Art museums are defined by their collections. One at the Yale University Art Gallery that rises to a level of international preeminence—among our nation’s largest and widest-ranging collections of Italian medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern paintings—forms the subject of this digital catalogue. It is both a privilege and a responsibility to steward this collection, an enterprise that has been brilliantly led for nearly a quarter century by Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art. Larry’s distinguished expertise and extensive research—leading to remarkable new attributions and acquisitions—and the probing research of coauthor Pia Palladino, an esteemed scholar of early Italian manuscript and panel painting, are apparent throughout this volume.
As Larry explains in the introduction, this rich and varied collection owes its inception to the purchase in 1871, on the eve of the Gallery’s fortieth anniversary, of a large group of paintings assembled some two decades earlier in Florence by the American entrepreneur James Jackson Jarves. Italian paintings from the periods preferred by Jarves—the thirteenth through the sixteenth century—were far from widely appreciated at the time, and Yale’s purchase of so many was decried in some quarters as shortsighted and profligate. Three catalogues of the collection have appeared in the years since, each of varying degrees of ambition and each informed by ever-increasing public and scholarly interest in this material. The collection has grown over time, more than doubling its 1871 nucleus and expanding its chronological and geographic range to periods and types of art ignored by Jarves. The collection has also endured, more harshly or at least more extensively than perhaps any other, the vicissitudes of the conservation and restoration debates that raged across Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s. All this is chronicled, evaluated, and synthesized in the exemplary entries written by Kanter and Palladino, to whom admirers of Italian painting will surely feel a debt of gratitude for the resolution these outstanding scholars bring to many long-standing problems.
More than 250 Italian paintings at Yale span nearly eight centuries of artistic creation, frequently at the most exalted levels of quality and rarity. Maintaining public access to so precious a legacy and promoting scholarship of a rigorous, exacting standard is an obligation we at the Gallery accept as core values of our mission. Writing, editing, and production of these volumes has been a long process. Dedicated research began some fifteen years ago, enabled by the generous support of Darcy and Treacy Beyer and of Nina Griggs. Our gratitude to them is doubled by a sense of how rare it has become for museums to be able to dedicate substantial resources to such scholarly undertakings. Along with Larry, I am proud to be part of the ongoing team effort that has led to the appearance of this book and its companion print editions, available at https://artgallery.yale.edu/research-and-learning/publications.
Stephanie Wiles
The Henry J. Heinz II Director
Yale University Art Gallery