dosso.”⁴ It is possible, although far from certain, that like Signorelli, Benvenuto di Giovanni intended some or all of his maidens to be identifiable with the classical and biblical heroines named by Petrarch. It is similarly possible, although not demonstrable, that the mounted knight in the Yale desco may have been meant to portray either the virtuous Julius Caesar or Scipio Africanus, who were both said by Petrarch to have witnessed the binding of Love. Few scholars have attempted to explain this figure, other than Eugène Müntz, who thought he might be Mars and the woman furthest left holding the broken bow, Diana.⁵ Cecilia De Carli also rejected a Petrarchan interpretation of the desco, identifying the women as nymphs of Diana punishing Cupid; this is unlikely as none of them is dressed as a huntress.⁶

Numerous interpretations of varying degrees of plausibility have been advanced to explain the inclusion of other details in the composition of the Yale desco. The butterflies were described by Ellen Callmann as emblems of Psyche, who, after many trials and dangers, married Amor in Apuleius’s Golden Ass.⁷ By extension, they are thought to represent the fragility and, due to their tragically short life cycles, impermanence of love. The stag reclining in the landscape at the left is an emblem of Diana, goddess of chastity. The vignette of a hound chasing a hare in the middle distance is similarly emblematic of the victory of chastity, as the hound is sacred to Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, and the hare is popularly associated with Venus, goddess of love. Charles Seymour, Jr., identified the four birds painted against the sky as crows, symbols of fidelity in marriage,⁸ while the other three birds—a parrot, a falcon, and a goldfinch—are less easy to interpret. The small white dog near the feet of the horse at the right is also a symbol of fidelity. The cricket was associated by Callmann with Aesop’s fable of the Cricket and the Ant, apparently well known in literate circles in the fifteenth century, and would again have been emblematic of the fleeting nature or impermanence of love.⁹

Surprisingly few authors refer to the impaled coats of arms painted on the reverse of the Yale desco and repeated on the shield born by the retreating cavalier at the right of the composition. Osvald Sirén, who was followed by Helen Comstock and by Burton Fredericksen and Darrell Davisson, identified the sinister (bride’s) arms as those of the Piccolomini family of Siena (argent, a cross azure charged with five crescent moons or) but did not recognize the dexter (groom’s) arms.¹⁰ Seymour introduced a tentative proposal that the dexter arms might be those of the Griselli, a suggestion repeated without comment or inquiry by Cecilia De Carli, Maria Cristina Bandera, and Cristelle Baskins.¹¹ Callmann correctly recognized the dexter arms as those of the Marsili family (gules, 6 five-pointed vine leaves, 3, 2, and 1, or) and credited Monika Butzek with specifying the marriage recorded by these arms as that of Bartolomea di Jacomo di Francesco Piccolomini and Cristofano di Biagio d’Arcangelo Marsili, contracted in 1497.¹² This date may be accepted as the earliest possible occasion for the commission of the desco, but it cannot be determined whether the commission was received at the time of the marriage, as an augury of marital fidelity and the production of an heir, or later, upon the birth of a male child. Too few examples of deschi, and even fewer records of them, survive to support an argument for which was the more likely circumstance.

Consideration of the desco’s authorship does not materially assist with narrowing the range of possibilities for its dating. When in the James Jackson Jarves collection, and for two decades after its acquisition by Yale, it was considered a work by Pintoricchio. William Rankin recognized the weakness of this attribution but could suggest no better alternative than “Florentine school.”¹³ Bernard Berenson was the first to classify it as Sienese when he listed it as a work by Benvenuto di Giovanni.¹⁴ F. Mason Perkins instead described it (confusingly, as a “disco da porta”) as among the finest works of Benvenuto’s son, Girolamo di Benvenuto, and this attribution was followed by nearly all subsequent authors.¹⁵ Even Berenson’s later publications classify the desco as by Girolamo di Benvenuto in his father’s workshop.¹⁶ De Carli, Callmann, and Bandera returned to Berenson’s initial identification as Benvenuto di Giovanni, and this is correct, although Callmann took great pains to emphasize the extensive participation of workshop assistants, none of which is anywhere in evidence in this painting.¹⁷ The exaggerated attenuation of all the figures in the desco; the thin, lively highlights on the maidens’ draperies; and Cupid’s carefully articulated muscular and skeletal structure, still visible despite the complete loss of modeling glazes from abrasion, are entirely typical of Benvenuto’s painting style. These same characteristics, as well as the facial types of all the figures, point to a date after Benvenuto’s Passion predella of 1491 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.¹⁸

Four datable work by Benvenuto survive from the last two decades or more of the artist’s activity: an altarpiece of 1497 in the church of Santi Flora e Lucilla at Torrita di Siena; an altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin formerly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, dated 1498; a desco da parto in the Giorgio Franchetti collection at the Ca d’Oro in Venice (fig. 3), recognizable by its impaled coat of arms as having been painted in 1500 or shortly after; and an altarpiece of 1509 in the church of Santa Lucia at Sinalunga.¹⁹ Of these, the work most persistently compared to the Yale desco for its similarities of size, style, function, and profane subject matter has been the Franchetti desco, which represents Hercules at the Crossroads, choosing between vice and virtue. Both works have consistently been attributed to Girolamo di Benvenuto through a recurring litany of circular arguments, but the Franchetti desco was restored to Benvenuto by the present author in 1988, prompted by a wholesale reevaluation of the painter’s late career.²⁰ A third desco, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, representing the Judgment of Paris (fig. 4), is often grouped with those at Yale and in the Franchetti collection.²¹ This, however, is a typical work by Girolamo di Benvenuto, employing his rounded, more self-consciously naturalistic figure types, stiffer and less imaginative poses, and more workmanlike facture. The collaboration of father and son on larger commissions, such as the two altarpieces of 1497 and 1509, renders difficult finer gradations of chronology in this period. —LK

1. For a general discussion of deschi da parto, see Fitzgerald 1986; and Mussacchio 1999. ↩︎

2. See esp. Baskins 1999, 125, 223n32. ↩︎

3. Petrarch 1962, Book 4, ll. 132–35. ↩︎

4. Petrarch 1901, Book 4, ll. 94–96. ↩︎

5. Müntz 1899, 427; and Essling and Müntz 1902, 148–49. ↩︎

6. De Carli 1997, 190–92. ↩︎

7. Callmann 1999a, 112–14. ↩︎

8. Charles Seymour, Jr., curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. Joachim von Sandrart, in Sandrart 1680, 114), ascribes the origin of this symbolism to Politian. ↩︎

9. Callmann 1999a, 114–15. ↩︎

10. Sirén 1916a, 165–66; Comstock 1926, 54, 57–58; Comstock 1946, 52; and Fredericksen and Davisson 1966, 32, 35. ↩︎

11. De Carli 1997, 190–92; Bandera 1999, 241, no. 78; and Baskins 1999, 223n32. ↩︎

12. Callmann 1999a, 105, 115n3. ↩︎

13. Rankin 1895, 145, 147. ↩︎

14. Berenson 1897, 134. ↩︎

15. Perkins 1905, 77. ↩︎

16. Berenson 1932a, 253; Berenson 1936, 217; and Berenson 1968, 1:187. ↩︎

17. De Carli 1997, 190–92; Callmann 1999a, 106–10; and Bandera 1999, 196. ↩︎

18. Inv. nos. 1952.5.52–.55, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41667.html, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41669.html, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41668.html, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41670.html. ↩︎

19. See Bandera 1999, 241–42, 244–45. ↩︎

20. Laurence Kanter, in Christiansen, Kanter, and Strehlke 1988, 315. ↩︎

21. See esp. Callmann 1999a, 108–10. ↩︎