Martino di Bartolomeo, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

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

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, has been thinned to between 5 and 9 millimeters in depth and cradled. It comprises four planks approximately 22.5, 21, 26, and 9.5 centimeters wide, from left to right, and it has been cropped across the top, where a 9-centimeter-tall addition of old wood completes the profile of the ogival arch. A triangular insert, 37 centimeters tall and 4.7 centimeters wide, compensates a loss of wood at the bottom-left corner. The two seams separating the first, second, and third planks are slightly open, provoking minor losses to the surface. The painting was aggressively cleaned by Andrew Petryn at an unknown date after 1970, which involved him scraping away nearly the entirety of the Virgin’s blue mantle, heavily abrading the Magdalen’s red dress, and gouging out smaller local losses through the shadows in the gray robe of the Holy Woman standing at the left. The gold is heavily worn. Irregular losses across the bottom of the panel may be due to water damage, and the original pastiglia cusps defining the upper profile of the composition were probably shaved away before James Jackson Jarves acquired the painting in the 1850s. Much of the figural group in the right half of the painting is beautifully preserved.

The size and subject matter of this work suggest that it was probably conceived as an independent panel, possibly intended to decorate a commemorative altar or funerary chapel. The subject, usually described as a Deposition, represents, in effect, an unusual conflation of the theme of the Pietà, as developed by Sienese trecento painters, with that of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. The motif of the Virgin seated on the ground with the body of her dead Son in a seated position on her lap, a segment of the Cross visible in the background, made its first appearance in Sienese painting around the middle of the fourteenth century, in the work of the so-called Master of the Pietà, an artist sometimes thought to have received his formation in Simone Martini’s Avignonese workshop. The iconography, related to that of the Simonesque Madonna of Humility—with the Dead Christ replacing the nursing infant—is rare outside Siena and appears almost exclusively in small panels for private devotion. Aside from Cecco di Pietro’s version in the central compartment of a polyptych dated 1377 in the Museo di San Matteo, Pisa, the earliest representations on a monumental scale are confined primarily to Angevine Naples. One of the foremost Giottesque painters in Naples, Roberto d’Oderisio, executed no fewer than three large, independent compositions of the Pietà based on the Sienese prototype—in addition to a fourth, smaller version—two of which were probably intended to be inserted into sepulchral monuments.¹ The Yale picture departs from the iconic nature of these examples, however, by the addition of narrative elements derived from scenes of the Lamentation, such as the mourning figures surrounding Christ and the Virgin and the fragment of the ladder leaning against the Cross. Mary Magdalen, in the foreground, dressed in red, supports Christ’s arm, as Saint John the Evangelist gently lifts up His head and the two grieving Marys look on in anguish behind them.

Listed by James Jackson Jarves as a work of Puccio Capanna,² the Yale Lamentation was first described by Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, who saw it when it was still in Florence, as having “altogether the character of the works of Antonio [Veneziano].”³ Subsequent nineteenth-century scholars reiterated this attribution, although William Rankin, while noting a relationship to Antonio’s frescoes in the Camposanto, Pisa, emphasized the cruder execution of the Yale panel.⁴ In 1909 Osvald Sirén described the picture as “of no great artistic value” and rejected the association with Antonio Veneziano in favor of the Pisan painter Cecco di Pietro.⁵ He later revised this opinion, however, and compared the stiff execution, heavy black contours, and caricatural figure types to Bolognese painting, tentatively proposing the name of Michele di Matteo da Bologna—an attribution that was not taken up by Raimond van Marle, who included the panel in Cecco di Pietro’s oeuvre.⁶ In the most detailed examination of the Lamentation to date, Richard Offner echoed Sirén’s negative judgment, referring to the painting’s “crudities of execution,” but dismissed any association with the Bolognese school and attributed the painting to Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli, a mysterious painter known primarily for his collaboration with Martino di Bartolomeo on several important Pisan commissions between 1402 and 1404.⁷ According to Offner, the Yale painting displayed “clear and direct” analogies with the only signed work by Giovanni di Pietro, the Crucifixion from the convent of San Domenico in Pisa, painted on cloth and dated 1405 (fig. 1). Although separated from each other chronologically, Offner specified, the two images were united by the same “insistent deficiencies,” yielding “about an equally small degree of aesthetic energy.”⁸

While some scholars continued to emphasize the Yale panel’s relationship to Cecco di Pietro’s production,⁹ Offner’s attribution to Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli was embraced by Bernard Berenson and, with some caution, by Charles Seymour, Jr.¹⁰ The latter noted that, if by Giovanni di Pietro, the image had to predate the artist’s Pisan activity, suggesting a date around 1400. Subsequent mentions of the Lamentation, however, have hinged on the relationship between Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli and Martino di Bartolomeo in Pisa, and on differing perceptions of the influence of one painter over the other during this period. Federico Zeri, Carol Montfort Molten, and Ada Labriola included the panel among Martino’s production, albeit leaving open the possibility that it might be another collaboration between the two artists.¹¹ Gabriele Fattorini followed Offner and placed the Yale painting among Giovanni di Pietro’s rare independent efforts, nevertheless noting that the figures of mourners betrayed “traces of a coexistence with Martino.”¹²

As noted in past studies, attempts to build a coherent group of works around the personality of Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli have been hampered by the paucity of surviving documentary or visual evidence related to his activity outside of the brief collaboration with Martino di Bartolomeo. Although his name suggests a Neapolitan origin, he is first mentioned in a Lucchese document dated July 3, 1397, which lists him and the goldsmith Bartolomeo di Marco di Rinalduccio Arcomanni da San Miniato as witnesses to the association, or compagnia, between the local artists Alessio and Giuliano di Simone and the Sienese banner painter Benedetto di Giovanni da Siena.¹³ It is possible that around this time the artist first came in contact with Martino di Bartolomeo, then residing in Pisa but also active in Lucca, where he executed a prestigious series of illuminations for the choir books for the Duomo around 1394–95. The next reference to Giovanni di Pietro dates from April 17, 1402, when he and Martino, both living in the same parish in Pisa, were engaged to paint a major polyptych for the high altar of the hospital church of Santa Chiara.¹⁴ The fact that Giovanni di Pietro is mentioned first in the contract document, and that it is stipulated that he is to paint “with his own hand” all the major figures in the altarpiece, has led most scholars to assume that he was the older master and perhaps the head of their joint business venture. Between 1402 and August 1404, when the Santa Chiara polyptych was installed, Giovanni di Pietro and “Martino suo compagno” were paid for various other works for the same institution, all of which are either unidentified or lost. Giovanni’s signed Crucifixion, which is dated 1405 Pisan style—and therefore executed, as noted by Fattorini, sometime between March 25, 1404, and March 25, 1405¹⁵—is the last record of his activity. After this date, Giovanni di Pietro’s name disappears from the documents. It is generally assumed that the partnership with Martino was dissolved when the latter returned to Siena, sometime before April 1405.¹⁶

Based on the Santa Chiara altarpiece, scholars have generally identified as products of the artists’ compagnia several other important Pisan commissions from the same period, the execution of which reflects a similar conflation of formal elements derived from Martino di Bartolomeo with a hard, graphic idiom attributed to the intervention of Giovanni di Pietro. Chief among these is a polyptych with the Virgin and Child and full-length saints, also from the convent of San Domenico, now divided between the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, and the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.¹⁷ Although the Berlin predella scenes have been unanimously assigned to Martino, the authorship of the Pisa Virgin and Child has been the subject of divergent opinions. While earlier scholarship tended to assign it to Martino, more recent studies have identified the hand of Giovanni di Pietro in this compartment, as well as in the two lateral saints on the left. The same debate has characterized discussions of another painting from San Domenico, showing the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine and a Kneeling Donor, formerly dated April 1404.¹⁸ The attribution of this image has variously shifted from Giovanni di Pietro to Martino to both artists working together.

Although the signature in the Pisa Crucifixion (see fig. 1) was viewed by Offner as a touchstone for assessing the personality of Giovanni di Pietro, some of the figures in that work appear so closely bound to the vocabulary of Martino di Bartolomeo as to suggest his direct involvement in its execution. The profile of the mourning Saint John the Evangelist, in particular, is virtually indistinguishable from that of Martino’s figures in the Berlin predella and in the Annunciation panels in the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge (fig. 2).¹⁹ It is not unlikely that the Crucifixion, like the painters’ other two commissions for San Domenico, was also a product of their compagnia, possibly the last one before its dissolution and Martino’s return to Siena.

The conflation of elements that characterizes all of the above works is less evident in the Yale Lamentation, which seems more homogeneously indebted to the expressive and formal vocabulary of Martino di Bartolomeo. The emotionally charged content of this image, reminiscent of the overwrought drama of Northern Vesperbild sculptures, and the representation of naturalistic details, such as the rows of white teeth visible through parted lips, provide a stark contrast to the schematic approach and frozen quality generally associated with Giovanni di Pietro. The hard outlines and graphic emphasis on the individual folds of skin and bone structure, as well as the deep chiaroscuro—heightened, in this instance, by the current state of the panel—are not inconsistent with Martino’s earliest independent efforts, as reflected in the Lucca choir books and in the frescoes for the oratory of Saint John the Baptist in Cascina (Pisa), dated 1398. The Cascina frescoes (figs. 3–4), in particular, provide close comparisons for the facial morphology and deeply etched features of the Yale mourners, suggesting a date for the Lamentation not far removed from this commission—preceding Martino’s signed and dated 1403 altarpiece from the Spedale dei Trovatelli in Pisa and his partnership with Giovanni di Pietro.²⁰ Like the Cascina frescoes, the Lamentation betrays the artist’s debt during this early period of his formation to the culture of the Camposanto frescoes and the influence of artists such as Spinello Aretino and Antonio Veneziano. A possible Pisan provenance for the Yale panel is suggested by the proposed identification of this work with a Deposition from the Cross reported to have been in the collection of Dr. Jacopo Balatresi in Pisa in 1846.²¹ The dimensions of that image, cited by Francesco Bonaini, correspond closely to those of the Yale painting.²² —PP

1. These are now in the Museo Regionale Agostino Pepoli, Trapani; and the church of Santa Maria della Pietà, Naples. ↩︎

2. Jarves 1860, 44, no. 19. ↩︎

3. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1864, 1:491. ↩︎

4. Rankin 1895, 142. ↩︎

5. Sirén 1909b, 197. ↩︎

6. Sirén 1916a, 179–80; and van Marle 1925, 258. ↩︎

7. Offner 1927a, 42–43. ↩︎

8. Offner 1927a, 42. ↩︎

9. Kauffmann 1935, 184n634. ↩︎

10. Berenson 1968, 1:182; and Seymour 1970, 61. ↩︎

11. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 122, 600; Montfort Molten 1992, 42–43, 187–88, no. 34; and Ada Labriola, in Filieri 1998, 204. ↩︎

12. Fattorini 2016, 40. ↩︎

13. On Benedetto di Giovanni da Siena, active in Lucca between 1366/67 and 1403 and engaged mostly in painting on cloth, see Concioni, Ferri, and Ghilarducci 1994, 304–8. ↩︎

14. Milanesi 1854–56, 2:8–12. For the polyptych, see Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, inv. no. 4903. ↩︎

15. Fattorini 2016, 44. ↩︎

16. According to documents, by April 18, 1405, Martino was already engaged in the execution of lost frescoes for the chapel of San Crescenzio, in the Sienese Duomo; Milanesi 1854–56, 2:31. ↩︎

17. Inv. no. 1663; and inv. nos. 1105–7, respectively. ↩︎

18. Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, inv. no. 1668. ↩︎

19. These panels have sometimes been associated with the Santa Chiara polyptych, but the likelihood of their having been the pinnacle of that complex was dismissed by Gabriele Fattorini on technical grounds; see Fattorini 2016, 41. ↩︎

20. For the Trovatelli altarpiece, see Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa, inv. no. 4898. It is worth pointing out that although the distinctive leaf-and-vine motif in the haloes of the Yale painting, which appears throughout Martino’s association with Giovanni di Pietro, has been interpreted as evidence of a joint commission (see Montfort Molten 1992, 43), it also recurs in Martino’s independent Sienese production (see, for example, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, inv. no. 120). ↩︎

21. Anne-Marie Doré, in L’art gothique siennois 1983, 304. ↩︎

22. Bonaini 1846, 57n1: “Una Deposizione di Croce posseduta dal sig. Dotto. Jacopo Balatresi, alta due braccia e un quinto, e larga un braccio e sette soldi.” As noted by Carol Montfort Molten, a braccio is approximately 21 to 22 inches, or 53 to 56 centimeters; see Montfort Molten 1992, 187n2. ↩︎