Girolamo di Benvenuto, The Nativity

Sale, Christie’s, London, July 4, 1924, lot 78; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, 1924

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, retains its original thickness of 3 centimeters, with an additional 1.2 centimeters of engaged frame moldings affixed around its entire perimeter. It is comprised of three planks: a central panel approximately 36 centimeters wide with narrower boards, each approximately 4.5 centimeters wide, nailed and glued to it on either side. The seam between the left and center panels is intact, but the seam between the center and right panels has opened. Remnants of an original painted coating and gesso drips are visible along the top and side edges but not along the bottom edge. The back of the panel retains a discolored original gesso coating, slightly water damaged right of center. An original hole for a hanging loop is drilled through the top edge of the panel at the back. The bottom molding of the engaged frame is lifting at the corners and split at the center above a burn mark in the panel. The engaged frame at the top of the panel has a minor split to the left of center and at the right, at the level of the shepherd’s head. Gilding on the frame is original but worn and has been partly lost on the bottom molding. The paint surface has been severely abraded through most of its lower portion, while the landscape background is largely intact. The most extreme losses effect the face and hands of the Virgin, Saint Joseph’s head and chest, the ox and ass, the Christ Child, and the Virgin’s blue robe.

This unfortunately damaged painting was purchased by Maitland Griggs at auction in London in 1924, where it was offered as a work by Bernardino Fungai. Most of the few scholars who have discussed or mentioned it, however, have considered it by or close to Girolamo di Benvenuto, with dissension arising only over whether it is actually by that artist or by an assistant, follower, or imitator. Raimond van Marle described it as an early work by Girolamo;¹ Burton Fredericksen and Darrell Davisson, who also thought it a work by Girolamo, dated it “probably after 1510.”² Luisa Vertova tentatively proposed including it—with the caveat that its condition made firm judgments of attribution difficult—among a group of works that she isolated as by an artist close to Girolamo di Benvenuto and Bernardino Fungai, christened by her the “Master of the Bagatti Valsecchi Altarpiece.”³ Charles Seymour, Jr., making no reference to Vertova’s theory, considered it the work of an imitator of Girolamo di Benvenuto, while Federico Zeri preferred to see all the works in Vertova’s group as the late career of Girolamo.⁴ Only Everett Fahy, in an unelaborated comment sent to the curator of the collection in 1998, called it “certainly by Bernardino Fungai.”⁵ By this, it is doubtful that he meant to return to its original 1924 attribution so much as to propose a new definition of the emergence of Fungai from the workshop shared by Girolamo di Benvenuto and his father, Benvenuto di Giovanni. It now seems possible to identify a different and unrelated group of works as evidence of Fungai in Benvenuto di Giovanni’s workshop in the 1480s (see Bernardino Fungai, Virgin and Child). The difficulty of charting the emergence of Girolamo di Benvenuto in a similar fashion is due to the extent of collaboration between father and son over a period of at least twenty years. Nevertheless, the Griggs Nativity sits comfortably within the parameters of style commonly recognized as indicating the personality of Girolamo di Benvenuto.

Thirteen loosely related compositions of the Nativity are generally associated with Girolamo di Benvenuto. All of them feature the Christ Child lying on the ground with the Virgin kneeling in adoration; some show only Saint Joseph in attendance, some include one or more shepherds or anachronistic saints forming a larger company. Four of these were included by Vertova in her construction of a Master of the Bagatti Valsecchi Altarpiece: the present work; a closely related composition at the Museo Civico in Montalcino, probably painted close to 1508, that omits the shepherd and includes the dove of the Holy Spirit and three cherub heads at the top; a version in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, probably painted close to 1508 as well (fig. 1), that also omits the shepherd and includes a false predella with Saints Francis, Jerome, and Bernardino; and a more complicated composition formerly in the collection of Mrs. A. E. Goodhart in New York and now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (fig. 2), which includes six saints crowded around the Holy Family. Two others—in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena,⁶ and in the Museo Civico e Pinacoteca Crociani, Montepulciano (fig. 3)—appear not to be by Girolamo di Benvenuto but instead are late works by Benvenuto di Giovanni, the latter datable ca. 1490–95 and the former ca. 1510–15. Another three—in the Musée Magnin, Dijon, France (with Saints Jerome and Francis),⁷ the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma (with Saint Jerome),⁸ and an altarpiece formerly in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles⁹—are collaborations of Girolamo and his father. Of the remaining four, one that appeared at Hampel Auctions on July 2, 2020, is probably by a follower of Benvenuto di Giovanni around 1515, while the others are typical works of Girolamo di Benvenuto’s maturity: formerly art market, Bologna, 1990 (with two kneeling angels and a shepherd carrying a lamb over his shoulders);¹⁰ Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, Siena (with the infant Saint John the Baptist);¹¹ and formerly collection of J. Roberts.¹² The latter is a particularly lively and accomplished painting, as much influenced by the late style of Pietro Orioli as by that of Benvenuto di Giovanni; it may reveal the intervention of an artist of a younger generation, such as Pietro di Domenico.

The Griggs Nativity may be the first in chronological sequence of these compositions, with the possible exception of the Montepulciano version, which shows no traces of Girolamo’s hand in its design or execution and may be the model by Benvenuto from which all the others are descended. Following his father’s example in the Griggs painting more closely than in the others, Girolamo has pulled his figures closer to the viewer and opened out their postures in a less friezelike orientation. He has also introduced a low wall or parapet separating the Holy Family from the adoring shepherd, a device that does not occur in any of the other versions. The figure types in the Griggs painting compare closely to those in Girolamo’s dated Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece in Montalcino of 1498, and it is reasonable to conclude that both were painted in the last decade of the fifteenth century. One other painting included by Vertova in her Master of the Bagatti Valsecchi Altarpiece group, a Coronation of the Virgin formerly in the Sterbini collection, Rome, shares all these features with the Griggs Nativity and must be nearly contemporary to it.¹³ It is presently impossible to say if these represent Girolamo’s earliest assays as an independent artist, but they are certainly among the earliest works attributable to him that reveal him to be a distinctive personality within the Sienese tradition. —LK

1. van Marle 1937, 421. ↩︎

2. Fredericksen and Davisson 1966, 33, 35. ↩︎

3. Vertova 1969, 8. ↩︎

4. Seymour 1970, 195, 197; and Zeri 1976b, 1:133. ↩︎

5. Curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. ↩︎

6. Inv. no. 342. ↩︎

7. Inv. no. 1980.54. ↩︎

8. Inv. no. 1961.9.27, https://philbrook.emuseum.com/objects/3623/adoration-of-the-child-with-saint-jerome?ctx=3ecb378e43a0e0fcdea97568535c76d94fadeb89&idx=0. ↩︎

9. Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, January 27, 2011. ↩︎

10. Fototeca Zeri, Federico Zeri Foundation, Bologna, inv. no. 17455. ↩︎

11. Inv. no. 60. ↩︎

12. Sale, Christie’s, London, June 27, 1969, lot 74. ↩︎

13. Sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, October 21, 2014, lot 50. ↩︎