Introduction

The collection of Italian paintings at Yale, which numbers among the richest concentrations of such material owned by any public institution outside of Italy, was begun with the oft-retold story of the purchase in 1871 of 119 paintings assembled by James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888) during his residence in Florence between 1852 and 1859. Jarves (fig. 1), a Bostonian not of great wealth but of independent means, had earlier spent a decade as a journalist and failed business entrepreneur in Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, where he was on equally friendly terms with the colony of Protestant missionaries, Hawaiian royalty, and British traders.¹ A cultivated and well-read man, he was entirely self-educated in matters of art, which he first “discovered” on a visit to the Musée du Louvre in Paris in 1852. Under the intellectual guidance of the sparse literature on the subject available in his day—chiefly the polemical writings of Alexis-François Rio (1797–1874), Lord Lindsay (1812–1880), and, above all, John Ruskin (1819–1900)—Jarves threw himself with missionary zeal into assembling a collection of pictures that would illustrate the earliest beginnings of Christian art, by which he meant the several centuries preceding the climactic achievements of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo around the year 1500. This was an adventurous, even exotic undertaking for the time, a generation or more prior to the explosion of interest in Botticelli and the Italian “primitives” that swept over England in the 1870s and later, and entirely without precedent or peer among Jarves’s American contemporaries.

In Florence, Jarves developed a close friendship with the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), whose intense devotion to Spiritualism he shared. Robert Browning (1812–1889), who indulged his wife in her Spiritualist fancy, thought Jarves likable but mad.² Jarves’s credulous religious convictions might be seen as a parallel to his attraction to paintings of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries: he saw in them a purer, more unsullied expression of Christian sensibility and belief than could be found in the technically more accomplished works from what he (along with Ruskin, Rio, and Lindsay) deemed a period of art’s ostensible decline and degeneracy from the late sixteenth century onward. Where most of his contemporaries were unquestioning in their belief that progress in the arts was inevitable and that a taste for its naive roots was risible, Jarves clung—unconsciously, no doubt—to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the values of simplicity and purity that were lost to artifice and disingenuity as civilizations “progressed.” As suspicious of Roman Catholicism as any New England Protestant, he also associated the great works of the seventeenth-century Bolognese school then in fashion with organized state religion, the tyranny of the Church, and the age of autocracy. Jarves, deeply patriotic, embarked on a dual crusade to educate his countrymen, through his writings, not just in a wider appreciation of European culture but also in an expanded view of that culture that would embrace the fantasy of a virtuous republican prelude to the age of the despots from whom America had fought for its independence not many generations before. He further sought to persuade them, through his collection, that the rising status of the young republic depended upon the foundation of a public art museum. As he wrote in his first book, Art-Hints (1855):

No nation has ever been in so favorable a position as the United States of America, for the complete development of those ideal faculties of which Art is language. . . . In one respect aristocracies have been of service to Art. They have collected and preserved its objects in public museums, when otherwise they might have perished. To them we owe the best galleries of Europe. There has never been, before the United States of America, a republic commensurate in dignity and power with the old monarchies of Europe. What the people may do in this matter remains to be seen. . . . I believe . . . that great public collections will be formed by individual exertions, and that in time America will rival the old world in Art-treasures.³

Having invested most of his income and a considerable amount of borrowed capital in the hunt for underappreciated “masterpieces,” Jarves shipped the greater part of his collection to Boston in 1859, and the following year, nearing financial insolvency, he put it on exhibition at a commercial gallery in New York. From then until 1868, he attempted, tirelessly and fruitlessly, to persuade the citizens of either city to purchase it from him by public subscription, to which he would contribute as a gift half of the $60,000 value he declared for it, as the basis for founding a municipal art museum (the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, were both incorporated only in the following decade). The citizenry of Boston and New York were unmoved by the offer, and rumored negotiations with Baltimore and Washington, D.C., also came to naught. Jarves had come back to America armed with testimonials from eminent critics but nevertheless followed by a cloud of suspicion surrounding his motives and his competence to judge authenticity.⁴ He also encountered a public entirely unprepared at that time to consider the “ligneous daubs”⁵ of early artists and the almost exclusively religious subject matter of their creations to be of any value whatsoever. The ill timing of his progressive taste so many years ahead of collecting fashion was compounded by the ill timing of his philanthropic enterprise during the period of the American Civil War, when underwriting the cost of any public endeavor was effectively impossible. Virtually destitute, he accepted a loan of $20,000 from the Corporation of Yale College in 1867, offering as collateral his collection, which was put on display the following year in the north gallery of the newly constructed Street Hall that housed the Yale School of the Fine Arts, the first to be founded (1864) at any American university, and the Art Gallery, the first to be founded (1832) in America.

Yale’s foresight in expressing an interest in Jarves’s collection, an interest they were prepared to back with a financial commitment, was due chiefly to the initiative of a chance acquaintance of Jarves’s, Lewis Packard, Hillhouse Professor of Greek, and to a climate of openness to the educational value of aesthetic experience fostered by then Yale College president Theodore Woolsey, a decided novelty among American institutions of higher learning. Supported, and possibly financed, by the wealthy Edward Elbridge Salisbury, former Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit at Yale, it was also encouraged by a warm letter of recommendation from Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), a prominent Boston writer and critic and a translator of Dante, who was later (1874) appointed Professor of the History of Art at Harvard University, the first such appointment in the nation. Norton wrote of the Jarves collection, “If Yale were to secure it, it would do more to make it a true university and the leading university in America than could be done in any other way by an equal expenditure of money.”⁶ It must be acknowledged that Yale’s actions were as shrewd as they were magnanimous or foresighted: the terms of Jarves’s loan obliged him to repay the principal, with interest at 6 percent, in three years, making it more of an investment than an outlay of capital. The period of the loan was extended one year when Jarves was unable to meet his obligations, but in November 1871, the collection was consigned to auction. No buyers materialized: Yale’s bid of $22,000, the amount of principal and interest owed by Jarves, was not advanced by any bidder. The college extended the aggrieved collector a month’s grace to redeem his debt, but even so he could find no one prepared to back his hopes of returning the paintings to Boston or New York on terms more favorable to him.

The complete apathy with which Jarves and his collection were greeted in America should, in hindsight, be anything but surprising. Scarcely half a dozen collectors in England, France, and Germany had preceded him in his interests, and only in London were any public institutions prepared to venture down this eccentric path with an outlay of funds. American critics and their reading public might agree with Jarves that raising the national levels of cultural literacy would be a good thing, but apparently only three men—Packer, Salisbury, and Norton—agreed with his prescriptions for achieving this desirable goal. Even with the backing of two influential members of faculty and of the Dean of the School of the Fine Arts, John Ferguson Weir, the reception of the Jarves collection at Yale was uncertain, and it was opened to the public only after a delay of half a year, in May 1868, for fear of ridicule and accusations of fiscal impropriety.

Nor did controversy subside with the final purchase of the collection in 1871. In 1875 Daniel Cady Eaton, a professor at the art school, resigned his post and complained to the Yale Corporation:

Without denying that there may be a few works that bear the impress of originality; that here and there bits of technical excellence can be discovered, I unhesitatingly pronounce the manner in which the [Jarves] collection is at present exhibited an active fraud on the public. . . . The Fine Arts are best taught by example. What idea can the historian give of the merits of great masters in opposition to such evidences of their vulgarity and ignorance! What hope of exciting in the student a pure and elevated taste in the midst of pictures not only destitute of intrinsic merit, but attaching their coarseness and worthlessness to the foremost names in the History of Art!⁷

Eaton’s diatribe may today be read at face value as an unfortunate blindness to the merits of “primitive” painting, but it is also a barometer of a more fundamental attitude: that to be worthwhile, the arts must be useful, must serve a purpose. In his mind, that purpose was to complete a classical education. In the minds of the city fathers of New York and Boston who rejected the Jarves paintings but ultimately supported the creation of the great museums in those cities, it was to improve the morals of the general public and the quality (viz profitability) of local industry: “encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of the arts to manufacture,” as it was expressed in the founding charter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.⁸ Italian painting of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries⁹ struck none of them as relevant to any of these pursuits.

The Jarves Collection remained as it was in Street Hall, displayed as Jarves himself had arranged it, for nearly a quarter century, until 1892, little known and scarcely used outside the School of the Fine Arts. A modest rehang in 1892 (fig. 2) may have led to the appearance in 1895 of the first critical survey attempting to reconsider some of the naive attributions “to the foremost names in the History of Art” that Jarves and his proxy, Russell Sturgis, had attached to the paintings, but even this did little either to push serious scholarship forward or to bring the collection to the attention of a wider and more committed public.¹⁰ It could not be more revealing than to learn that the great American pioneer of Italian studies, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), had not yet felt compelled to visit Yale to see the Jarves Collection when he published the first edition of his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance in 1896, an oversight he rectified only for subsequent editions in the following decade. But the early years of the twentieth century finally saw the reputation of the works on view in Street Hall cast in a more positive light—perhaps not coincidentally alongside the phenomenal rise in popularity of the Sienese school of painting, in which the Jarves Collection is singularly rich, following the great exhibitions in Siena and London in 1904.¹¹ Moved into a newly built wing of Street Hall in 1911, the collection was submitted to a full conservation survey and modest campaign of mostly cosmetic restoration in 1915, undertaken by Harry Augustus Hammond Smith of New York, and the following year the University published its first serious and fully illustrated catalogue of the Jarves pictures.¹² Written by the Swedish scholar Osvald Sirén (1879–1966) (fig. 3), it was a well-researched and insightful attempt to correct the romantically hopeful attributions that had accompanied the works of art at the time of their sale. Art history was then a discipline truly in its infancy, and Sirén’s catalogue reads today more like informed journalism than critical scholarship, but in light of the sad fate that lay in store for the Jarves Collection, it is invaluable for its eloquent and evocative descriptions of the paintings, especially of their colors (in an era of black-and-white photography) following the light-handed interventions of Hammond Smith.

By 1921, it had become evident that the display space in Street Hall was inadequate for Yale’s growing collections and that the conditions of display were inappropriate for their safety. With the appointment the following year of Everett V. Meeks (1879–1954) as dean of the School of the Fine Arts, plans were made for the construction of a new building ultimately designed by the architect Egerton Swartwout and opened to the public in 1928. More consequential for the future of Italian paintings at Yale than the reinstallation of the Jarves Collection in a spacious new gallery, however, was the decision by Dean Meeks in 1925 to appoint a committee of Associates in Fine Arts, chaired by the New York lawyer Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), tasked with helping to raise money for the new building. Griggs was already a committed collector of early Italian paintings, which he was buying with a passion and at a pace rivaling that of Jarves seventy years before. Unlike Jarves, Griggs was careful to cultivate the advice of reputable authorities (to be fair, it might be claimed that none existed in Jarves’s day) to assist him, one of whom was the remarkable Austrian scholar Richard Offner (1889–1965) (fig. 4). Offner, who had transferred to New York after the First World War, was already by 1925 the preeminent international authority on fourteenth-century Italian, chiefly Tuscan, painting, in the study of which he set himself up in vocal opposition to the opinions expressed, on almost every topic, a decade earlier by Osvald Sirén. In 1927 Offner published an extended review of Sirén’s catalogue of the Jarves Collection, couched in the form of a public lecture, titled Italian Primitives at Yale. This slender book, with its canny and piercing observations, rigorous scholarly method, and poetic if sometimes difficult descriptions of works of art, did more to cement the importance of this collection at the center of American research on the arts of the early Renaissance than had any other publication before it and more than almost any publication to have appeared since.¹³ It brought the collection deservedly, and at last, to the attention of an audience of art amateurs well beyond the closed circle of Yale students, faculty, and alumni.

When Offner’s book appeared in 1927, the number and range of early Italian paintings available to be seen in American public collections were relatively limited. The great private collections of New York were still mostly private. The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed the few purchases it had made alongside a handful of gifts it had received, as did the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, but neither could be said to offer more than a token representation of the field. The vast collection formed by John G. Johnson in Philadelphia, which had been catalogued as early as 1913 by Berenson,¹⁴ was partially and sporadically put on public view, but it did not find a permanent home until 1928, while Henry Walters’s collection in Baltimore was not made public until 1934. Of the prominent East Coast institutions, only the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University owned and exhibited a considerable number of early Italian paintings, all acquired by purchase and gift over a brief period of little more than two decades, beginning in 1899, and these had been well publicized by the scholarship emerging from Harvard’s productive faculty. Yale’s collection, by contrast, appeared in Offner’s book as something of a novelty, despite its longer pedigree. As Offner made the visually obvious but previously unacknowledged point:

For academic purposes it is perhaps the most useful of all university collections for its fairly even distribution of illustrations of three centuries of Tuscan painting: and is more adequately supplied in fine and rare examples of the thirteenth century of this area than any other public museum outside Italy.¹⁵

The number of Italian paintings at Yale was modestly increased in the 1930s by gifts from the estate of the expatriate painter Edwin Austen Abbey (1852–1911) and by purchases in the name of the Associates in Fine Arts, essentially funneling contributions made by Griggs. The bequest in 1943 of the remainder of Griggs’s personal collection, from which gifts were also made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catapulted Yale’s holdings to the front ranks of research collections worldwide. Griggs’s taste leaned decidedly toward paintings from Florence and Siena—the two schools best represented in the Jarves Collection—and since his contributions were, numerically, nearly as great as Jarves’s,¹⁶ these two important artistic centers still account for the deepest strengths of Yale’s holdings.

The Griggs bequest arrived two years before the end of the Second World War and was followed in short order by the appointment in 1949 of Charles Seymour, Jr. (1918–1975)—son of Yale’s fifteenth president and formerly the curator of sculpture at the newly formed National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—as assistant professor of the history of art and curator of Renaissance art at the Gallery. Seymour was the first to make the Griggs paintings known to a wider scholarly audience with the publication in 1970 of his Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery, and two years later his findings were incorporated, with slightly more refined attributions, in the summary lists of the Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections compiled by Burton Fredericksen and Federico Zeri.¹⁷ These two publications also introduced little-known gifts made by alumni like Robert Lehman (1946) and the significant donation received in 1959 from Hannah D. and Louis M. Rabinowitz. The Rabinowitzes, neither of whom had a direct Yale connection, collected ecumenically, and their gift included works by such pivotal names in the history of Italian art as Pietro Lorenzetti, Sassetta, and Fra Angelico, as well as by such Northern European masters as Hieronymous Bosch (one of only two or perhaps three autograph works by that artist in America) and Lucas Cranach.

As comprehensive guides to the collection, the publications of Seymour and Zeri in the early 1970s represent a major advance over Sirén’s catalogue and Offner’s critical study, but neither rises to the level of scholarly achievement of these earlier books. Zeri did not aspire to create more than an up-to-date typescript list that incorporated his attributions for the contents of American museums, while Seymour’s catalogue, which has remained for more than fifty years the document of record for Yale’s Italian paintings, is more of an annotated inventory than a proper catalogue. It is hampered by its summary approach to bibliography, its minimal discursive text (many entries have little more than one sentence explaining their classification and none outlining the arguments or conclusions that led there), its unreliable efforts at attribution and dating, and, above all, its decisions to illustrate more than half of its contents only with thumbnail images and to include almost exclusively works of art predating 1500. Fully a third of the Jarves Collection comprises works of later date, and these, therefore, along with miscellaneous gifts both negligible and important, have remained all but unknown outside New Haven. On the other hand, Seymour’s book, followed by an exhibition catalogue of 1972,¹⁸ offered the first glimpse available to much of the scholarly world of the results of twenty years of aggressive, radical cleaning to which the collection of Italian paintings at Yale had been subjected under his tutelage.

This campaign of “restoration” at Yale, undertaken from roughly 1950 to 1972 by Seymour’s handpicked conservator, Andrew Petryn, and with Seymour’s guidance and encouragement, reduced more than 150 paintings to a status akin to laboratory specimens. In a misguided theoretical attempt to eliminate the aesthetic bias of earlier approaches to conservation and unearth the original material components of each painting, it succeeded—almost without exception—in compromising the works’ artistic integrity, in many cases also destroying valuable physical evidence of provenance, function, and authorship. Compounding questionable decisions of the appropriate level to which a picture should be cleaned was the categorical decision not to retouch or otherwise address any losses, no matter how intrusive on the visual coherence of a work of art they might be. Saddest of all was the speed and determination with which this campaign was prosecuted. On average, a new painting was treated every six or seven weeks, without pause, over twenty-two years, leaving behind a storeroom full of unexhibitable treasures in lamentable state. For all its riches, Yale’s collection became a byword among museum professionals for the abuse of a public trust. The Italian scholar Giovanni Previtali glibly explained the ruinous condition of Giotto’s frescoes in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce in Florence by averring that “if we can imagine a sadistic (or simply an American) restorer rabidly attacking the Legends of the Madgalene [at Assisi] and reducing them to a larval state, we could be sure to obtain something very similar to another Peruzzi Chapel ‘after treatment.’”¹⁹ It was impossible for anyone not to recognize Previtali’s quip as a minimally disguised reference to the situation at Yale.

Several attempts were made over the succeeding thirty years to emend some of these excesses, with varying results reflecting different philosophies of the preservation and presentation of early works of art. A notable campaign of intervention sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, between 1998 and 2000 addressed twenty or more paintings with the aim of returning them to a state permissive of public display. The results of this project were celebrated in an April 2002 symposium at Yale, “Early Italian Paintings: Approaches to Conservation.”²⁰ Emerging from this conference, and from the aggregated range and variety of “approaches” to the redress of extreme damage that led up to it, was a clear picture of little more than the intrinsically controversial nature of conservation and the vulnerability of works of art entrusted to the care of public institutions. A small number of paintings at Yale escaped the ravages of the Petryn/Seymour campaign: in particular, in every instance where the collection included a pair of paintings, one was cleaned and one was left alone as a baseline demonstration of the “improvements” of the cleaned state. Important works have also been added to the collection since 1972—chiefly through gifts from Richard L. Feigen, Darcy and Treacy Beyer, and Nina Griggs and through purchases made with endowment funds established by Maitland Griggs, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., and the Robert Lehman Foundation—and these, of course, provide a study in contrast with the more damaged works once owned by Jarves, Griggs, or the Rabinowitzes. Since 2002, it has also been possible to reconsider the treatment of a small number of Italian panel paintings in the hopes not only of redeeming works of great beauty and historical importance but also of proposing a model of the limits to which any such redemption can responsibly be advanced. Future generations will judge for themselves whether any of these treatments, or any of those that preceded them, offer an enhanced key to the understanding and enjoyment of the rich legacy of artistic accomplishment left behind by the early Italian Renaissance.

* * *

Although Yale’s collection of Italian paintings has labored under a cloud of critical suspicion from its inception nearly to the present day, it must be categorically affirmed that it is a collection of superlative value for its remarkable scope and, more importantly, for the extraordinary quality of many of the works it contains. As Offner noted after gently chiding Jarves for not owning any paintings by Giotto or Duccio, nowhere outside Italy can one find as many thirteenth-century works of consequence as here. Nor can one expect to find the fourteenth century in Florence and, above all, in Siena illustrated with such thoroughness and refinement as one does at Yale, with many artists both of the first rank (Taddeo Gaddi, Jacopo del Casentino, Andrea and Nardo di Cione, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Lorenzo Monaco, Lippo Memmi, Luca di Tommè, Taddeo di Bartolo) and others less memorable (Lippo d’Andrea) represented not just by one but by two or three examples, offering precious insight into the development of their careers and the range of their visual imaginations. The great strength of the collection shifts in the fifteenth century decidedly in favor of Siena. Only two major Sienese painters, Domenico di Bartolo and Vecchietta, are omitted from the roll, while some of their compatriots boast three (Matteo di Giovanni), four (Benvenuto di Giovanni), or five (Giovanni di Paolo, Sano di Pietro) examples each. Paintings or painted sculptures by the Master of the Osservanza, Neroccio, and Francesco di Giorgio are widely admired as among the most impressive of their kind anywhere. Nor is the Florentine school lacking in distinction at Yale. Eight painters, including Fra Angelico and Paolo Uccello, are catalogued in the following pages by two, four, or even five examples each, while Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Rape of Deianira has long been admired as one of the landmarks of fifteenth-century Italian painting in America. Outside of Tuscany in these early centuries, one encounters coverage of a more relaxed density but highlighted by such luminous offerings as the only signed painting by Gentile da Fabriano in America and good-quality examples of the Venetian, Umbrian, and Bolognese schools. Paintings of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are mostly more recent arrivals at Yale but already include important, in some cases truly imposing, examples of the work of Luca Signorelli, Piero di Cosimo, Jacopo Pontormo, Titian, Tintoretto, Jacopo Zucchi, Scarsellino, Annibale Caracci, Guido Reni, Guercino, Carlo Dolci, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Trevisani, and Corrado Giaquinto.

Demography and chronology are just two of the parameters defining the range and excellence of Yale’s Italian paintings; the variety of object types and functions represented in the collection is scarcely less impressive. Visitors to American museums are accustomed to finding altarpiece fragments and panels of private devotion comprising the displays of early Italian art. At Yale, these are supplemented with two complete dossals from the thirteenth century and one of the earliest-known intact portable triptychs. From the fourteenth century are a rare double-sided processional cross, a nearly complete altarpiece predella, and possibly a unique surviving example of a painted testata di bara, the headboard of a bier or hospital bed. The fifteenth century can boast more painted cassone fronts than any other collection in this country, as well as one complete chest; two deschi da parto (painted birth trays), one from the beginning and one from the end of that peculiarly Tuscan tradition; at least one complete altarpiece polyptych and one all’antica altarpiece in the updated Renaissance style; votive panels and tabernacles with and without their original frames; unusually refined polychrome stucco reliefs and a nearly unique cartapesta relief with beautifully preserved polychromy; a painted processional standard; an intact portable housealtar; fresco fragments; frames painted by major artists (an exceptional rarity anywhere in the world); and more. Italian painting in later centuries became decidedly less utilitarian than it had been earlier and its range of functions accordingly more limited, but very few types of objects are omitted from the final volume of this catalogue: portraits, ecclesiastical commissions, pictures for private devotion, profane subjects, still-lifes, landscapes, oil sketches, painted furniture panels and fireplace decorations, and so on.

The interested reader can find all but limitless opportunities for new discoveries among the Italian paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery. This catalogue represents a concerted attempt to record our present state of knowledge in a field not only rapidly changing but also too vast to exhaust in any single publication. The authors earnestly hope to offer here a solid basis for continued research: errors, omissions, and oversights should be considered invitations to an improved future edition that we would feel honored to have helped make possible.

Laurence Kanter
Chief Curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art
Yale University Art Gallery

 

1. For a thoroughly researched and very intelligent study of Jarves, the intellectual currents that contributed to the formation of his ideas, and the drama surrounding the compilation and ultimate dispersal of his collection, see Steegmuller 1951. Most of the information about him repeated here is drawn from this remarkable biography. ↩︎

2. Steegmuller 1951, 201n5. ↩︎

3. Jarves 1855, 27. ↩︎

4. For an amusing sample of mid-nineteenth-century Bostonian denunciations of the culture of ignorance and deceit underpinning the trade in European art treasures to a gullible American public, see Zafran 1994, 11–15. ↩︎

5. Quoted in Steegmuller 1951, 181. ↩︎

6. Quoted in Steegmuller 1951, 230. ↩︎

7. Quoted in Steegmuller 1951, 252n18. ↩︎

8. Tomkins 1970, 35. ↩︎

9. Less than two-thirds of the Jarves collection comprises works from this period. Nearly 40 percent of the collection is made up of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings as well as paintings from Northern Europe, presumably added by Jarves in an attempt to make the entire collection more palatable to a potential buyer. ↩︎

10. Jarves’s attributions are recorded in the catalogue of the 1860 exhibition of his collection at the Institute of Fine Art in New York (see Jarves 1860) and in the catalogue prepared for the sale at auction in 1871 (see Brown 1871). Russell Sturgis published a guide to the collection in 1868 to accompany its display in Street Hall (Sturgis 1868), the content of which largely followed Jarves’s 1860 catalogue. William Rankin’s lengthy, discursive review appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1895; see Rankin 1895. ↩︎

11. The Mostra d’arte antica senese was on view at the Palazzo Pubblico from April to August 1904; see Ricci 1904. In addition to the major ecclesiastical and civic monuments of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sienese paintings, this exhibition included a number of works of art owned by the impoverished noble families of Siena, many of which, not surprisingly, found their way into prominent American collections over the following two decades. The London exhibition (see Camporeale 2005, 485–517) was mostly drawn from paintings in British private collections. Some of these had previously been shown in the great Manchester exhibition of 1857 (see Morris 1857; and Pergam 2011), but it was not until fifty or more years later that they achieved recognition as a distinct taste within the collecting panorama of early Italian art. ↩︎

12. Sirén 1916a. ↩︎

13. Offner 1927a. ↩︎

14. Berenson 1913. ↩︎

15. Offner 1927a, 2. ↩︎

16. The first volume of the present catalogue, comprising paintings datable between roughly 1230 and 1420, contains thirty-six works from Jarves and thirty-six from Griggs. The second volume, dedicated to fifteenth-century paintings, includes thirty-five works from Jarves and twenty-seven from Griggs. An acquisition endowment created by Griggs has secured a number of important Italian paintings in addition to these and accounts as well for many of the chief works from later centuries at Yale. ↩︎

17. Seymour 1970; and Fredericksen and Zeri 1972. ↩︎

18. Seymour et al. 1972. ↩︎

19. Previtali 1974, 112: “se vogliamo immaginare un restauratore sadico (o, semplicemente, statunitense) accanirsi sulle Storie della Maddalena sino a ridurle allo stato larvale, possiamo esser certi di ottenere qualcosa di molto simile ad un’altra Cappella Peruzzi ‘dopo la cura.’” ↩︎

20. The symposium papers were edited by the former Yale conservator Patricia Sherwin Garland and published by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2003; see Garland 2003a. ↩︎