rat ae : : uy ‘ ¥ oa ; ‘ : 4 * ( . > . 4 , i : i 1% es a =k M * * ~*~ = qT, > S MES r ‘ 4 gas a 8 ee eee ee nega wit we es he : . . aN é 4 j % > f : ; : . E nN * £ x ¥ y * 4 > . : 3 . i “ a % _ “Sa Mandi ring * Pe * ms E <“e, . ™ j 3 ; : ‘ a 2 ¥i $ 3 5 Be gy “ " Be x ; 3 ee : : . 2 ; J bs : ¥ i 4 < ~ : ~b « ; ae y , as 4 3 . rT ? ; 2 i : = « % a is * ; ; 5 i 4% = y S.> F Bs : - = : =e . OES eh » eee OE aan 7 e a Wed PRPS el STR. : tat _— » eit + he a” a - oc cee 3 —-* e Pe ee a Me c ae » - Pog ae < 5 Soy e we 5 ° 4 z > F r ° * x ™ - 43 fe ¥ re ne : ees 5 , . ay {dang ee r - . ae ‘ Sa ‘ 2) ey a Pad Cae ie 3 » a , \ aw ‘ 4 = tees! i. aibe 4 a ee Be DU. eT Ce eee > Ae . es a ‘ 7 4 ete Cie a. a ae te, Fah a7) es Titre of oP. Y i Pt 94> 4) . 7 he ; 2 ‘ 7 ’ le ne : eS, a f : rie & - P| - ,. = =» . - THT.MOAT Talay Davo!) taoase/ .e ard " : : i: es a! fe . (oi. prin Wh 2 ° a Pi : i , ‘ ree ‘, a a is ; , : Fic. 9. Narvo pt Crone: Curist From THE Parapi eg . S. Maria Novella, Florence STUDIES IN FLORENTINE PAINTING THe FouRTEENTH CENTURY BY RICHARD OFFNER NEW YORK FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN MCMXXVII ht, 1927, by Freperic Farrcuitp SHERMAN . C To THE MEMoRY OF My FaTruer Reb eA Gel HE following studies, which are by-products of research extending far beyond their own limits, first saw the light separately, at odd intervals and in various places, as the material presented in them united in clear conclusions. Almost entirely rewritten since and enlarged, neither intrinsic interest nor aesthetic importance determined the choice of their contents — which in a sense may be said to have selected themselves — but, first, the susceptibility of scattered or unidentified — paintings to cluster in stylistically coherent groups. Some of the studies are devoted to familiar figures, but almost all of them consider masters hitherto known barely by name, or not at all, as for example Pacino di Bonguida, the Fogg Master, Jacopo del Casentino, Antonio Veneziano, Niccolo di Tommaso. If this be a justification of their second appearance, they have been brought together here on the convic- tion also that the binding principle of a given individual style remains an undetermined resemblance until the works it masses are seen in a longer alignment. Only then do the disparities between master and master isolate and define him, and fix his position in the whole field. But by dealing with the material in this way, the ground is also cleared of stray growths, and the main features of the historical panorama sharpened towards a truer view of a still shadowy period. The validity of the individual integrations and of the historical prospect generally, however, would depend on an attention—and I may say a conscience as well — so scrupulous and refined as to im- mobilize one’s own parti-pris, thereby securing one against the temp- tation of forcing fact to one’s whims or ends, or of imposing conven- tional categories upon it. But, if the material is thus objectively dealt with, the different per- sonalities here assembled, nevertheless reveal a certain rational rela- tion by separating themselves in three groups, to represent the three cardinal tendencies of Florentine painting in the fourteenth century. The integration of each personality is undertaken, as I have said, on the basis — the only real basis — of style. In order to allow the sty- listic fact its own way, and to its fullest extent, external evidence has been conceded an authority limited properly by the nature and degree of its relevance in each case. As every case is unique, such testimony, Vv literary or other, has had to be measured by all the circumstances lying around the individual problem. To the same end — or rather to compass it more directly — and in defiance of academic objection, those isolated features, in which be- trayals of style are more concentrated and seizable, have been brought together on a single page to summarize it, and so shorten the labor of the student. The stages and the principles implicit in reconstruction are dis- cussed more fully in the essay on Method, but in order to free the presentation of both problem and conclusion from the perplexities and elusiveness of verbal argument, and to secure the concrete image against factitious elaboration or simplification, as much as possible of the material is given in illustrations. But if verbal proof has been limited, it has been found necessary to reinforce the conclusiveness of the evidence offered in the illustra- tions, by verbal indications of points of critical analogy. I have piled these up on the principle that the validity of proof increases with the number of such analogies — just as the correctness of the time on a clock is established more conclusively with every additional instance of agreement. An enterprise such as this, modest as it doubtless is, involves exten- sive photographic material, that has had to be gathered under all man- ner of difficulties. ‘The greater, therefore, my appreciation of the gen- erosity of all those, too many to mention here, who have facilitated my labors through gifts of photographs, or permitted their reproduction. Among these I want particularly to thank Miss Helen Frick, Mr. Bernard Berenson, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, Miss Belle Greene, Mr. Adolphe Stoclet, Mr. Chas. Loeser, Mr. Carl Hamilton, Mr. Percy Straus, Prof. Paul J. Sachs, Mr. Edward Forbes, Capt. Langton Doug- las, the Detroit Institute of Art, Comm. Giov. Poggi, Mrs. Walker D. Hines. My much deeper debt, to many who, since the initiation of these researches, have through friendly intercourse (to speak of nothing else) enriched the substance of this book, is still harder adequately to ac- knowledge. And the hardest of all to Mr. Bernard Berenson, of whose accomplishment every student of Italian Art, and of criticism general- ly, bears reverent recognition. To his stimulus, to the quality of his culture, to his penetration, to the accessibility of his incomparable li- brary, I have owed endless profit and inspiration from the early stages of my study. And I have not forgotten, since those first bright Florentine days, how much I derived from the friendship and knowledge of Mr. F. Mason Perkins and from the refined scholarship of the lamented Prof. Max Dvorak. I am under various shades and kinds of obligation again to the Frick Art Reference Library, to the Sachs Fellowship, to Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, Mr. and Mrs. Percy S. Straus; and finally to the interest and counsel of Mr. Frederic F. Sherman, who has been at no end of pains and expense to give this book an adequate form. RicHARD OFFNER. New York University, Juty 21, 1926. NOTE The following titles, which are those most frequently re- ferred to, will be abbreviated as below, the number of the vol- ume indicated by a Roman numeral to precede the page, thus: Vasari, I, 695. The place or date of publication in special in- stances will precede the volume number. Vasari — Giorgio Vasari, Vite dei piu eccellenti pittori, archi- tettori et scultori etc.; ed. Sansoni (with notes by Gaetano Milanesi), Florence, 1902. Crowe and Cavalcaselle — Crowe and Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy, ed. Murray, London, 1903. Suida — Wilhelm Suida, Florentinische Maler um die Mitte des XIV Jahrhunderts, ed. Heitz, Strassburg, 1906. Venturi — Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell ’arte Italiana, ed. Hoepli, Milan, 1907. Testi— Laudedeo Testi, Storia della pittura Veneziana, ed. Arti Grafiche, Bergamo, 1912. Sirén — Osvald Sirén, Giotto and Some of his Followers, ed. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (U.S.A.), 1917. Van Marle — Raymond Van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, ed. Nijhoff, the Hague, 1923, vol. III. S. P. — Refers to the specimen pages showing details from the works of the several masters (with one exception) and designed as a pictorial synopsis of individual style. TABLE OF CONTENTS Const A Eee eee et ieee ane as te See ae ee V EERO N Me foo cbye wk epi ce se RL Se hen, Pee Se I Part ONE eestor OF PACINO DI BONAGUIDA . . . «. . «© » . =: 3 Meter ERC ASENTINO 7) 3. te 28d Bee SOUPPEREDEDLA |... 3 1°. 2 we 8 we wk we AB Part Two SereveestuR OFTHE FOGG PIETA’. = 1... fw AO Two Unknown Pictures sy TappEo GAppDI. . . . . . . 59 Tue Panets or ANTONIO VENEZIANO ......... «6 Serer ie DIETROGERINIGS 5°. ¢ se las ee «83 Part THREE MME COLON Featsit arch eh ek AN ee ge es Vt OF Nicco.o p1 TomMMAso AND THE Rinucctn1 Master . . . . 109 PANAOUTUINE OF A lt1nORY OF METHOD . . 5. . . . . . . 127 MopeiuEy ARTISTS AND AUTHORS . 2 2°29. 0). . . . 2.137 tO S PACES 15.25) ire Sete ies pa oe oe ere ee TAG PONT Stee Fd se Lec it al et eee Gn rode e ren ee ei LAS II 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 lS Oils TRATIONS Nardo di Cione: Christ. From the Paradise. S. Maria Novella, BotcHcem 2 gre ara). +r Ul ahslecs Lape.” (on eee na oe oe LEE romtispiéce Page Pacino di Bonaguida: The Crucifixion. (Part of Diptych). Collection Bamvicw jesse) otraus, New York. 3... 3 2. 4 woe % 3 Details from the Works of Pacino di Bonaguida . . . . 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: St. Nicholas. (Detail from the Paty oureh: Ast. emmy riorence.. . (.-. ty 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: St. BunhGlower, (Detail cam He Pal eee: Academy, Florence. . . ce pee 2 re Re ee 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail from ae Tree of Life. Academy, Florence 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: The Nativity from the Tree of Life. Academy, BuGrencenn) SP aes, oe ey) Pacino di Bonaguida: The Crucifixion en Re Tree if Life. Academy, Florence . . eure, 222 Pacino di Beatie: pine ape St. Nicholas in ah Polyptych. Academy, Florence, . . eee it) 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: The Nee ee ie Tree of Life. eae Florence. . 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: eteee bel Child. clean of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence. . . 22, Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail of fie Crucifixion i in SN: fpstarease ete emy, Florence . . ies he Shop of Pacino di far aRREE Small rcatch Tienes Tis ere eae Pacmo di Bonapuida: Crucifix. S.Felicita, Florence. .... « . 22 Pacino di Bonaguida: Madonna, SS. Francis and Lawrence. Fondazione Home, Florence . - ny Ee) Deas Gee es Ee eee ee VE eel a eae ey Milieu of Pacino di Reeds Small Triptych. Museo Bandini, ICSOIES Gu G -. Series 2 Pacino di Bonaguida Uvaeehy ree ra fhe Life of Christ. The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York . . . eet) = 22 Pacino di Bonaguida (Assisted): Leaf from the Life of Christ. The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York . . .. . 22 Follower of Pacino di Bonaguida: Detail of an Illuminated Leaf, Cok lection of Mr. Frank C. Smith, Worcester, Mass... . 22 Jacopo del Casentino: S. Miniato and Scenes from his Life. Church of Den Wintatom Dlorencen a, fans i erties ete a eee | £23 Details from the Paintings of Jacopo del Cente ee ee! sg gs A 22 23 24 25 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 a2 33 34 35 36 a7, 38 39 40 AI 42 43 44 45 Jacopo del Casentino: Triptych. Collection of Don Guido Cagnola, Milan SENET Sh aes Jacopo del Casentino: Madonna. Fondazione Horne, Florence Jacopo del Casentino: Detail of Large Sg Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, Florence Jacopo del Casentino: Dormition of the Virgin. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence . Jacopo del Casentino: St. Bae ne pec Uffizi Gallery, Florence Jacopo del Casentino: ‘St. Nicholas. erases of Fine ye Floneee ‘ Jacopo del Casentino: Crucifixion. Collection of the late Prof. Allan Marquand, Princeton, N. J. . oa keene ee Jacopo del Casentino: Virgin and Angels. Madonna di Piazza, Scarperia Jacopo del Casentino: Detail of Altarpiece. Church of S. Miniato, Florence PEATE WSS 3 . Jacopo del Casentino: stias from He Ree of S. Ninate Church of S. Miniato, Florence . 0 he SE Jacopo del Casentino: Scene from the Se of S. Miniato. Church of S. Miniato, Florence . : aloe Jacopo del Casentino: Triptych. The Bae Collecuen Vine : Follower of Bernardo Daddi: Virgin Swooning over the Savior’s Tomb. Staten’s Museum, Copenhagen . aeereaher es < ) S Follower of Bernardo Daddi: The Pieta. Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin ; Follower of Bernardo Daddi: The Nativity. Collection of Mr. Phi Lehman, New York . “te Bernardo Daddi: Episodes from the Legend. of the Sacred Girdle. Pa- lazzo Communale, Prato . Orcagna: Details of tees! Strozzi Chane S. ves Noval Florence Orcagna: Angel ne Polyptch guise Chapa S. Maria Noval Florence Orcagna: Detail of Predella to pene ents Chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence : ; The Fogg Museum Pieta. The ees oe Nines Canbates Make ; Details from the Paintings of the Master of the Fogg Pieta . Master of the Fogg Pieta: King David. Museum, Rennes . Master of the Fogg Pieta: Crucifix. Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . Master of the Fogg Pieta: Mourning Virgin. (Fragment of a Crucifix). Collection of Mr. F. Mason Perkins, Florence . Master of the Fogg Pieta: St. Francis. The Worcester Art Museu Worcester, Mass. 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 43 43 43 43 48 48 48 49 58 58 58 58 58 46 47 48 49 50 SI (se) 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 Wa 72 Master of the Fogg Pieta: St. sate The Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass. = Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of Virgin on the Crucifix. sae S. Croce, Florence . : Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of ae Crucified on the Crucifix. Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . Master of the Fogg Pieta: Detail of St. Be ie e Brangel, on the Crucifix, Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence . : SE. 5 Giotto: Detail of Altarpiece. Uffizi Gallery, ee , Master of the Fogg Piet’: Madonna, Saints and a Duomo, Figline Taddeo Gaddi: Metoee el Child. S. Lorenzo alle Rose . Details from the Works of Taddeo Gaddi . Taddeo Gaddi: Adoration. Academy, Florence . : Taddeo Gaddi: Detail from Legend of Job. Camposanto, Pisa Taddeo Gaddi: Madonna and Angels. Uffizi Gallery, Florence . Taddeo Gaddi: St. John, the Evangelist. Collection of Mr. Philip Gentner, Worcester, Mass. Antonio Veneziano: SOOT of the Virgin. Convent of S. Tom- maso, Pisa . Details from the Paintings of Antonio Veneziano . pes iNet ° Antonio Veneziano: Last Judgment (Detail). Tabernacle, Nuovoli Antonio Veneziano: Two Saints. Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, New York . ene step eee i heme Ae Antonio Veneziano: Coronation of the Virgin. Collection of Mr. Rich- ard M. Hurd, New York . ib ae es eee Antonio Veneziano: Refection of S. Ranieri. Camposanto, Pisa . Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and Angels. Kestner Museum, Han- nover, Germany . Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and aoe (Desi. Kestner Museum, Hannover, Germany Antonio Veneziano: St. Paul. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence Antonio Veneziano: Madonna and Child. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. Antonio Veneziano: St. Peter. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence Antonio Veneziano: St. James. University Gallery, Gottingen, Germany Antonio Veneziano: Miracle of Separation of the Wine from the Water. (Detail). Camposanto, Pisa a etek. Pes. ret 4 a ee Antonio Veneziano: The Scurging of Christ. (Detail). Church of S. Niccold Reale, Palermo . mR eae eee ee ret ae P Antonio Veneziano: The Embarcation. (Detail). Camposanto, Pisa . 58 58 58 58 58 58 59 66 66 66 66 66 67 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 82 Antonio Veneziano: The Miracle of the Wine and the Water. (Detail). Camposanto, Pisa Antonio Veneziano: St. ee (Detail). Church of S. Niccold, Palermo Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: St. KES. in WINS, ae ieee Gardaee Museum, Fenway Court, Boston, Mass. Mei) > Details from the Paintings of Niccold di Pietro Gerini . Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child, Collection of Mr. Neste A. Ryerson, Chicago, Illinois . Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child. “The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. Niccolo di Pietro Gerini: Entombment. Academy of Fine Arts, Florence Niccold di Pietro Gerini: Crucifix. Church of S. Croce, Florence . Niccolé di Pietro Gerini: Trinity. Or San Michele, Florence . Niccold di Pietro Gerini: Madonna and Child. S. Lorenzo in Vincigliata. (Near Florence) Nardo di Cione: Triptych. Calas of Mr. Hee Gola New bY OTK. oe Le sla Wet Wie ef ok ke thei, 8 roe ue ee eee Details from the Paintings of Nardo di Cione . Ee Nardo di Cione: St. eae the ee Yale University, New Haven, Conn. : nae + he alos ee Nardo di Cione: St. Peter. Yale Univenatye New Haven, Conn. . Nardo di Cione: Virgin and Child from Altarpiece. New York His- torical Society, New York wah oes yee aly ie a er Nardo di Cione and Assistants: Saints. Alte Pinakotek, Munich, Germany a ik Nardo di Cione: SS. John, a Eeeeaies Joe, is Bans, a James, National Gallery, London : Nardo di Cione: Virgin and Child. Collection Mr. Herschel Vv. Tone Minneapolis, Minn. Follower of Nardo di Cione: Christ j in Tomb. The pies Canes New York . Niccolé di Tommaso: Adam and Eve. cee del rT, Pistoia ; Details from the Paintings of Niccolo di Tommaso . Details from the Paintings of the Rinuccini Master . Niccolo di Tommaso: The Temptation and The oak Convento del T, Pistoia . Niccolo di Tommaso: St. James. Collection of Mr. Moailliad Fr. Griggs, New York . Niccolé di Tommaso: The Gonna eae of Fine Aen Wigeaes Niccolo di Tommaso: Detail of St. John, the Evangelist. Fondazione Horne. Florence 82 82 83 96 96 96 96 96 96 96 97 108 108 108 108 108 108 108 108 109 126 126 126 126 126 126 D9 100 IOI 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 IIO Ili 112 Niccolé di Tommaso: St. John, the Evangelist. Fondazione Horne, Florence’ . .: bE Oe Niccolo di Tommaso: St. Paul. Eola vione Horne, Florence . Niccolo di Tommaso: Detail of St. Anthony. S. Antonio Abate, Nate Niccolé di Tommaso: The Nativity. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome . Niccolo di Tommaso: Tabernacle. The Johnson Collection, Phila- delphia, Penn. : , Niccolo di Tommaso: Prerch: Church of S, Neate pie Nici : Giovanni da Milano: Detail of Saints in Altarpiece. Uffizi Gallery, Florence TOE Base ee ee ee orr, be Giovanni da Milano: Birth of ie Visi, Pee Chapel, S. Croce, Florence os is eee Rare oe ae The Rinuccini Niner: Nias of re Virgin, Rinuccini Chapel, S. Croce, Florence a : 4 The Rinuccini Master: Detail of ie eda of ne Vien Church of S. Croce, Florence ; The Rinuccini Master: Detail of the Magic of is Virgin CHunt of S. Croce, Florence : BE «ey ha Fi The Rinuccini Master: Palvpeych, peaieae Toes ‘ The Rinuccini Master: St. Barnard and Disciples. (Detail of Predella to Polyptych). Academy of Fine Arts, Florence . . : The Rinuccini Master: Scene from the Life of St. John, the edie: (Detail of Predella to Polyptych). Academy of Fine Arts, Florence 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 126 INTRODUCTON DS ea the most persistent fallacy in the criticism of Florentine painting is the uncensored belief that the fourteenth century is divided between Giotto and his followers. However close to the truth the theory of isolated scholars may have been, their practice seems in- variably to be at the mercy of this error. At present all that is being willingly admitted of this period, is that Giotto was its initiator and Siena the source of a transfiguring influence. Misled by the Giot- tesque prejudice, students have been giving too little place to that in- fluence, have underrated it, and worse, they have almost entirely neg- lected the non-Giottesque painting of this moment. If Giotto may be said to have found the mightiest artistic embodi- ment for spiritual significance, his school is by no means coextensive with the Florentine painting of the time. There is, in fact, a tendency in Florence opposed to the Giottesque genius in taste, and actively op- posed to its stark statement, its heroic system and its intellectualism, a tendency, nevertheless, strong and deep and persistent within the school. Giotto’s art by idealizing action and psychology chilled the spontaneous human sympathies; by its structural balance, it arrested the mobility of life, and burdened the sensibilities by its monumental weight. Approaching the world by way of an ingenuous and sentimental empiricism the masters of the non-Giottesque tendency wanted to create the illusion of life by exploiting a pantomime more explicit than the averaged face and gesture of the Giotteschi, to present an action with a more impulsive and unrehearsed air. They wanted to render things in their flux and catch the sparkle on their surface. And more naturally sensible of the principle of change in the world, than of its eternity, they preferred to follow the unfolding of a story, in the for- tunes of its personages. By the temperament implicit in this pref- erence, they avoided the dramatic, for drama means imposing an ar- bitrary system of ethics, and an inflexible logic, upon the events of life, which flow on without a regulated rise and fall. As old and older than the Giottesque revolution, this current in Florentine painting rises in a still undefined, obscure, partly Roman source, and first appears in the works of the St. Cecily Master. The first three essays in the book review this tradition, and deal repre- I sentatively with it, establishing its claim to being indigenous by its persistence through Daddi, in a steady course to Angelico, and finally down to Bacchiacca. The second group of essays dealing with masters known slightly or not at all before, lays nevertheless a reasonable claim to being represen- tative. The four figures that make it up are fair impersonations of the cast and drift of the Giottesque succession from the middle of the cen- tury down to its sad decline. The first two of these, formed probably by Giotto himself, illustrate a moment when the air was still alive with his creative energy. Rude, uninspired repetitious but lusty, the other two belong to the descend- ing slope of the Trecento, when only a certain Giottesque starkness of statement and a certain sense of physical and dramatic pondus, sur- vive the great master. The third group is held together by its poetic tendency. Originally essentially uncongenial to the Florentine temper, its lyricism seems to have been given definite form by the gradual infiltration of foreign in- fluence. To judge by the frequent call of Sienese artists to this city ever since Duccio was commissioned to paint the Rucellai Madonna, Florence must have regarded this exquisite art a welcome release from the difficult beauties of its own. In forming the lyricism of Nardo di Cione, Sienese painting left perhaps no less of its refinement, of its song in it, than in even so Sienizing a master as Daddi. For while there is a good deal in Daddi that harks back to the Lorenzetti, a large part conventionally accounted for in this way, is in reality appropriated from Florentine sculpture. But Nardo seems to have caught some- thing of the very genius that shines out of the early Trecento Sienese pictures. His Sienese appropriations however do not end there. The rendering of the soft consistency of the flesh under the close-fitting dresses of his women, and of the narrow eye, urge us toward the same source. His statement, however, and his skeleton are Giottesque. Niccolo di Tommaso and The Rinuccini Master are prolongations in different directions of a lyricism, that varies only as Nardo varies from his brother Orcagna, the former being responsible for Niccolo to about the same extent as the latter was for the Rinuccini Master. The three painters integrated and discussed in the third group, isolate a note, which though it rises out of forms and an idiom inalien- ably Florentine, constitutes a tendency within Florentine painting, that establishes its independence by its continuity in Lorenzo Monaco and Botticelli. \ : ca 4 = | ‘ sd : 4 44 j ta ee ) Shales — ori t é P + rr it - > é y Na ee Ae Pech Ha bo HCE | Se eh tua alia iit Ti tae Ot Ft ore | a as ‘ if 7 3 , ; : : o! AA hy ax 4 ; fi e tes : ; se ee : at | 9 a ry > ; : A : nie ‘ : >, . : + = ren ; 4 : Wa - ; ‘1M jh sedaa, A re ; a : : i ” i SMS SN RL ITS ca 1 ahaa eng reaenananipn hipametang-nteror n Ser a T sie ie Me paman Ad ard sink ws bak oo ee ! K stzah AML fo soiiga\lo) ' . Sivoariy a8 04 as mn apenas iia jd ae the bors af oe Ee oe es pine Prema or Pacino ig.a polye- ad ee Paaehe Hy whetes’ veBerrnn «be “a nie ihe Pig a} ty aitemied THE SHOP OF PACINO DI BONAGUIDA a world scorns all knowledge beyond its reach, and because scorn lightens the imputation of ignorance, Pacino — hitherto little more than a name — has been made its special object. The most recent literature has been impatiently justifying its position by the at- tribution of works that fitted whatever chance notion it happened to hold of him.” This was made easy and tacitly sanctioned by the two- fold fact, that antiquity is altogether silent about him® and that he was entirely eclipsed by his greater contemporaries, who were engaged in one of the most critical revolutions of form in history. And, to be sure, Pacino is neither a mighty creative figure, still less a determining in- fluence, and subsequent painting would probably not have been ma- terially different without him. But by adding to the two only admis- sible works,* and relieving him of a number unintelligently assigned to him, one is enabled at last to recognize in him a distinct gift, the light, fresh fluent gift of the minstrel, and one of the principal figures in a significant tendency in Florentine painting. Milanesi’ is the first to drag him into modern art-historical litera- ture with the publication of two documents, one under the date 1303, the other of a time soon after 1320. These two dates tend to stabilize his chronology: he is, presumably, mature and has been active for some time in 1303, and the appearance of his name after 1320 invites the conjecture of activity for some time to come. A contemporary of Giotto, then, possibly a younger contemporary, he is probably as old as any of Giotto’s known or acknowledged pupils, and on the basis of dates alone, it is unlikely he was of their number.° The monument radical for the reconstruction of Pacino is a polyp- tych in five compartments at the Florentine Academy’ wherein the central and dominant tragedy of the Crucifixion (Fig. 1) is attended by Sts. Nicholas (Fig. 2) and Bartholomew (Fig. 3) on the left, Florentius (S. P. 7) and Luke on the right. It bears his autograph and the year of its painting,” the only one among his works furnishing either of these data. A poetic but timid performance, it holds a spatial rather than a formal sense, suggestion rather than concentration, sen- timent rather than passion. The height of the crucifix and of the flanking figures of Mary and John dwarf the principal actor and the 3 dramatic motive, and the representation thus sacrifices its inherent grandeur. The conduct of Mary and John is not a reflex to an im- mediately present or imminent calamity, but the emotional epilogue to an event already past. Our Crucifixion throws up the lyric aspect of feeling, not the dramatic — it has become a lament, and has ceased to be action. And the summarized aesthetic of these distinguishing char- acters assimilates it to the symbolic representation of the formal cruci- fix, with Mary and John, in all respects — excepting their position — corresponding to the terminal figures on the cross-bar. Its composition’ is of a series which seems to have gone out of fash- ion with the second half of the century, somewhat later chiefly favored by Daddi. Here Pacino constructs neither with knowledge nor with understanding: the line is uncertain and the form flat. The figures sink against the ground without a sense of the easy and vital resistance to the pull of gravitation. They could easily be blown over. Their movements are gentle and they have a mild anxious look. The pro- portions vary from that of the tall Virgin,” with small eyes and long face, to the short St. Bartholomew. The high-crowned heads rest loosely on rounded and narrow shoulders, and the faces of the men are heavy-jowled with flat or bulging foreheads. The lips are soft and clean-edged. The noses of John and the Virgin indicate the limits of two varying types. The drapery is thrown into long, curved, narrow, shallow, sweeping ridges. The uncommonly large halos and broad border edged with tiny rosettes that are tooled with faint foliations against a ground of cross-hatching, make a unified surface barely dis- tinguishable from the rest of the gold ground. Finally the original color survives mainly in the green underpainting which neutralizes what the modern cleaner has left of the local color. As usual, one is surprised in passing to the medallions in the pin- nacles at the disparities between the monumental and the miniature modes. The style becomes tighter and more concentrated and the master a more seizable personality. It is by the way of these (S. P. 13, 14) that one first comes to recognize the same hand in the Tree of Life on the opposite wall.” The force of the conviction that this picture is by Pacino would depend on the ability to surround him with the contemporary artistic ambient in Florence. The patient and susceptible attention however will see under apparent divergencies of style and of state, the aesthetic complex of the former of these paintings, in the other. The touch, the line, shape, the peace of the Crucified in both pictures (Fig. 3, 4), the 4 mould of the mask, the nose, the hollows of the eyes, the closed lids will then seem to hold differences of degree only, differences presumably of period. To instance the most obvious resemblances, the hands of our Christ repeat the left of the St. Luke and the mouth, chin and beard, the lower part of St. Bartholomew’s face (Fig. 3). To carry the proof to the miniatures it would be enough to set the St. John (bottom right in the Tree of Life) beside the prophet (Fig. 4) above the St. Nicholas of the polyptych. The head of this same St. John is in inner agreement with that of the St. Florentius; and the head of God, the Father, above the central compartment of the polyptych has the very shape of almost any one of Pacino’s frontal heads. Rings of tiny rosettes edge the halos as in the polyptych, and the gold background at the top is tooled with the same superficial tracery. The Tree of Life” blossoms with a multitude of small scenes, four on each of its twelve branches, representing the life of Christ read beginning at the tip of the lowest branch at the left, across the width of the picture towards the right and progressively upward. Below are scenes from the creation of man, his temptation and fall; just over them Moses and St. Francis on the left, St. Clare and John, the Evan- gelist on the right; on either side of the phoenix Ezekiel left, and Daniel right. Above, saints alternate with angels in glory, with Christ and Mary in the peak.” Hanging against all the swarming and shifting variety of earthly events Christ’s body, showing none of the distorting agony of death, detaches itself in a final relaxation of all effort, as if His sad task, done and over, the martyred spirit had lulled itself into a healing sleep. The lay-out of the picture is an amplified survival™ of the earlier Byzantinizing habit of crowding scenes of Christ’s life about Him in death; and yet, dissimilar as the total effect may be, the orderly repe- tition of the circular pattern over the surface need only be imagined diminished in scale and prominence to shrink to the geometrically patterned background of the Giottesque cross. It is in the miniatures again that he broke his leash. Here he is freer, surer, and more limpid, as if from the habit of a beloved prac- tice, and the medium sings under the fresh and dainty touch, and follows its own joyful fancy in the calligraphy of the leaves that curl round the medallions, and in the beautiful inscriptions of the ramifi- cations (Figs. 6 to 8). Unhampered by prepossessions of the monu- mental or the heroic, the style is lively and crisp as seldom again in the Florentine painting of the Trecento. The figure, sharply and com- 5 pendiously outlined, has the flatness of an image struck from a print- block, and the whole has consequently something of the character of a pictograph. The figures accordingly bear no real relation to the cubic depth but only to the surrounding patches and to the limits of the area, and are tied together in each scene by a cursive rhythm that moves from left to right. The whole ensemble by being spread evenly over the surface avoids all visual interruptions of the continuity of the story, and counterfeits the ceremonial look of a banner. This is not narration, the telling of a story for its chain of pro- gressive events or for its dramatic movement — even if in spots it has purely narrative passages — because the thin thread of the simple tale is too elaborately interwoven with theological matter that suspends and inflates the flow of the recital, and makes of the whole a sort of chart of theological propaganda. It is a kind of pictorial compendium of the essence of Christian teaching from the Fall at the bottom to the Re- demption and the Glory above; and its unity is in the orderly gradua- tion of the symbolism towards the climax at the top in which the whole bustle of events is resolved, as in the final hosanna of some churchly hymn. We are aware throughout of an implied text which it is in- tended to illustrate. It is thus a kind of program painting in which we do not therefore look for great moving moments or tragic depths, as one might expect in events wherein the fate of the world is being de- cided. There is no second level: the whole thing ripples on brisk, fresh and shallow, and its excellence lies in its maintenance of the limits it has put upon itself of illustration. Stylistically, and perhaps chronologically, between the two altar- pieces, is a Crucifix (Fig. 9) that now hangs over the altar in the sac- risty of S. Felicita in Florence assigned repeatedly, and with faltering conviction to the School of Giotto.” In its present condition it bears evidence of the power of resistance of classic technique to wanton de- struction and merciless restoration through the ages. The nude is moulded like the Christ in the Tree of Life and the rounded knees tapering below are identical. The shadows follow the cheek-bone and the hollow under it in the same way as in the Christ of the Academy polyptych, and the tapering arms of the two Christs with the unarticulated wrists and long palms terminate in the same curved, insubstantial fingers. The hair, the eyes, the nose, the face, broad above and narrowing towards the chin, derive from the same radical images. The feet are placed in a position known to me in no other Florentine instance, generally avoided, doubtless, because of the awkward twist it produced in the whole leg. If the form is external, there is a definite rhythm and considerable elegance in the proportions, and a more than common decisiveness in the drawing. Though its architecture follows the formula of the Giottesque crosses in Padua and at the Florentine churches of the Ognissanti, S. Marco, S. Felice, S. Croce, it is well to note that in other respects it is as un-Giottesque as any painting of the early Trecento in Florence could conceivably be. It is opposed in spirit and in aesthetic, in tragic intensity to the Giottesque type of crucifix, and to that passion which, concentrated in plastic form, are characteristic of it. The Giottesque feeling is abysmal and agonized, and regains its balance through vent (rather than establishes its existence through lack of that necessity) ; its effect is produced by a sharply contrasted action and reaction. Our crucifix has no terminal figures on the cross-bar, no audience to direct the focus of sentiment, and the Christ left alone spreads about Him a sense of silence and isolation. The complete muscular slackness is not intended to produce the effect of final surrender of the organiz- ing principle of life, but rather to tranquilize all action. There is no trace of pain or torment, but a truly classic moderation and harmoniz- ing balance of accents. Beneath the apparent extinction of active con- sciousness we become sensible of the deep-drawn breath of sleep. There remains one full-sized picture traceable to Pacino’s circle, a half-length Virgin (Fig. 10) in the collection of Mr. Charles Loeser in Florence. If there are characteristics in it that hold out stubbornly against an unqualified attribution, one might still reasonably ask of a panel painted in an age of great racial expression, whether Pacino — admitting his one known monumental effort to be a failure — might not in an exceptional case have risen to such majesty of design. One might, if need be, assume direct imitation. But it is harder to account for the sense of bulk, for the solid hands, for the flat lips and the line between them. On the other hand, one should have little difficulty in seeing the affinity between the Virgin’s head and that of St. Bartholomew in the polyptych (see Fig. 3). The features of the former, it is true, are vi- tally codérdinated, while those of the latter are undetermined in mean- ing. Nevertheless, the cut of the eyes, their setting, the iris and pupil, the glance, share profound analogies. The bulging forehead of the Child recalls the head of the St. Luke, and His ear that of the Nicholas in Ks the polyptych (see Fig. 2), while the motif of the Child holding the Mother’s mantle with His face turned away from Her, reappears in the same form in the Straus diptych (see S. P. 1). The way the border of the dress encircles the neck in the two Virgins is typical of Pacino, and the types are so intimately Pacinesque, that it would be as em- barrassing to refuse, as it is to ascribe, the painting to him. In minor particulars the analogies continue. The halos sweep in great circles around the heads, as in all of Pacino’s larger paintings, and are edged with incisions and the same tiny rosettes, as in the polyptych. The borders of the panel, which has been sawed off at the top, are also of the same character. If by Pacino then, the Virgin is easily his most dignified work; but it is precisely the exalted character of this dignity that suggests the al- ternative that it may be by some more nobly gifted master, still un- discovered, but working in Pacino’s milieu. Very recently (in 1924) another work by Pacino has come to light. That it has only just found its way from the Roman market into an American collection is the more gratifying, as it is a significant addi- tion to Pacino’s oeuvre. It is a diptych (Fig. 11) larger than the rule of small panels (the leaf measuring ca. 12 x 18 ins.) and of a color livelier than is common with Pacino. This is due to the effect of the varnish, which has also united the individual streaks of tempera pigment to an enamel-like smoothness. Subject besides, to a different kind of wear and renovation from other of his panels, it discloses a very fine crackle and an abrasion of the gold. Here and there it has lost some of the col- or too, as in the Virgin’s robe in the right leaf (Fig. 11), and in the Magdalen’s head, but the whole is in essentially healthy state. For all these reasons, the eye may not find it easy at first to reconcile its sur- face with the still fresh tempera-bloom of the Tree of Life on the one hand or with the marred polyptych on the other. In a confrontation with other works, it will be necessary to remember this, as well as the fact that, in a panel like the present, which lies somewhere between a full-sized and a miniature painting, allowances have to be made for variations in type, and technical differences, incidental to scale. The total aesthetic effect releases about the same degree of inten- sity as Pacino’s other paintings already discussed: the diptych neither sinks us deeper in spiritual immersion nor quickens the pulse to greater violence. ‘The savor is of the same specific variety, the types of the same family, and their action and movement exhibit the same eccen- tricities. The analogies between the shapes of the crosses in the diptych and in the Academy polyptych, between their veining; and the unusual crowns of thorns, are significant, even if inessential, to the fundamental affinities. ‘The head of the Christ in the diptych tapers towards the chin, past the darkly bearded jaw as that of the Christs in the Acad- emy. The trunk swells, and narrows at the waist similarly, the curve of the belly dips to the same shadow, and in the first two the thighs are parted by a line that runs clean up to it. These are wrapped in semi- transparent loin-cloths, in which the narrowly ridged and grooved folds are identical. The tibia in both is long, and the feet are patterned and posed on the same formula. There is a feature-for-feature agreement, even if the total likeness is less evident, between the Crucified in the diptych, and the corre- sponding figures in the Tree of Life and in the S. Felicita Cross. In fact its affinities to the last are closest of all (S. P. 9, 10) though the radical shapes of the heads in all three, of the eye, of the knobby chin, etc., betray the identical formal basis. The other heads in the diptych continue the same evidence. They are constructed on the same image as the heads in the polyptych, and like those of the Tree of Life whether round or oval, are plump- cheeked with a large, long-tailed, fish-shaped eye that strikes across into the temple. The faces are furnished with noses generally blunt, and sometimes showing a sagging ridge; and a small loose-rimmed ear. Thus the head of the Evangelist beside the cross in the diptych, though fuller of cheek, has the same mould and modulations as that of the Virgin in the polyptych (S. P. 2, 3) ; and the younger heads of the Dormition in the diptych, profess the same parenthood as those in the Resurrection or the Last Supper or the Tree of Life. ‘The long eyes of the diptych will be found in clearest agreement with those of the figures at the foot of the Tree of Life, as well as in those of the polyptych. The draperies again, as for example those of the Virgin and the St. John in the right leaf (Fig. 11) of the diptych recall the jagged silhou- ettes of the lateral personages in the polyptych, and though the con- trast in light and shade is sharper, on account of differences in scale and in the condition of the surface, their arrangement and essential character are the same. One may pursue other parallels in the medallions of the Tree of Life. If the rock formation in the right leaf repeats to a refinement the rock in the central compartment of the polyptych, the vegetation, 9 the tree-stem, the cinquefoil at its foot, have the same pigmental quali- ty with the same suggestions of the fluid vehicle with which the color was drenched, as the vegetation at the base of the Tree of Life or in the Nativity (Fig. 6) in the same panel. In fact the cinquefoil recurs in the Nativity in a simplified form, only it is set down compendiously in hasty strokes that neglect the leaf-shape. Though execution is inherent in total shape, it will be well to point to its separate similarity in the diptych to the execution in the Tree of Life. Both show the same streaking-on of the light at the top of the cheek, the ridge of the nose, the jaw and chin, and the same relation in value to the darker parts around it. Only the larger scale of the diptych involves a somewhat heavier brush stroke and a less cursive line. From the existence of a number of small pictures one would be tempted to conclude that Pacino’s activity as a panel miniaturist did not end with the Tree of Life, and that like Bernardo Daddi and Jacopo del Casentino he turned out scores of portable paintings exe- cuted with the aid of a shop of assistants. One of these**is among the treasure of pictures Herbert Horne left to the city of Florence (Fig. 12). Its painting falls into the period of the Tree of Life. The style and the type of the Horne picture may be found passim in this panel, but the pattern and the Virgin’s fashion of wearing her mantle, the hatching and folds of the drapery, the hands, the mode of rounding the forms, the streak of light down the ridges of the nose, the lips — all will be found repeated in the small medallion representing the Adoration (Fig. 8). The picture, which has suffered slightly from a darkening influence of the varnish, was commissioned by a patron eager to recommend himself to the Virgin’s intimate sympathies, and made Pacino see to it that she was more than commonly liberal of sentiment. The master’s fondness for a strong, blood scarlet appears in the background. The scrollwork tooled largely in the fashion of the time adds a magnificence to the lordly halos. Signs of the same personality — manifesting itself in varying de- grees but in a similar phase of Pacino’s artistic activity — occur in two small triptychs, in all that is known to me of what must have been a large number of similar panels, produced for a humble clientéle with the collaboration of assistants. Where Pacino’s hand seems to be pres- ent, long habit or else the admixture of inferior aid has relaxed the execution. Though rubbed and sleeked to be made presentable to the modern fe) buyer, it is still possible to see that the one formerly in the Florentine market (lig. 13) is less evolved in style than, though close in general physiognomy to, the Tree of Life. In some of the medallions of this painting the eyes of the heads facing outward maintain a diagrammatic symmetry, and the noses are rendered by a vertical stroke and two dots symmetrically placed on either side at its base. The head of our Virgin follows the same facial formula. The hands, if a trifle different, have the same air of mild ineffectuality, and the straw fingers are similarly attached. The dilated eyes of the figures in the wings of our triptych, the sagging ridge of the pinched noses, appear conspicuously in the Tree of Life. In the light of these stylistic affinities the iconographic analogies between the Flagellation, the Entombement, the Crucifix- ion of the triptych, and the same scenes in the medallions; the same dryness, the same strained and awkward expression in both paintings, persuade one if not of common authorship, at least of a common shop. In the figures of the triptych of the Museo Bandini at Fiesole (Fig. 14) which are clumsier, and the faces of which are heavier, we shall find the same short hand, the same stereotype in the drawing. The line sings the same melody (though the hand is unsteadier and has a less even touch) and its graphological character — particularly in the case of the border of the Virgin’s mantle — is the same as in the Tree of Life. The compositional plan of the central portion is a relaxation of the formula of the corresponding section in the other triptych. The hands repeat those of the Horne panel, and the Magdalen’s are folded like those in the upper tiers of the Tree of Life. But this testimony is complicated by disparities that draw it close to the S. Cecilia Master. In the study on Pacino already alluded to,” I recorded the feeling that Pacino had a miniature habit of mind and brush. It has since become a certainty, from works I have been able to identify in the in- terval, that his shop devoted itself busily to the running illumination of texts written on parchment or vellum. More than that, their num- ber compared to the relative scarcity of Florentine miniatures of this early period, raises the likelihood that book-illumination centered in Pacino’s shop, which was among the most important of its kind in the third and fourth decades of the Trecento in Florence. Not far beyond its limits lies the activity of a group to which Bernardo Daddi be- longed, and of which the Laurentian manuscript Il Biadaiolo™ is the principal surviving book-illumination. II An extended work of this kind and one of the most important of Pacino’s shop rests in the J. Pierpont Morgan Library: A Life of Christ (with occasional scenes from lives of other saints) told in 38 full page illuminations (Fig. 15, 16), each leaf measuring 954 x 67% inches, without text or comment or title.” The Pacinesque character of the entire series is clear (S. P. 4, 7, 8, 11). In fact, so close is its radical type to that of the Straus diptych, that it must have been executed at about the same time. The round faces, the sleek shining convexity of cheek and of jowl, the long-tailed eyes cutting clear across the wide cheek into the temples, the hair (that of the adolescents is clipped straight above the foreheads and exposes a small ear), the dainty-fingered hands, the inarticulate wrists, the san- dals bound with slender thongs, the rocks, the action, all are repeated here. In the Christ in the House of Emmaus in the Morgan Life of Christ (to take a convenient instance), the young St. John has the head and the left hand of the St. John in the nght leaf of the diptych. The Virgins again in the Illuminations of the Miracle of the Wine and Water and of the Presentation, of the Adoration, of the Nativity, (Fig. 16) and of the Annunciation, variously profess the type of Our Lady Enthroned in the diptych. The high lights in the diptych touch the same projections of the face as throughout in the illuminations, and the modelling shapes them to the same roundness with a plump- ness of cheek, a diminutive hand, foot and ear, a mildness of temper to be found everywhere in the illuminations. Though the technique in the Tree of Life is more summary, the similar correspondencies to those just instanced appear between the illuminations and the medallions of this panel (S. P. 4, 6, 12, 11, 15). It is of course the similar state of the Morgan Illuminations and of the Tree of Life that renders them comparable in point of execution, which for other reasons as well approximates the two works. The line is looser and the streaking of the brush, though not as free, as in the Tree of Life, manifests differences due only or chiefly to the medium. Indentity of hands in the Illuminations and medallions will appear most obvious in those of the two series that represent the same themes, as for example in the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Crucifixion, the Kiss of Judas, and so on. The inequality of these illuminations both in style and excellence may be explained from what we know of the tendency in Trecento shops to mix hands. The limits of this inequality, however, lie well within the bounds of Pacino’s style, so that the only question admis- 12 sible about their authorship is the extent of Pacino’s personal share in their execution. It is more than likely that this was twofold. From the enumerated analogies to other works — analogies chiefly of plan, pattern, type and general shape — there can be no doubt that Pacino himself designed them. The fact however that those superior in exe- cution are also the closest to his other works, would urge his share in the actual painting. This superiority in similarity appears chiefly in the Visitation (Fig. 15), the Annunciation, the Adoration, the Bap- tism, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Way to Calvary, the Pieta, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost. Pacino’s understanding of structure was rather conventional than organic: his form reaches us rather as fact than as experience. Never- theless, his understanding of it is adequate for his limited ends; it justifies itself within its own context. That understanding inheres in the scenes just named in a greater measure than in the remaining ones. The line is more graceful and calligraphic, and the expression of both body and face is more unified and convincing. But in the other scenes the action has a certain strain and flatness; it has the unrehearsed air of a play prematurely presented, as if the executant, guided by the master’s drawing, followed it without catching the impulse that gave it expression. The result is that while the design often suggests a cer- tain dignity, or piety, the inferior hand betrays itself in a wavering or scamping outwardness of interpretation of the latent original, in the diagrammatic faces, in the ill-adjusted movements, and in the awk- ward statement. An odd, unaccustomed expression surprises the fea- tures. They smirk or simper or twitch out of turn and out of place and thus ruffle the intended effect. This is true of such scenes as the Scoffing, Christ in the House of Emmaus, Christ Mounting the Cross, and the Washing of the Feet of the Disciples. Taken as a whole, the Morgan Vita Christi maintains a more con- sistently measured pace, a graver rhythm, a greater dignity, than any other of Pacino’s works. The action has neither any of the eager im- pulsiveness of the medallions in the Tree of Life, nor again the weak- nesses of the polyptych. The series professes a more settled mastery and maturity, and would, accordingly, seem to be one of his later works. The similar technique and types of an Illuminated Choral in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts joins this work as well to Pacino’s circle. The individual leaves which have been cut down now measure 939 by 13 inches, and contain several initials adorned with figure composi- tions. Although they were executed by a different hand (or hands) 13 from the Morgan series, nevertheless they all, but chiefly the Descent of the Holy Spirit, betray peculiarities of shape, folds, hands, the specu- lation of the eye, already found to be habitual with Pacino. The loose, fluid execution exactly repeats the technique of the Morgan illumina- tions. Most impressive in design of all his illuminations is a full-page miniature representing the Ascension (Fig. 17) with two figures of donors in a medallion below, in the collection of Mr. Frank Smith of Worcester, Mass. This was doubtless the frontispiece of an antiphonal. There is a studied balance in the action, a more conscious exalta- tion, and a settled placidity with none of the usual Florentine tension. The figures are relaxed in structure and in movement in a sort of rapt absorption. The restlessness of the Tree of Life is entirely gone from ite There is a smoothness in the execution, and a continuity of line that obey a temperament more tranquil than that of Pacino. But for the general shapes, the types differ from those usual in his works in the somewhat smaller iris, the narrower eye with dark rims round it, the uncommonly small hand, an exaggeration of the neck-length and its movement, and in the more meticulous graduation of the shadow with an omission of accents. If Pacino’s fundamental shapes and Pacino’s design abide within these disguises, the hand is certainly not his, the pedantic execution resulting from a servile adherence to the master’s plan. Nevertheless the leaf has the virtue of consistently pursuing a single effect. This effect is the poetic expression of some able craftsman, whose tempera- mental affinities are far away in the full Umbrian Renaissance. In both, the concentration of formal and dramatic suggestions is forfeited for a more extended harmony of sustained linear rhythms. Life be- comes immobilized, the world wider and more tranquil, and its inhabi- tants, free of the law of gravitation, are absorbed mind and body, in an eternal vision. As these essays go to press, three other works of illumination from the shop of Pacino fall under my notice. ‘The more extended and im- portant one is a bible mentioned by Paolo d’Ancona (in La Miniature Italienne Du Xe Au XVIe Siecle, Ed. G. van Oest, Paris, 1925, 34, pls. XXX-XXI) as in the Library of Prince Trivulzio,” and described as a work of a Florentine miniaturist “impressioné par |’école de Sienne;” the work, d’Ancona continues to say “se recommande par |’exuberance de sa decoration.” Of the two leaves reproduced by this author, plate 14 XX XJ shows a representation of the Tree of Life similar to Pacino’s panel in the Florentine Academy, only that in the illumination, the small medallions, twenty-four in number, contain busts of saints and prophets. A twenty-fifth, intended probably for God, the Father, is unframed and breaks the all-over symmetry on the left at the top. All the features that have persisted through Pacino’s works reviewed up to this point, recur here, from the types, the hands, the Crucified, to the brush-stroke and the modelling. Only a certain loss of character in the total would make it necessary to assume shop-assistance in the execution. A parchment sheet, framed and hanging at the Fitzwilliam Mu- seum, Cambridge, England, was originally probably the frontispiece of a choral. In the body of it are two representations one above the other, the upper the Resurrection, the lower the Three Maries at the Tomb. Below, left and right, are two diminutive donors. Running along the left side of the page and along the bottom are a series of medallions (interrupted half-way in each course by a mandorla) con- taining small scenes instancing mainly Christ’s miraculous appear- ances after death. The Christ of the Resurrection is most closely paralleled in the Smith Ascension: the figure, posture, head, hands, draping being nearly identical. The rocks and foliage approximate those in the Morgan Vita Christi. The head of the angel seated on the tomb is given a spec- tral purple transparency as in the Morgan I]luminations. Finally a Martyrdom and Assumption of St. Lawrence belonging to Marczell von Nemes, in Munich, joins the productions of Pacino’s shop by affinities particularly close to the Smith and Fitzwilliam sheets. Now, if the works thus assembled are harmonious among them- selves and constant to a single personality, what are its stylistic and aesthetic determinants? By an aggregate of what individual signs in these works shall Pacino be known? Of the types that appear predom- inantly, the round-headed — chiefly in young personages (S. P. 2, 12) —is more common than the long-headed, and shows a fleshy mask (S. P. 1, 2, 12) that covers a mould wide at the cheek, which often tapers toward the chin (S. P. 9, 10, 12, 14). His grey-beards are square- jawed (S. P. 6, 7, 11). Where the young men are bearded, the hair fringes the face (S. P. 9, 10, 14). Heads with high bulging foreheads vary and extend his range (S. P. 8,11). The nose is straight and long, or blunt and curved outward. The lips are soft, full and clean-edged. 15 The hand has either the helpless appearance of an inflated glove (see Figs. 2, 3) or of being cut out of cardboard (see Figs.6,7, 15). His tendency is to construct summarily, to articulate loosely, and generally there is no line of junction given between hand and forearm: in his nudes — more especially — there is no articulation of the wrist. Long shallow folds run in large curves over draperies that hang loosely on an ignored structure. His tooling is uncommonly fine, barely visible: to vary and enrich the gold surface it produces a chatoiement upon it. The ornamental details, lozenges, stars, circles, and quatrefoils, are his inheritance of the geometric taste of the thirteenth century. As Pacino seeks above everything else the fluidity of narration (and preéminently in his miniatures), he reduces the form, when required, to a medium fluid like notes in music or words in a poem. He does not stop, like other miniaturists of his time, to smoothly round out his forms, because rotundity has plastic intimations, and plasticity tends to hold up the flow of the story. His line and modelling accordingly, are aS summary as is consistent with their primary function of com- municating something other than themselves. To this end the figure bears no real relation to the cubic space, but leaves a web of patterns over the face of the panel. It is neither architectonic nor monumental ; and it thinks and feels on a small scale. The pantomime is mild, timid, without vehemence or exaltation, and there is an air of unsuspecting acceptance of their fate about his people. His larger figures are self-effacing: they betray the artist’s uneasi- ness in their company on account of their monumental suggestions. The line wanders languidly over the edges, and contents itself with a generic rendering of a theme to which he brings neither a high degree of energy nor conviction. But in the miniature scenes he is in his own element. He can be heroic on a small scale, as for example in some of the Morgan Illumi- nations, or in parts of the Tree of Life; or again unconcernedly and prosaically narrative, as in some of the medallions, where the figures absorbed like children in their play, dart about with odd jerky move- ments and with their eyes popping out of their eager, elfish heads. From all that has been said, it will be clear that Pacino was not a Giottesque in the conventional sense. ‘This designation, which several of Pacino’s panels still carry, can be due only to the wide margin of safety there is in assuming any Florentine master of the early four- teenth century subject to an influence so powerful. But the imputa- tion of such influence in Pacino is only relatively just, because it holds 16 only of isolated and incidental aspects of his painting. Pacino it is true almost certainly began with Giotto. He may have worked with him at an early formative stage, if we are to judge from certain gestures, the facial diagram, even the type. These features, however, render it al- most as likely that his early training was involved in Roman painting, possibly in Cavallini’s, who himself painted in Florence. Nevertheless, neither the Roman nor the Giottesque influences seem to have been decisive in his formation. They went no farther than to mould his vo- cabulary. His art has a different tendency and belongs to a different order of artistic expression. One has only to compare Pacino’s works, large and small, with those of Giotto’s close followers — Taddeo Gad- di’s, Maso’s, or Orcagna’s — to see how consistently divergent the architectural solid (which is the radical unit of Giottesque composition) and Pacino’s pictorial writing really are. And his technique, his man- ual habits, his attitude towards his medium, are likewise totally differ- ent from Giotto’s.” It is a technique accommodated, as far as one can judge, from his earliest period to another kind of imagery, which moves with the rhythm of life, temperamentally discrepant from the Giot- tesque vision of a world outlasting humanity and exceeding its powers. Such a mode of feeling naturally leaned to narrative (that is, the evolv- ing rather than the eternal) and to the smaller scale (the human rather than the heroic) ; and constitutes a tendency imbedded in Flor- entine art, and continuous through its evolution. This tendency logi- cally looks for the incidental rather than the unchanging in form, for the qualitative rather than the substantive. It is fanciful, lyrical and inventive. It includes painters the better part of whose work, whether so in name or not, has the character of illumination, and it is no acci- dent that most of what they have left is a sort of book-illustration on panel. They first loom out of a still shadowy tradition with the so-called Master of the Saint Cecily Altarpiece, joined by Pacino and a cluster of nameless satellites; followed close by Bernardo Daddi, Jacapo del Casentino, and the I! Biadaiuolo illuminator. And as Giotto is the in- spiration and fountain head of the monumental tendency, so the Saint Cecily Master seems to be the earliest to have found the formula for the group just mentioned. This master elaborated, pulled about (identified more recently with Buffalmacco) is, as recent criticism has left him,” a pluralistic per- sonality, the nucleus of which, in spite of the violence done him, is definite and coherent enough. He is probably a shade older than Pa- 17 cino, of a firmer fibre and greater maturity of imagination. Specific signs of his influence appear, as must be expected but sparingly in the small remains of Pacino’s painting; but the eye that has learnt to look for derivations, will find it in the gait of Pacino’s line, and in his way of stabilizing the design, in the first and in the last glance at his works. The air of the diminutive frontal figures symmetrically placed on either side of the throne in the Straus diptych and small triptychs al- ready discussed, suggests their having come from such a picture as the altarpiece by the S. Cecilia Master at S. Margherita a Montici. The female saint left of the throne; and the type, and silhouette of the St. Margaret, who stands between vertical courses of stories of her martyr- dom in another picture in the same church, owe their origin to the formula that reappears in the medallion of the Tree of Life showing the Coronation and in the Glory of Saints above. The square sharp- cornered architecture of the last named panel, its light and dark, find nowhere else so close a parallel as in the St. Margaret panel just men- tioned, and after that in the S. Cecilia altarpiece in the Uffizi. The throne of the little Virgin by Pacino in the Horne collection is like that of a small Virgin at Budapest by the S. Cecilia Master, and like one by another of his followers in the conventual chapel of S. Maria Madda- lena in Pian di Mugnone. The same architectural motives and per- spective occur so frequently in the works of the S. Cecilia Master that one must conclude this type of throne had become a shop-convention. In less noticeable details, such, for example, as the treatment of the gold ground, one will find unexpected analogies. So the lozenged pat- tern of the uppermost portion of the Tree of Life seems imitated from the ground of the S. Cecilia Master’s Uffizi altarpiece; it is pointed with similar dots, and shows the same conventionalized leaves against the same cross-hatching. A strong scarlet note is common to both, and Pacino’s preference for pale green and yellow is anticipated in the works of the Cecilia Master. But no detail of resemblance goes so far towards establishing the hypothesis of Pacino’s derivation, as the forward bird-like thrust of the neck and the way it bears its head in the medallions of the Tree of Life, the construction of the round heads (in the young men especial- ly), the manner of setting light on the faces, and its value in the con- text; the small signorial hands with the slim brittle fingers, their mode of touching objects; the placing of the eyes — where narrow eyes oc- cur — and all the nuance of formation about them. The draperies 18 with sharply wrinkled ridged folds were woven by the same looms, and the surface shows streaks of the same brush. Now and then the suspicion of Sienese influence passes over certain of Pacino’s works — of which the rounded knees and narrow hips of his nude Christs, some of their heads, and here and there the general appearance of a figure, are strongly confirming. For the rest Pacino is true to his city’s artistic past, though he stands always on the side opposed to Giotto’s. 19 to Io. II. NOTES . Many of the conclusions reached in this essay I first published in Arr rv America, December, 1922, 3-27. . To take the most sinning examples, Venturi, V, 506, guardedly assumes the possibility that Pacino painted the lateral figures in the polyptych signed with Giotto’s name in the Pinacoteca at Bologna —a work of direct Giottesque derivation; he is followed by Van Marle, III, 240-250, who surpasses himself in his attributions to Pacino, the strongest refutation of which is in his own illustrations; and Suida in the Prussian Jahrbuch for 1905, 109, followed by the Cicerone (last German edition) attributes to him a Sienese Virgin in the Ex-Refectory of S. Croce in Florence, restored with jus- tice by F. Mason Perkins to the Maestro del Codice di S. Giorgio (Rassegna d’arte, 1918, 107, II0-I12). . He seems unknown to Ghiberti, Antonio Billi, Albertini and Vasari. . To Thode’s first timid linking of the Tree of Life to the signed polyptych, both in the Florentine Academy (see his Franz von Assisi, Berlin, 1885), Suida (Prussian Jahrbuch for 1905, 108) added — apart from the Virgin mentioned in note 2 — two Saints, in Monatshefte fiir Kunstwissenshaft, VII, 3, refused to Pacino by Borenius (Pictures by the Old Masters in the Library of Christ Church, Oxford, 1916, 24, 25, numbered 16 and 17). . Nuovi Documenti, Florence before 1888, 17. Under the date 1303 Pacino dissolves partnership with a certain Tambo di Serraglio, and is here spoken of as “artifex in arte pictorum.” His name appears a second time in the register of the Guild of the Medici e Speziali in the volume that’ runs from 1320 to 1353. . The repeated assumption that Pacino was a pure Giottesque is the too common effort of scattered and fragmentary knowledge to become conclusive. His temperament and his talents, as will be seen, committed him to a different tradition and a different tendency. . Reproduced in Venturi, V, 502, and in Van Marle, III, 243. . The inscription under the central compartment reads: SYMON RBTER S FLOR FEC PIGI H OP A PACINO BONAGUIDE ANO DNI MCCCX. Thode, the first to read it (Franz von Assisi, Berlin, 1885, 503, note 3) believes he can see vestiges of two X’s following the legible date, leaving it 1330. Thode, who perceived the influence of Giotto (a very different Giotto from ours!) in the drawing of this picture, did all he could to read the date as late as possible. Milanesi before 1888 (Nuovi Documenti 17) reads MCCCX. Suida (Prussian Jahrbuch, 1905, 108) would substantiate his reading of the date as MCCCX on the basis of equal lengths of space before and following the inscription, but as these are variable under the lateral compartments, one may reject both his argument and his conclusion. Today the date seems so far to have been respected by the cleaner as to show the upper left tip of the diagonal bar of what must needs once have been either a V or an X, following the first X; making it probable, on the evidencer before our eyes, that the earliest possible original date was MCCCXV. The other limit would be furnished by Thode’s reading. . See the Crucifixion in the polyptych in the chapel of St. George in S. Chiara, Assisi (Sirén, plate 102); and the same subject in a small triptych in the Horne Collection (Sirén, plate 104); also the Crucifixion at the Florentine Academy painted under the influence of Daddi. Strongly reminiscent of the S. Cecilia Master. Reproductions of this painter’s works will be found in the first part of vol. II, in Sirén, pls. 10-13 inclusive. Reproduced in Venturi, V, 507, and Van Marle, III, 248. . It is a faithful illustration of Bonaventura’s Lignum Vitae, and its only instance of panel; the other two Italian versions of this subject are one by 'T. Gaddi in the Ex-Refectory, S. Croce, 20 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Florence; the other, anonymous, and derived from it, in the Chapter Hall of S. Francesco, Pistoia. See Thode, Franz von Assisi, 502-507. The effaced saint in the rock from which the cross rises is probably S. Bonaventura. The presence of isolated archaisms (such as striated and line-edged draperies, the Byzantine feature of hands raised to the height of the bosom and turned outward symmetrically) and of certain representations no longer then in fashion (such as the first, in which God the Father holds the Infant); the Dugento formulas for the Annunciation, the Last Supper to take the more common scenes, tempt one to assume an earlier model for this panel and possibly even some series of miniatures. Thus Cicerone (last German ed.), Maud Cruttwell, Florentine Churches, London, Dent, 1908, 127. Van Marle, III, 248-249, believes he sees a relation between this Crucifix and the Tree of Life, both of which he attributes to a Predecessor of Pacino di Bonaguida. In the Catalogo Illustrato della Fondazione Horne (Firenze, 1921, 34, no. 91) it is attributed to the Scuola di Giotto. Its size is m. .24x.26. Van Marle, III, 249, recognizes its identity of style with the Tree of Life but attributes it to a Predecessor of Pacino. See note 1. See Paolo d’Ancona, La Miniatura Fiorentina, Florence, 1914, and La Miniature Italienne, etc. Paris, 1925, pl. XX XIII. Mr. Sidney Cockerell has very kindly pointed out to me that the Morgan Vita Christi was formerly in the Henry Yates Thompson Collection, and that some of its pages are reproduced in Illustrations from One Hundred Manuscripts in the Library of Henry Yates Thompson, pl. V-XV. I notice that the attribution I some years ago bestowed upon these illuminations has since been adopted by Prof. Morey in The Arts for 1925. Cod. 2139, fol. 435. Van Marle, III, 250, writing since the publication of this view in 1922, still regards Pacino as a Giottesque, an error that leads him to attribute to this master four Saints belonging to Mr. Mori, Paris. (See Van Marle, V, 468). The reconstruction of this master begins with Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, London, 1901, and is continued by Suida, Jahrbuch der Koniglichen Preussischen Kunstsammlun- gen, 1905, II, 89 et seq., who is also the first to suggest him as Pacino’s teacher. Since this pub- lication, Venturi (V, 290), has tried to identify him with Buffalmacco; and Sirén (Burlington Magazine; 1920, 4-11; 1924, 272) to substantiate this identification lamely on the basis of the effaced frescoes at the Badia a Settimo ascribed to Buffalmaco by Ghiberti. The St. Cecily Master has, like so many incompletely known painters been disfigured by over-attribution, and chiefly in the last of the Burlington Magazine articles by Osvald Sirén; and by Van Marle, III, 274-294. Under the name of this master I should include only the following works: Florence, Uffizi, Altarpiece, no. 449. Montici (near Florence), S. Margherita, St. Margaret and Scenes from her Life. Montici, S. Margherita, Altarpiece. Budapest, Museum, Small Madonna Saints, Angels and Donors, no. 41. Florence, S. Simone, St. Peter. Assisi, Upper Church of St. Francis, Nos. 1, 26-28, of the Frescoes of the Life of St. Francis. Florence, S. Giorgio, Madonna and Two Angels. ao nnd aad < ee j — A abe > a i © 7 y 4 wom y oo~I Ankh wD DerTAaILs FROM THE Works oF Pacino v1 BonacuipA New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych. New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polvptych. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. New York, Mr. Jesse I. Straus, Diptych. Florence, S. Felicita, Crucifix. New York, The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, Vita Christi. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Polyptych. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, The Tree of Life. New York, The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, Vita Christi. nt Fic. 2. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Str. Nicnotas, DETAIL FROM THE PoLyptTycH Fic. 3. Pacino pvt Bonacuma: Sr. BarrHoLomMew, DETAIL FROM THE PoLypTycH Icademy, Florence Academy, Florence Fic. 4. Pacino pt Bonacuma: Derait FROM THE TREE OF LIFE Academy, Florence Fic. 6. Pacino v1 Bonacutpa: Fic. 7. Pacino pit Bonacuipa: Yue Nativiry FROM THE TREE oF LIFE ‘Tue CRUCIFIXION FROM THE TREE OF LIFE Academy, Florence Academy, Florence Fic. 5. Pacino pt Bonacurpa: Fic: 8. Pacino p1 BonaAcuipA: Propnet Apove Str. NICHOLAS IN THE PoLyprycH Tue AporATION FROM THE TREE OF LIFE Academy, Florence Academy, Florence ie essanneseternense: ie mn Nene eileen «553 rd ; a 4 g £ : Dee ase aad Fic. 10. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Maponna AND CHILD Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence THE PoLyprycH N N I "RUCIFIXIO Derait or THE C o p1 BonacuipA: Pacin 1 IG, + Ht I Florence Academy, MALL TRIPTYCH iw Suop oF Pacino pi Bonacuipa: 14; Fic. Florentine Market . ; * hi I Fic. 9. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: Crucirix Fic. 12. Pacino pt Bonacuipa: St. Felicita, Florence Maponna, SS, Francis ann LAWRENCE The Horne Foundation, Florence . ’ J i ‘ I 4 t r 7 ° ; 3 ~ _ ae , ‘ _ es + ’ - * 5 \ ‘ ; ‘ } ; if ‘ “TUIp Ung OAsn fy - VaINOVNOG Id ONIDVd AO aj0s ly ‘VI “Old NAVIL]\ TIVNS HOALdIU I Fic. 15. Pacino pt Bonacuipa (AssisTED): LEAF FROM THE LiFe oF CurisT Fic. 16. Pacino pr Bonacuwa (AssisTED): LEAF FROM THE LiFE oF CHRIST The J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York NATED LEAF AN ILLUMI DETAIL OF sUIDA: NAG ER OF Pacino pi Bo FoL_ow 7 I Fic Mass. , Smith, Worcester Frank C. Mr. Collection of NN te 2 = ¥ he OE NNN NEAL ALO DALE S. MinIATo AND ENTINO: AS g. JAcopro DEL C Eres s LiFe NES FROM HI ScE Church of S. Miniato, Florence JACOPO DEL CASENTINO' 9 Daas is as much truth in an attribution nowadays, as there is credulity in an innocent public. And the blame is about equal on both sides. The more clouded — or wanton, as the case may be — opinion is, the more kindly people seem to take to its changing “camels and weasels.” If on the other hand they have met with repeated disap- pointment — which in the end they are bound to do — they sink into a despairing or slighting suspicion of the whole business. But it is easier on the whole to believe, and belief helps besides, to make the game by so much the merrier. And this in spite of the fact that the mischief done is sure to incommode serious effort, which, apart from the indifference it meets with, even within its own circle, has to endure the rankling hostility of valuable interests. The pressure of these has, in fact, tended to reduce even that paragon of incorruptibility, the stu- dent, to the prevailing cynicism, that will look on with calm to see others — and, too often, himself — tag works of art with labels best serving the unseemliest of private ends. An attribution consequently, which, in the exalted pursuits of scholarship, has its own far-reaching significance, is in this way bared of all but its market-value. Thus it happens that, because Jacopo’s name has the sanction of a classical reputation, while his work has remained obscure, it has been found easy and profitable to attach it to a number of pictures with only a certain vagueness of sentiment and style in common. The result of such a practice is clear: it leaves us in this, as in many other instances, with a many-headed hydra, whose output has become as heterogeneous as it was before 1909 when Herbert Horne’ first reduced it to two au- thentic works (Figs. 1, 2). Horne preferred to err on the side of prudence. Profiting by the example of earlier incoherent reconstructions of this master, rather than trust a wayward judgment, the archivist’s conscience has even gone so far as to reject a number of panels, which an automatic deduc- tion from these two paintings urges irresistibly upon us. With such safe beginnings, it is less astonishing to find Vasari’ shuf- fling Jacopo with his contemporaries, or Cavalcaselle interchanging him with Giovanni dal Ponte, than to find him confused more recently* 23 with the following of Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi and even with a painter of an older generation, thought to be Buffalmacco.’ In the midst of these embarrassing disagreements therefore, an in- tegration of Jacopo must repose on the two radical works alluded to: his only autographed picture belonging to Don Guido Cagnola in Milan (Fig. 1), and another (Fig. 2), assigned to him by an old and persistent tradition, now in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, in Florence,’ showing sure signs of the same hand. Though an integration had as yet been in no sense attempted, Os- vald Sirén (in Giotto and Some of his Followers, Harvard University Press, 1917, 188-192, pls. 169-171) has linked to Horne’s original two, three other panels which suggest fresh tendencies, even if they do not touch his limits. To these I have here added a number, bringing the total up to over a score, in which unhappily none bears a date, and only one may be placed with relative precision in a chronological alignment. There is very little available evidence outside the pictures. The period of his activity alone may be surmised, and from the following information. In the first edition of his Lives, Vasari affirms that Jacopo was buried at Prato Vecchio at 65 in 1358. The doubtful re- liability of this statement is cancelled by data gathered by Horne, who in the Rivista d’arte (for 1909, 100, 101) conjectures on likely ground that the year MCCCIL (1349) entered against Jacopo’s name in the Statute-book of the Confraternity of Painters, is the year of his death. The same article cites a document recording a commission to Jacopo in 1347; but with the year 1354 all record of him in the Libro dell’Es- timo ceases. These dates then supported by that of 1339,’ under which Jacopo is mentioned as Consigliere of the above confraternity, lead one by a series of innocent inferences to confine Jacopo’s earliest ac- tivity to ca. 1320. | With such spare data, Jacopo’s works have had to be ordered on the basis of fugitive evidence in the pictures themselves. And even there, while it was necessary to assume breaches in the original series, it has been impossible to localize them, much less to estimate their length. What has survived could, accordingly, be marshalled only by fairly arbitrary parti-pris, to suggest a continuity of style rather than a claim to strictness in individual succession. Florence, Mr. Chas. Loeser. Dormition of the Virgin. (Fig. 3). Attributed with qualifications by Sirén to Jacopo (I, 191, 192). Good state. Dimensions m. .85 x .615. The broad border of tooled 24 ornament running in the gold at the left follows the vertical part of the frame, seeming to continue from another composition formerly above it, Mr. Loeser’s picture is probably one of a series of scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin, which stood on either side of Her enthroned figure: a mode of representation fashionable until the last part of the Dugento, and surviving as late as this in at least one other panel by Jacopo, the S. Miniato altarpiece. The long bony structure of the Christ’s head (S.P. 2); the pale iris, the light seeking the edge of the long nose and the projection around the eye, its expression; the yielding chin, the type; will be found in the Virgin of the small Cagnola triptych; and the sharply drawn folds of the child in Mr. Loeser’s panel, recur in the loincloth of the Crucified in the triptych. The wavy locks and beards of the apostles simulate those of John, the Evangelist in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della Lana. The broad border tooled with the Dugento motive of the scroll, and the tooled halos, the dingy severity of the figures, put this nearer the beginning of the century than any of his other works. A composition uncommon in, and unsuited to, upright compartments, it is the only extant one among Jacopo’s works in which he seems to imitate a defi- nite work of Giotto. It is a contraction of Giotto’s Dormition in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin; but the fact that the centre of the composition is copied figure for figure would not be enough to sub- stantiate his derivation from Giotto, which is the most ancient view. One might more reasonably surmise from the types a Giottesque influ- ence transmitted by Taddeo Gaddi.* Is it possible that this picture marks Jacopo’s earliest encounter with Giottesque painting? In any case the Giottesque traces are transitory and overlay fundamental forms which derive from another source. Florence, Collection of Mr. Chas. Loeser. Annunciation. Though of proportions and size (m. .78 x .59) approximating those of Mr. Loeser’s Dormition, and though it deals with the same saint and has similar tooled halos it does not seem to be of the same series. But not being as well preserved as the Dormition no stylistic confrontation could be conclusive for this view. The long cheeked faces approximate those in the St. Bartholomew altarpiece and in the large tabernacle, and seem, like the Dormition, to belong to his specifically Florentine moment. To make the limits of a symmetrical architecture coincide with the limits of the panel is proper to the Sienese of the Trecento. The An- nunciation by Daddi in the Louvre furnishes a very nearly contemporary instance of an angel attending the annunciate angel. In the aureoles here as well as in those of Mr. Loeser’s Dormition, Jacopo has incised small figures. The only other Tuscan and nearly contemporary instances of figures incised in the gold of a painting, are furnished by the six scenes from the life of the Baptist in the Kaiser- 25 Friedrich Museum, Berlin, by Deodato Orlandi, and by his signed and dated (1301) polyptych in the Museo Civico in Pisa. Florence, Palazzo dell Arte della lana, Tabernacle. Virgin, Saints and Angels. (Fig. 2). The tradition of Jacopo’s authorship of this altarpiece goes back to the sixteenth century,’ and continues unquestioned to our own day. It constitutes together with the Cagnola triptych a basis for all other at- tributions to Jacopo. Cleaning, reguilding, repainting, have left very little of the original surface. Disparities of scale and of state, discrepancy between the moments of their painting, cannot obscure the pervasive affinities of this panel to the Cagnola triptych. Beginning with the expressions, which in both panels betray the same degree and orbit of consciousness, the Vir- gins have the same long heads and are very similar in features — by the nature of the differences mentioned, sharper in the small picture. The glance, the soft mouth, the yielding chin, are identical, and the light covers the same saliencies and curvatures of the surface, only it is not as concentrated in the tabernacle, because it has larger areas to cover. The Infant has the same action, a similar pose and the same round eyes. The closeness of these affinities together with the stylistic differences between our altarpiece and other of Jacopo’s works, determine the chronological gap between the two paintings just confronted. The action of the Child, its type, the soft draperies, seem cribbed from Duccio, while the Evangelist is reminiscently Giottesque. The lunette” over this panel has been erroneously regarded by the same hand. Horne attributes it to Jacopo, and reinforces his view with reproductions (Rivista d’arte, 1909). But a glance would expose his mistake, the lunette having been obviously painted at the fag-end of the century by some follower of Niccold di Pietro Gerini;” not unlikely by the “peggior maestro che Jacopo non era” of whom Vasari (vol. I, p. 670) says that he had “rifatto” the painting. Milan, Don Guido Cagnola. Small Triptych. (Fig. 1). First mentioned by Suida, Kunstchronik, XVII, 1906, 335. The base of the central panel bears the signature IACOBUS. DE. CASEN- TINO. ME. FECIT. Radical for an integration of the painter’s artistic personality. The traits of this picture which prove themselves essential by per- sisting, albeit with slight variations, in subsequent works, are all present in the head of the Virgin: the low forehead, the long smooth cheek, the globular chin, the full sensuous lips, the lower one often, as here, sucked in, the upper one showing a wide space between the crests; the height between it and the nose, especially in the earlier works, the tired and always submissive languor in the look, with a sickle of light under the eye. Though the throne is the kind Taddeo Gaddi continues to use in the 26 latter part of his life, and though the borders are in part stamped; the rude execution, the tooling.of the broad border in the central panel, the arrangement, and the dingy severity and abstraction of the personages, urge the likelihood of an early date. Confrontation with his other works leads us to the same conclusion. ‘The lights detach themselves sharply from the shadow as in Pacino di Bonaguida, the Cecilia Master, in a way proper to the Byzantinizing Dugento. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser. Small Virgin, Saints and Angels. Recognized by its owner more than twenty years ago (later also by Mr. F. Mason Perkins) as a work of Jacopo’s. Very good state. Measuring m. .673 x .385, this panel was probably once the central compartment of a triptych. It repeats the head and the pattern of the Virgin (S.P. 13, 12) in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, and the drapery leaves the same part of the hair uncovered. The eye sinks identically beyond the slightly projecting cheek, which drops to the same heavy chin. The Infant is held in the same way, only he leans over more obliquely, and though the picture, having preserved its original surface, does not show the same contrasts of lights and shadows as the majority of Jacopo’s works, the flesh covers the same bony structure everywhere. If the composition is more evolved than those of the larger altarpieces, it is not therefore necessarily later. It must be remembered that the full-sized panel tends to conform to the changeless nature of churchly functions, the liturgy and the architecture: it is conventional, less muta- ble, and its execution materially more limited, than the small tabernacle, which intended for more intimate worship, might vary with the personal whim of artist or patron; and being smaller, the material limitations of its paintings are, as all through Italian painting, more elastic. The soft light and shade of Sienese painting, that seems to pass over the Florentine structure of some of the angels’ faces, may be what remained in Jacopo’s memory of some work of Simone’s or Lippo Memmi’s. Berlin, (formerly Gottingen, University Museum) Kaiser-Friedrich Mus- eum. Virgin, Saints and Angels. Unsparingly renovated. Numbered tog1 in the “Verzeichnis der Gemalde” (1921), the panel measures m. .45 x .23. Gottingen, University Museum. Lateral Leaves to the Above Virgin, etc. The triptych was published by Prof. Osvald Sirén (I, 190; II, plate r70)i The moulding and the shape of the central panel carry us back to the Cagnola Virgin. The flat-backed throne, the severity of arrange- ment, the vertical superimposition of the heads, the solemnity and reticence also point to a relatively early period. The types, as far as we may trust the present state of the picture, recall Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi. 27 Florence, Collection of Mr. Chas. Loeser. Half-length Virgin and Child. Measuring m. .815 x .503, this picture was once in the Chas. Butler Collection, there attributed to Luca di Tommé. It is in good state, and of a pale blond tone. Jacopo’s idiosyncracies appear in the structure of the Virgin’s head, the good-natured glance, the full lips, the long nose, the turn of the Child’s head (as in the Geneva and the Arte della lana panels) and its type. The association of the orange of the Child’s drapery with the red of the Virgin’s mantle is repeated again and again in Jacopo’s paintings. The stamps of the halos, which resemble those of the St. Bartholomew altarpiece, and the Trecento style, detain the impulsive temptation to date this panel very early. And why might not the striated drapery of the Virgin, the loop at the nose joining the brows, the right hand, the nostril, the carved nose, the pattern and action of the Child, all be due to a Ducciesque original Jacopo chose in this instance to imitate? The way the Child’s thumb is clapped down on the finch, and the edge of modelling shadow, again, carry us towards the Florentines of the first part of the fourteenth century, while the long head, and the tone, force it into the proximity of Mr. Loeser’s small Virgin. The date would vacillate between the Cagnola triptych and the last mentioned panel; it was certainly not painted later, and may even possibly fall among his earliest works. This picture embodies in equal measure the Florentine and the Duc- ciesque traditions. Arezzo, L’Ospedale, Sala dell’ Amministrazione. Small Panel. Published and recognized by Mario Salmi in Belvedere, March, 1924, 119 - 123. The panel represents the Virgin and two impersonations of the Savior, with two small scenes below. Florence, Fondazione Horne. Virgin and Child. (Fig. 4). Published in the “Catalogo Illustrato della Fondazione Horne” (Fi- renze, 1921) p. 19, under number 46, as “Scuola di Duccio di Buo- ninsegna.” The panel measures m. .83 x .46, and bears a good deal of disguised retouching. . Though more solid and firmer in structure and treatment, in better state, and already presaging Jacopo’s relinquishment of the leptocephalic type, the Horne Virgin looks out of the same benevolent, heavily out- lined eyes as the Madonna (S.P. 11, 12) of the tabernacle of the Palaz- zo dell’Arte della lana, and professes the same ancestry in the long upper lip. The ears of the Children are the same, and the drawing of the foreshortened nose, the mouth, the eyes in one, and of the frontal heads in the tabernacle, follow the same formula. Under the Florentine forms the careful eye will note Sienese reminis- 28 cences: in the pattern of the Virgin’s head, in the Child’s action, in the drapery drooping against the Virgin’s left cheek, and in the intimacy of the mood. Florentine, Accademia delle Belle Arti. Three Panels Representing The Baptist (S. P. 6), Saint Nicholas (Fig. 5), St. John the Evangelist. Numbered 39, 44, 45, these panels, measuring individually m. 1.03 x .37, with a medallion each in the pinnacles, belong to the same original polyptych. The Baptist, if compared to the same figure in the taber- nacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana (S.P. 6, 5) shows the hair drawn back similarly over the temples, with such disparities in the stare of the symmetrical face as accord with the difference of period. The face of our Baptist is like those of the two other saints, already more vivid in expression than the figure in the tabernacle, and of a contrasting crispness in drawing, that anticipates Jacopo’s later works. In the head of St Nicholas the outline of the large eye goes the same way, and the iris lies in the same field of white, as those of the Horne Virgin. But for the greater heaviness of the latter, the faces of both are built over the same bony structure. ‘The ear is the same as the ear of the Horne Child. The pattern of the saint’s figure and that of the Virgin correspond, tapering similarly at the bottom. ‘The floreated halos of the three saints are variants of that of the Virgin. It is not unlikely that these saints at one time attended the Horne Madonna in a common altarpiece. They belong, at all events, to the same moment in his evolution, and that moment is nearer to the large Tabernacle than to the Saint Bartholomew. Lucca. Private Collection. Madonna and Child. The figure of the Child partly lost. In weight, in design, in dimen- sions, in feeling, it follows the Horne picture; and falls about midway between Jacopo’s earlier and later works. Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Magazine. Virgin and Child. This uninspired panel bearing the number 104 and measuring m. .58 x .385, was originally pointed, and has been cut down to a rectangle. Parts of the drapery have been repainted. It shows the Virgin in three-quarter view to slightly below the knee, holding the Child, who is toying with her white scarf. The types, the proportions of the face, put it into the late middle period of Jacopo’s activity. Eastnor Castle (England), Lord Somers. Four Saints. Wings of a dismembered altarpiece. Although I have seen these in very inadequate reproduction, I feel certain they are by the master. Florence, Uffizi. St. Bartholomew Enthroned and Angels. (Fig. 6). Published and reproduced for the first time by Khvoshinsky and 29 Salmi, Pittori Toscani, Rome 1914, II, 25, fig. 25; see also Sirén, I, 191; II, pl. 171; and in The Burlington Magazine, Nov., 1914. Mercilessly rubbed down, what is left on the tall panel, especially the adherence of the high lights to the apple-green underpainting exhibits the technique of the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, and of the Horne Virgin. The heads of the angel playing the viol at the right, and of the Horne Virgin (S. P. 3, 11) are in point of pondus of the drawing of par- ticulars, of expression, derivation, of the same fundamental formula. The frontality of the saint, his right arm and hand are those of the S. Miniato (Fig. 9) — the posture recalling at once the Christ Enthroned in the Giottesque altarpiece in the sacristy at St. Peter’s, Rome, and the Evangelist of Donatello. It may have served as model to Lorenzo di Niccold for his St. Bartholomew in the Gallery at S. Gimignano. The gorgeous stamped halos and broad borders, and the frame, occur in paintings by Daddi dating from the late thirties and the forties of the fourteenth century.” Their presence, together with the loose drawing tend to push the painting of this altarpiece, in spite of local archaisims, up towards the middle of the century. Princeton, New Jersey, The late Prof. Allan Marquand. Small Cruci- fixion. (Fig. 7). In a very fair state of preservation. The frame and the painting are one panel, measuring m. 1.265 x.49. ‘The Christ recurs in the right shutters of the Cagnola, and Bondy triptychs, and in the Crucifixion at Gottingen. In all four, Jacopo used with inessential variations the same anatomical formula for the Crucified and the same facial mask. The light touching the ridges makes the same arabesque, only less prominent in the enamel of the uncorrupted Princeton picture. The loincloth altered slightly in the Bondy and Gottingen panels, assumes the sharp folds and the hang of that of the Cagnola triptych. The tension of the tragic mood as much as the refined execution, and the structure of the long: heads, approximate Prof. Marquand’s picture to Mr. Loeser’s Dormition. The small hand with the delicate wrist, and the drapery will also be found there. Indeed, it is more than likely the composition is taken bodily from some Giottesque model. The foliations painted on dark ground around the bust of the Eternal in the pinnacle occur often in the works of Pacino di Bonaguida. The eye that remembers Sienese types, especially those of Pietro Lorenzetti, will find them in some of the heads. Scarperia, Madonna di Piazza. Virgin with two Angels. (Fig. 8). In a partially ruined and restored condition. The pattern of the Virgin’s head and the fall of the drapery over it, imitate those of the Horne Virgin, but the tight fit of the flesh over the bony structure of the head, the opaque enamel, the prefunctory outline, put it conclusively among Jacopo’s later works, and explicitly near the S. Miniato. The type of the Virgin and her flatness, her right hand, possess essential 30 affinities with this figure, while the angels are sisters to those who at- tend Our Lady in the Bondy triptych. We must not in an eclectic like Jacopo, be surprised to find that the plan of the picture reverts to an early Trecento adaptation of an earlier compositional motif. The type of throne recalls a brief fashion initiated by the S. Cecily Master. Paris Market (1925). Virgin and Two Saints. Recognized by Osvald Sirén. Seen only in photograph. A charming full-length Virgin in unrestored, though partly ruined state. New York, Collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs. Madonna. The picture is not in a condition to permit a secure judgment regard- ing authorship further than to say that it was certainly painted in the shop of Jacopo del Casentino. Included here however among his own works because the design and the mass have a dignity due doubtless to the master himself, and marred only in subsequent remaniements. The dimensions of the panel are m. .736 x .445. The halo runs in concentric course around the heads as in the St. Bartholomew altarpiece and approximates it also in its types and style. The head of the Virgin closely resembles that of the same figure in a panel owned by a Paris dealer in 1925, and that of the Scarperia Madonna. Geneva, Villa Ariana. Virgin and Child. Battered and clumsily repainted. The round plump faces, the features, the smooth enamel, join this to the Scarperia panel. The right hand of the Virgin has the same fingers and the eyes the same sheepish glance. The halos are stamped in the fashion of the middle of the century. Florence, S. Miniato. S. Miniato with Scenes from his Life. (Figs. 9, WORT T 12). Hitherto, on different occasions attributed to the Maestro di S. Ce- cilia, first by Berenson Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 1901; also by Suida (Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 1905, IO1); most recently by Sirén (Burlington Magazine, Dec., 1919, 230) and Van Marle, III (1924), 291, 654. Ascribed by Crowe and Caval- caselle (ed. Murray, II, 246) to Agnolo Gaddi, while Dami (Bollettino d’arte, 1915, 239) gives it to “unknown, but direct pupil of Giotto.” ” This altarpiece, standing about two metres high, is being rescued from complete destruction by (let us hope) discreet restoration. The head of the S. Miniato bears an insinuating, if not an obvious, resemblance to the Cagnola Virgin; the length of the heads and the features are in their proportions the same. The two heads first com- pared in detail (the light-edged cheek-bones, the long flat cheeks filling at the jaws which run into the well-rounded chins) the synthetic like- ness, should finally become more evident. Less demonstrable, but per- haps as deep, are the affinities between S. Miniato’s head, and that of 31 the Horne Virgin (S.P. 8, 11). His ear—the large ear typical for Jacopo, whose contours sweep upward in a wide curve that turns inward abruptly at the top, dropping in a straight diagonal to the cheek — is the same as the ear of the Horne Child (S.P. 8, 9). The low narrow foreheads, and the hair trained back over the ears, which Jacopo had a fondness for showing, the wide span from crest to crest in the upper lip —a conspicuous and significant departure from the traditionally sharp caret of his Florentine contemporaries — the long nose, the long flat cheek, were only in inessential aspects from the corresponding particulars in the tabernacle of the Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, and find their closest resemblance in the angels nearest the Virgin (S.P. 8, 7). The wide, kindly, unthinking eyes admit you into the same inner void, and the structure has the same weaknesses. It is precisely in the absence of structural codrdination or of weight, in the generalizing contour, which maintains a relative flatness, that I see an advanced stage in Jacopo’s activity. The presence of the veined pavement in the S. Miniato and in the S. Bartholomew, the resemblance of the right arms; of the patterns, and curling flat fingers of the right hands, put both altarpieces within the same period. The Scarperia picture joins these, and three between them establish themselves in a chronological field, which in the series of Jacopo’s surviving work should follow the middle point of his activity. The flayed and otherwise martyred miniatures flanking the saint, are evolved beyond the large figure. The drawing is summary, external and diagrammatic, but on the most advantageous side of these qualifi- cations; if summary it is adequate, if external it is unhampered, if diagrammatic it is decisive. A rhythmic movement codrdinates the figure, which functions rather as pattern than as structure —a pattern placed and distributed in well-felt relation to the total surface. ‘There is an unwonted freedom and an ease in the postures and the action. The faces are rounder and fuller even than in the presumably later Bondy triptych, the eyes large, almost circular, with a light-colored iris, and the draperies softer than elsewhere in Jacopo’s panels. All these characters move it farther away from the Cagnola picture than from the triptych just named, nearer the trefoils of the St. Bar- tholomew altarpiece, than to the Loeser Dormition. Happily we possess a series of documented dates to which it would be possible to anchor the S. Miniato altarpiece, and which would con- firm our conclusions. The chapel of S. Miniato for which it was com- missioned was being decorated between 1335 and 1342." As the altar- piece is a chapel’s most important adornment, it was painted within, or a trifle beyond, these limits, as suggested by Luigi Dami (Bollettino d’arte, 1915, p. 239). This painting should be regarded Jacopo’s masterpiece, and its ac- ceptance as his work, completely alter our obsolete views of him. 32 Florentine Market (1926). St. Lucy. Measures m. 1.30.68. Fine figure closely resembling the S. Miniato, but fuller, and looser in treatment. Paris Market (1925). Coronation of The Virgin. Seen only in reproduction which nevertheless reveals restoration of what would seem a rather weak original. The types commit it to Jacopo’s late period. Brussels, Museum. Virgin and Child. Correctly attributed (without knowledge of my publication in Bollet- tino, etc., 1923) by M. Salmi, Belvedere, 1924, 120. Hanging under No. 3019 this picture bears the designation “Ecole de Sienne.” In posture, in the draping of the figures it recalls the Horne Virgin, with less nerve and significance in its modelling. The hasty execu- tion, the superficial drawing, the shallowness of expression, draw this painting into Jacopo’s last period, close to the Paolini Madonna. Roma, Prof. Paolo Paolini. Madonna and two Angels. (S.P. 14). Battered and restored, what the past has left of it invites a confron- tation with the Horne Virgin (S.P. 14, 11). The silhouettes are a perfect match, and the drapery falls over the heads in accordance with the same fashion. ‘The similar state of the flesh in both manifests the same construction in light and shade, the same placing of accents. But the brisk glance, the shorter upper lip, the rounder, more compact face; the similarity of the hands and of the placing and action of the angels, to the Scarperia picture — considering the nature of the analo- gies between our panel and the Horne Virgin — put it nearer this. The round eye, the unemphatic drawing and modelling, the execution, force it into the milieu of the stories around S. Miniato. Pavia, Galleria Malaspina. Two Wings to Small Triptych. Published and recognized by Mario Salmi in Belvedere, March, 1924, 119 - 123. The individual panels measure m. .446x.15. Vienna, Collection of Oscar Bondy. Small Tabernacle. (Fig. 13). The central panel measures m. .40x.215. The modelling follows the structure of the heads in earlier pictures. The light running around the eye, straight down the ridge of the nose, and gliding along the plump jaws, stars the plump chin. The thatched shed in the Nativity is the shed of the Gottingen pictures, only the feeling is gentler. The ar- rangement of the central panel carries us back to the Loeser Virgin with saints and angels; and the St. Catherine has remained true to the long-headed kind of the Tabernacolo della Tromba, only the company has grown gayer. The more continuous planes and an expression less charged or oo a strained, however, place our tabernacle at a considerable distance from the Cagnola triptych, while the form of the Gothic throne more de- veloped than in the foregoing works, the freer arrangement, the rus- tling movement, the dainty types, take it definitely into the last period of Jacopo’s activity. On the whole this is the prettiest of Jacopo’s smaller pictures. Frankfort, Staddel Institut. Small Virgin, Saints and Angels and two Donors. First recognized by Mr. Chas. Loeser. Thoroughly repainted and truncated, this picture, originally cusped, repeats the Bondy composition, though the border is tooled as in much earlier panels. The round-faced types, too, recall the Bondy heads. The lofty Virgin sits high, holds her legs, and makes a pattern from top to bottom, like our Lady in Lippo Memmi’s S, Gimignano Maesta. Out of the association of these works, a coherent personality for the first time shapes itself —a determinate presence, constant to a pur- poseful principle, and moving in its own world. The world of supreme masters has range, hope, and a self-established reality of existence that the poor world of actuality seems long ago to have lost; the one offers us a rapturous liberation from the other. But Jacopo’s world is nar- rower and less resourceful, with definite boundaries in all directions; affording peculiar charms and interests to be sure, but rarely filling the imagination. Its inhabitants are shy, timid and vaguely expectant, for his is a world also that furnishes no occasions either for the proof, of courage nor, of the capacity to face crises ; a sort of paradise without serpents, but also without beatitudes. Save where he leans on other masters, Jacopo’s personages and their doings want both in moral ef- fort or moral effectuality; they content themelves with the mild blessedness of acquiescence in unrealized or unadventured hopes. And seldom suggesting prolongations into larger realms of being, they even more rarely create about them an environment which undeniably jus- tifies them. Jacopo’s world is accordingly wanting in significance. And as in all representative art — which works through material forms —the sense of moment involves that of physical consequence, the lack of one means also the lack of the other; and Jacopo’s figures that have failed to impress us as persons, do not force us to an acceptance of their ma- terial existence. They function rather as illustrations of moods or qual- ities, and his form tends with listless repetition to become diagram- matic as in the late Florentine Trecentisti. Nor is the setting of the figures any more real. They are placed 34 against gilt backgrounds, put there by an automatic tradition rather than by an imagination that has fathomed the spatial possibilities of the gold plane. All this explains why his full-sized altarpieces seem puffed out be- yond their normal scale, and why they resemble conventional tableaux. The genre, as it reached him, was too monumental for his natural lean- ings and limitations; and the prescribed decorum of the sacred person- ages, their immobility, were too full of implications of timelessness and of the infinite, to be contained or apprehended by so restricted an in- telligence. They absorbed him too much by their bulk alone; before them one rescued one’s waning private identity with anxious effort. Constrained and hollow in his altarpieces, he naturally inclined to miniature. Here on the contrary one’s defenses were not directly challenged, and while the representations were large enough to be easily legible, one was not obliged to merge oneself in a magnified spe- ‘cies of existence. Miniature from the first assumes our superiority, to which we contentedly expand in the dreaming background of con- sciousness. It is the normal medium for presenting a content that maintains a merely human scale, and does not demand the exertion required of us in order that we may become the equal of large paint- ings. By it, as we sometimes Gulliver-like swell to flattering propor- tions, we shrink at others to feel ourselves in the warm keeping of some benignant grace or friendly power. As large altarpieces with their despotic symmetry are full of eternal connotations, miniature registers the passing and progressive, concerned normally with what people do, rather than with what they are, with continuity rather than with a state. Over it the eye travels more rap- idly, and more readily organizes the smaller units to an embracing synthesis. So that while his magnified Madonnas and magnified angels look out upon us with a tolerance and a kindliness too familiar for their as- sumed grandeur, his miniatures open upon a world that is more credi- ble, trustworthy and authentic. Here the holy persons are so small they might be held in the palm of one’s hand. Without a trace of supercilious detachment they seem willing to share their merely human warmth with the heart of the worshipper. More than that, these Virgins and these angels don’t seem to want to conceal the profane feminine allurements in the deli- cate bloom of their plump cheeks, and in their curved lips. Almost aware of them they release the coquetry of women that trouble the 35 earth. There is a reassuring and rustling uneasiness among them that suggests an impatience of divine discipline. The small scenes of the S. Miniato altarpiece reveal Jacopo under the greatest variety of aspects. In it we read the tale of the saint, his miracles and his passion, in a series from top to bottom in tall well- spaced compartments. A slow tempo is sustained in the telling of it, so that the narrative is not interrupted by dramatic outbreaks until the end, where with something like a flash of tragic terror the decapitated saint sets his head on his shoulders and hurries up the steep rock. But in all the other scenes he moves with a grave and graceful detachment among his persecutors, who form a sort of shadowy nimbus about him. No figure acts with more than a vague equivocal participation in what itis about. But rather than produce a sense of inherent continuity, the story is told in a series of postures, of tableaux, each isolated by its bi- lateral arrangement, with the saint occupying the centre. The representation is sustained in the foremost plane. The figure is neither so modelled nor so placed as to prove the space beyond and round it as real as the space it occupies; the filled space does not gen- erate the empty space, as in the good Giottesque, in whom plasticity in compositional tension produces the effect of a fuller and acuter reality. In his miniatures as in his large altarpieces he is mildly sug- gestive and pleasantly decorative. The discrepancies between the figure of S. Miniato and the figures in the small scenes around him, represent the differences of type and of style between his larger and his smaller pictures. In the former the heads change with time from the dolicocephalic to the round-faced type with increasing softness and plumpness of cheek and chin: the flesh almost always suggesting a specific degree of consistency. The fore- head is relatively low; the lips full and sinuous, the lower one sucked in, the upper showing a wide span between the rounded crests. The chin is sleek and bossy. The eye long and heavily outlined, wears a tired or submissive or timid look. A sickle of light under it cuts into the shadow of the cheek. The iris is generally pale, the nose long. His figures are heavy without weight, and expressive without depth. But the smaller scale of the miniatures minimizes all deficiencies: in them the bodily structure is firmer and better determined to movement. There is, accordingly, more grace in the small figures, which are daint- ily proportioned and round in face. The eye is almost circular. The wrists small and delicate. I am well aware that these isolated peculiarities, exhibiting habits 36 and preferences of an artistic practitioner are not the artistic determi- nants. How the hand betrays its way with the material, what shapes taste habitually selects, how a personal tempo guides the line round them and the shadow over them, by what rhythmic principle they dis- pose themselves in a given area, and how they fill a given space — shall remain, I fear, secrets between the artist’s structural and organic idio- syncracies, his vision, and their adjustments to the externalizing media: secrets that choose to reveal themselves at odd and happy mo- ments to special susceptibilities only. And yet it is by them that an artist is a painter rather than a poet, or a musician. If, then, this enumeration should fail to characterize Jacopo, it should help to localize in different works those characters that are con- stant in a single personality. But to make all conclusiveness in this matter uncommonly hard, within the unchanging Jacopo, we find the hungry restlessly Protean eclectic, imitating Giotto at one moment (in the Loeser Dormition), at another Simone (in Mr. Loeser’s small Madonna, Saints and Angels), at another still Pietro Lorenzetti (in the Marquand and Cagnola pan- els) and constituting a shifting, nebulous, secondary personality, which often dims the real Jacopo. And incidental to his electicism is an archaism which baffles all effort at a satisfactory chronology; an archaism manifesting itself un- der a variety of forms, most explicitly in the use of striated Byzantine drapery (in the Loeser half-length Virgin, in the large tabernacle), in the tooled design of the gold backgrounds, in the frontal pose (the St. Bartholomew, the S. Miniato) ; in the shape of the S. Miniato panel, in the scale and relation of the scale of its central figure to that of the small scenes (instanced among surviving Florentine pictures in the Magdalen now at the Florentine Academy) ; in the compositional for- mula of the Scarperia and the Paolini Virgins.” All these obscuring difficulties notwithstanding, his works assert one solid unchanging fact: that the type and the sentiment are of non- Florentine derivation. The flesh that covers the bone of the face in- stead of the Florentine hardness imitates its physical properties; the responsive and self-revealing eye, the sensuous lips, the graceful ges- ture of the body (in the miniatures especially) seem to involve an in- fluence whose cadenced movement of line and nuanced mobility of expression distinguish it from the architectural stability and averaged expression of Florentine painting — and that is the art of Siena. His Sienese leanings’ show further in such more evasive particu- 37 lars as the habitual silhouette of the head in the narrowing of the pat- tern of single half-lengths at the bottom, the clinging hang of the drapery (in the Horne and Paolini Virgins, in the Academy saints), the consciousness of the curling fingers, the undulant upper lip with a wide space between the crests (so different from the sharp caret of the orthodox Florentine). Of Sienese origin might also easily be the striated drapery he effects, and the white-kerchiefed female heads (in the Berlin and Cagnola pictures). This influence is worked deeply into the tissue of Jacopo’s painting, present at almost every moment of his evolution from the beginning, as it would appear, and increasing at the end — an influence differing in its nature from the other Florentine instances of the Cioni, of Ber- nardo Daddi, in whom the Sienese have left only a reflection of their retreating light. In Jacopo, the Florentine substance seems to melt into foreign moulds, even if the line never learns the Sienese magic, and the heavy forms weigh down the assumed refinements. But while these enumerations indicate a general Sienese influence, in his earlier works they bear the specific stamp and accent of a single source — of Duccio or someone in his circle. One may follow the re- semblance between the two masters in the radical images, the long heavy faces, the eye marked by a contour which isolates a similar area, and harbors a similar meaning, the yielding lower lip and chin — all appropriations of a critically formative moment in Jacopo’s develop- ment. The round-eyed Child not only derives from a Ducciesque model but apes its playful action, pulling at the Mother’s scarf by preference. And the sentimental motif, the tenderness of the glance, the dream of sacred motherhood, are Ducciesque. And indeed why should the preponderant presence of his works in Florence make him a Florentine at his origins? Does he not come from the Casentino? And if brought to Florence by Taddeo (as Vasari tells us) was it not — as he was presumably Taddeo’s senior — likely after his apprenticeship? One might even assume by stretching prob- abilities, that Jacopo’s Pratovecchio or some neighboring town afforded him, for a brief interval at least, his rudiments under some Sienese master. Or was it in Florence itself that his first critical encounter with Sien- ese painting took place? Considering the nature of its influence on the Florentine painting of the earlier Trecento, we should incline to be- lieve him brought up in a centre where this influence was more opera- tive, or where, at all events, there was a relative profusion of Sienese 38 works. Such a centre existed not far from Pratovecchio, in Arezzo, where the living evidence of the frescoed walls of S. Domenico, and the Lorenzetti polyptych at the Pieve, should secure Vasari’s testimony, and prove Arezzo to have been at least equally accessible to the influ- ences of both schools. And yet the Sienese characters in Jacopo’s early painting presum- ably representing wilful choice, are from the first found imbedded in a sturdy, north-Tuscan substratum. In his earliest two panels (the Loeser Dormition and the large tab- ernacle), he is ravenously Giottesque with a trailing baggage of provin- cial traits. It is the testimony of this tabernacle, and the persistence of long reiterated tradition (founded as we have seen on a confusion), that has led Horne to the outwardly secure view that Jacopo was a direct pupil of Giotto — a notion that has the venerable precedent of an early sixteenth century source, the most ancient authority for Jacopo, the Anonimo Gaddiano;* and Dami (in the Bollettino d’arte for 1915, 23) sees in the S. Miniato altarpieces the work of one of the “primi diretti discepoli di Giotto;” Khvoshinsky and Salmi (Pittori Toscani II, 25), with caution rather than discrimination regard him a Giottesque influenced by Daddi. Now, the two pictures just mentioned, furnish enough ground to anyone determined on it for the assumption of more of the “Giottesque” ingredient in a hypothetical, still earlier — the prehistoric — Jacopo. Yet, these two pictures, in which he is more Giottesque than in any that follow, should no more prove Giotto to have been his teacher, than the resemblance of the Berlin Virgin to Taddeo, or of its side wings to Daddi, would prove either of these to have been. What he took from Giotto the air was thick with, and he took, as we have seen, from every quarter, remaining constant only in his inveterate north-Tuscan sense of falling mass, his Sienese habits of drawing certain details, and in his Sienese lyricism. Still young, and impressionable enough on his ar- rival in Florence, to absorb the Giottesque shop-conventions, at the time overwhelmingly in fashion, he copies Giotto’s Ognissanti Dormi- tion; but in the tabernacle the Giottesque elements become more generic, mingling with types he borrowed from Gaddi, and with remi- niscences of Duccio. In the Berlin panel which cannot have been painted much later, the Sienese and Giottesque characters alike, con- ceal themselves behind unequivocally Gaddesque mood and Gaddesque types. But Taddeo’s influence, acute at this moment, leaves no per- — manent traces. a9 The fact is Jacopo’s taste, his temper and his limitations com- mitted him rather to the current in the Florentine painting of the early Trecento which rose from more archaic sources, chose a different course, and flowed towards a destination opposed to that of Giotto. A decade or two back it contented itself with the narrow channel made for it by the Master of St. Cecily — Bernardo Daddi’s direct artistic forbear and, with relative certainty, his living teacher. At least one work of Jacopo’s, the S. Miniato altarpiece, bears evi- dences of admiring imitation of this exquisite artist.” The style of the Paolini Virgin, the composition of this and of the Scarperia panels, maintain the tendency of this testimony. But it is to Daddi, who carries on the tradition of the Cecily Master, that Jacopo owes more than to any other single Florentine. His in- fluence which, as I have hinted, appears in the side wings of the Berlin panel, continues profound, outlasting presumably the intimate con- tacts between the two painters. All that Jacopo could absorb from Daddi is already present in the earlier Cagnola triptych, but, Daddi’s exclusive influence in some of the heads and in the Crucified here, and elsewhere, in the broad and richly stamped borders, and halos in jux- taposed courses, in his stacking of angels about the Virgin’s throne, in the unvarying pattern and type of the Crucified, urge the conclusion that, in his restless susceptibility, and insofar as he was become Floren- tine, his art was anchored to this one of all his Florentine contem- poraries. Yet this attachment gave way, now and again, as the years ran their course, before a nostalgic reversion to his early Sienese sympathies. 40 NOTES 1. This essay appeared originally in a briefer form in the Bollettino d’arte, for December, 1923, 248-284, where the majority of Jacopo’s paintings are given in reproduction. 2. In a scrupulously learned article in the Rivista d’arte for 1909, 95 et seq. 3. Vasari continues hopelessly muddled, in his second edition, on the artistic identity of Jacopo. And while he soberly forbears citing the epitaph reproduced in the first edition (see Vasari, I, 675, n. 3) which claims Jacopo painted in fresco and never on panel, his second edition inherits a leaning to this error. Horne, unable to resist Vasari’s testimony, adduces the technique of the Cagnola triptych in support of the more moderate view that Jacopo was primarily a frescoist (Rivista d’arte, 1909, 108). But the absence from his verified oeuvre of a single fresco, and Jacopo’s partiality besides, to the miniature mode, should persuade the student that his painting in fresco was probably minimal, or at best, secondary to his panel painting. It is this fundamental error, however, that leads Vasari into the further blunder of attributing to Jacopo the sixteen figures in the vaults, and the paintings on the walls and pilasters, in Or S. Michele, which are obviously by several hands, and of later date. In an inauspicious moment Horne saw in these vaults affinities to Giov. dal Ponte and Bicci di Lorenzo. The fresco in the tabernacle “dirimpetto a S. Giuseppe” (Vasari, I, 670) Milanesi declares in his notes to have been “rifatto.” The incised contours and the faint color that remain of this complete wreck exhibit the unmistakable hand of a Gerinesque master of the end of the century. The other tabernacle Vasari attributes to Jacopo, in the Via di Cocomero in Florence, has dis- appeared. Of the frescoes Vasari ascribes to him in Arezzo, in the Episcopal Palace, in the Cathedral, in the churches of St. Bartholomew, Compagnia Vecchia di S. Giovanni, S. Domenico, S. Agostino, in the Pieve, the Duomo Vecchio, either no traces remain, or what remains cannot be retained as his. Finally the altarpiece which Vasari affirms to have been painted by Jacopo for the chapel of the Company of St. Luke was paid for to Niccolo di Pietro Gerini in 1383 (see Vas., I, 675, note i). Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 175, 176, extended the confusion by mixing Jacopo’s work with Giovanni del Ponte; a confusion spread also by Milanesi, who attributes to Jacopo, Giov. dal Ponte’s polyptych in the National Gallery in London (see Vasari, I, 671, notes 1 and 3). Pietro Toesca (in L’Arte, 1904, 49 et seq.), and Carlo Gamba (Rassegna d’arte, 1904, 177 et seq.), were the first to rescue Giovanni from it. Venturi again (V, 864) wrongly attributes to Jacopo no. 26, Sala III, in the Museum of Pisa; and the editors of Murray’s edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, see his hand in No. 20, Sala I, of the Arezzo Gallery, which is certainly not by him. 4. See Sirén’s article (Burlington Magazine for November, 1914, 78), the conclusions of which he later (Giotto and Some of his Followers, I, 189, 192) completely reverses. A small Virgin with Saints and Angels in the Gallery at Budapest published by Gabriel de Terey in the Burlington Magazine, November, 1925, 251-252, as by Jacopo is by another follower of Daddi. 5. The name of this legendary personage was, for no good reason, proposed by Venturi (1906, V, 290) as the author of the four closing scenes of the St. Francis cycle in the Upper Church at Assisi, and of the altar-frontal from the Church of S. Cecilia now in the Uffizi. Sirén (The Burlington Magazine for December, 1919, January and October, 1920) amplifies the oeuvre of the painter of the S. Cecilia altarpiece by several acceptable additions, and by other less happy ones. See also Burlington Magazine for June, 1924, 271-278. 6. Reproduced in Rivista d’arte, 1909, and Sirén, II, pl. 170. 7. Vasari, I, 674, and note 2 thereto; also Horne, Rivista d’arte, 1909, 100, 101. 8. The influence of Taddeo Gaddi in this and two or three other works of Jacopo’s, gives some color of likelihood to Vasari’s accounts of the relation between the two painters (see Vasari, I, 669, 670), although Jacopo might easily have been Taddeo’s senior. 41 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18, 19. . Under “Jacopo del Casentino” the Anonimo Gaddiano declares that “In Firenze si uede il taber- nacolo della Nostra Donna di Mercato Vecchio.” See Karl Frey, Codice Magliabechiano (Berlin, 1872), 57; Vasari, I, 670; and Horne Rivista d’arte, 1909, 103, 104. . See detail in Bollettino d’arte, 1923, 253. . Van Marle, III, 654, cannot see the reason for this attribution. . Halos made from very nearly identical stamps may be seen in Daddi’s late polyptych at the Uffizi, and in two of his panels showing saints belonging to same original altarpiece; a bearded male saint in the Museo Bandini, Fiesole, and a female saint in the Serristori collection, Florence. Van Marle, III, 654, holds to the earlier view championed until recently by Sirén, who saw the justice of the present attribution the instant it was suggested. See Frey, who in his edition of Vasari (Munich, Georg Miiller, 1911), 321, 322, publishes docu- ments recording work executed for the altar of the titular saint. For the photograph bearing his correct attribution I am indebted to Dr. Giacomo De Nicola. This picture was published simultaneously with my article in the Bollettino d’arte for 1923 by Suida, Belvedere, 1923, 24, under the proper designation. The placing of angels over the shoulders of the throne, as it occurs in these two pictures, goes back to a tradition running back into the Dugento from the later examples of the St. Cecily Master’s Virgin at S. Margherita a Montici (near Florence), and of a Virgin of the early Trecento at S. Giorgio, Florence; to Cimabue’s Virgin at the church of the Servi, Bologna, the Virgin by the so-called Magdalen Master at S, Michele in Rovezzano, and Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Virgin at the church of the Servi in Orvieto, to still earlier variants. It was a very common composition in the thirteenth century. Van Marle’s III, 654, denial of a Sienese influence in Jacopo logically follows from his refusal of those panels to him which contain a large Sienese element. However, he seems to have overlooked a Sienese influence in some of those he admits as by Jacopo. In “Il Codice Magliabechiano,” ed. Frey, 57, the Anonimo speaks of “Jacopo di Casentino, pittore, discepolo do Giotto . . .” The frontality of the central figure in the S$. Miniato panel, the bi-lateral plan of the whole, and the architectural details hark back to the St. Cecily master. The scene at the lower left corner imitates the middle scene on the right in an altarpiece by the Cecily master at S. Margherita a Montici, representing St. Margaret and her legend; and the figure at her left is borrowed by Jacopo in the figure correspondingly placed in the upper right hand scene of the S, Miniato panel. 42 on! An kwh = eS gpeser 5 78) us US, 5 ea : DETAILS FROM THE PainTINGS OF JACOPO DEL CASENTINO Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Annunciation. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Dormition. Florence, Uffizi, St. Bartholomew Enthroned. Vienna, Bondy Collection, Triptych. Florence, Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, St. John, the Baptist. Florence, Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. Florence, S. Miniato, S. Miniato and Scenes from his Life. 9. 10. id. Florence, Horne Foundation, Madonna. Gottingen, University Gallery, Triptych Florence, Horne Foundation, Madonna. Florence, Palazzo dell?’ Arte della Lana, Tabernacle. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, Small Madonna, Saints and Angels. Rome, Paolini Collection, Madonna and Two Angels. PST ETT RIPTYCH T , Milan TINO: Jacopo DEL CasEN Ere eer: gnola Guido Ca Collection of Don ~ Fic. 4. Jacopo pEL CasentTINo: MaponNna Fic. 2. Jacopo pet Casentino: Derart or LArce ALTARPIECE Horne Foundation, Florence Palazzo dell’ Arte della lana, Florence sé phate S Fic. 3. Jacovo pet Casentino: DorMition oF THE VIRGIN Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence ee } A ~~ bh SAO WS AO ASS yy = a et poate Fic. 6. Jacovo pet Casentino: St. BaRTHOLOMEW Fic. 5. Jacopo pet Casentino: St. Nicnotas’ Fic. 7. JAcopo pet CasENTINO: CRUCIFIXION AND ANGELS Academy of Fine Arts, Florence Collection of the late Prof. Allan Marquand, Princeton, N. J. Uffizi Gallery, Florence NO: ASENTI (€ Derait or ALTARPI JACOPO DEL Church of S. NTINO: Fic. 8. Jacopo pEL CAsE ECE Vircin AND ANGELS @ , Florenc rato Min Madonna di Piazza, Scarperia U ‘ | r < ‘ -, - ' , x 4 ‘ Fic. 11. Jacopo pEL CasENTINO: SCENE FROM Fic. 12. Jacopo pEL CasENTINO: SCENE FROM THE ALTARPIECE OF S, Min1aTo THE ALTARPIECE OF S. MINIATO Church of S. Miniato, Florence Church of S. Miniato, Florence ‘TRIPTYCH Jacopo DEL CASENTINO The Bondy Collect itive’, 113% Vienna ion, | a7 : ’ 4s A ~s y ' o ~ : , ’ ° ‘ a Yi hae ‘ : ‘ ‘ , : i 2 ows ‘ajvunumwory orn : Utpurg ‘unasn py YIUuparsy-sasivy ATUL) GAWOVG AHL AO GNADAT aHL WOU SAGOSIdy] :1ddVvC Oday NYA vy “OU VLIaIqd FH], :Iddvq{ OduvNuag 40 UAMOTIOY “7 “OL UISDYWIGOT) “UWNISN $,WIJDIS ANOT, SMOIAVG AHL WAAO ONINOOMG NIOUIA sIddv(] OGUVNUAG AO AAMOTIOT ‘I ‘OT x40 X MAIN ‘uvuysaT dyy_ “4p fo worzI21]0/) ALIALLV |) aH Y, :IddadVvc] Odudv NYA AO UAMOTTIO Y AS “OT A DADDESQUE PREDELLA | ae small horizontal panel (Fig. 1), representing the Virgin swooning over the Saviour’s tomb is a part of a series that once formed a predella. It depicts the moment immediately after the slab had been placed over Christ’s body, which had been laid away and shut up in the sarcophagus; the stage of relaxed emotion following the tragic climax, when the Mother’s heart, having reached its limit of sorrow, overflows in a sort of rapture of pain, that finally sinks the senses into a blind and healing void. Standing against the shy morning light, Her companions pityingly watch Her grief. The heads lean over Her bowed figure and the rocks and trees gather round the little group by a sort of cosmic sympathy. The composition becomes thereby more concentrated than the more heroically tragic Pieta in Berlin, which presumably preceded this scene in the original predella. The dominant mood is announced in the bilateral arrangement, in which the trees and the figures converge rhythmically upon the center, where the figure of the Virgin breaks the symmetry. Her dark form is thrown against the light-colored tomb in a silhouette of sweep- ing contours, isolating Her in a private sorrow, vaguely accessible to Her companions, who are reduced to the role of helplessly sympathetic spectators. The composition is held compactly between the upright vermilion figure on the left and the St. Joseph on the right. The diag- onal figure of the Virgin joins these like the second stroke in an inverted N. The sustained lightness of color of the secondary characters makes a background, dramatically significant, for the black-mantled Protag- onist in an episode that strongly resembles the settling of the final chord of a sacred chant. The subject itself is exceedingly rare, and occurs, to my knowledge, in only one other instance, a small panel’ which hangs in the Pina- coteca Vaticana and represents the Crucifixion in the centre, with the Baptist and Paul at the sides, two scenes above, and the concluding episodes of the Passion below. The swooning Virgin closes the series in the lower right hand corner. The state of the panel is uncommonly sound, the surface has kept a good deal of its original crispness, the line and the incised contours, their sharpness, and the pigment its enamel and its suggestions of the 43 tempera vehicle. The individual colors, especially the blues, are un- marred, and the gold still has its lovely, luminous clearness. Though small in dimensions (8 x 15 inches) the picture displays a Florentine pattern and its classical tone, its controlled pathos, as defi- nitely join it to the Florentine tradition as they distinguish it from any other. But, if a Florentine, who is this master and what other extant works has he painted? To arrive at a solution of these problems it would first be necessary to recognize the differential type in the pre- della-piece under discussion. This is evolved in an artist by a gradual fixation of habits, at the ul- timate stage of artistic formation. Ina great age like that in which the little picture was painted, man was a completely and vitally functioning creature. He lived in a world of indisputable traditions in all matters of mind, faith, morals and economics. With these important details settled for him before he was born, he was free to go on undisturbed and single-hearted in his vocation. If he became a painter, he began by imitating the style and procedure of his teacher; and if gifted and endowed with creative energy besides, he unconsciously created his own type in the course of the years of apprenticeship and self-realiza- tion. His memory, little by little, found a formula for the shapes of na- ture he used in his paintings. This means that in his own practice every such shape was being reduced to a radical image, which was in some mysterious way determined by his organic, and by his structural constitution. Such a type, intimately individualized, underlies our little picture. While bare words cannot render its image to our minds, they can indicate the details that give it its distinguishing form. These details are the following: 1. A solid enamel-like tempera with a milky quality in the flesh. 2. A high-pitched color (the warm black of the Virgin’s robe with brown-violet high lights is uncommon). 3. Oval-shaped heads with firm round cheeks. 4. A small eye, tending to roundness. 5. A daintily shaped nose, with a light that runs down to the tip and then horizontally to the volute. 6. A shapely, bossy chin sharply lighted, with a level cleft dividing it from the lower lip. 7. The hand is generally small, with tiny cylindrical fingers and a thumb that tends to curve outward at the tip. 8. ‘The drapery wraps the body simply, showing narrow ridges. 44 g. The rocks are high at the sides, and worn or sunk in sweeping planes to a hollow at the centre. 10. Sparse, delicate vegetation saves it from looking an utter waste. 11. The trees have short and heavy trunks and have light-colored leaves — sometimes star-shaped — against the general dark mass of the foliage. 12. The spirit throughout is gentle and lyrical. If these details now are felt in the less communicable context in which they lie imbedded, they will release a specific effect to be found in a small number of other paintings. Of such I have thus far been able to identify only two. The first is in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin, measuring about 7/2 x 143-5 inches and represents the Pieta (Fig. 2). The theme would lead one to expect more acute emotion, but the painter, true to his temperament, has conceived the scene at the same pitch of intensity as the representation of the Swooning Virgin. There is the same pathos in the figures, the Virgin’s forces being all but spent be- fore they entirely leave her. Unhappily this panel has undergone considerable wear and mutila- tion, so that its characteristics will not appear as clearly as in the pic- ture. Nevertheless, if the two pictures are compared in respect to the particulars enumerated above, it will readily become evident that their originis the same. Their kind of plasticity, their types and their gentle pathos, their color and texture, could only be present in two works by the same hand. Although the rocks in both worn into sweeping planes, are similarly disposed and have the same formation, the resemblances of the figures are more striking and decisive. Thus the Evangelist in both shows a feature-for-feature analogy, even to the arrangement of his draperies, and if the St. Joseph in the Berlin Pieta had not lost his halo by scraping, the contour would outline a head identical with that of the St. Joseph in the Copenhagen panel; and if the surface were not worn, the chiaroscuro would model the same mould, the same skull, the same depression at the temple, the same cheek and nose, in both. The wringing of the hands in both figures shows the same folded fingers, and the thumbs are tipped outward.” One might carefully compare each detail to fortify the total impression. The other panel is in the Lehman Collection in New York (Fig. 3), and represents the Nativity.’ It joins the other two, discussed above, by the same unmistakable signs. The scene has a mood of divine fa- miliarity and both the Virgin and the Joseph have the air of high 45 station. Here she appears in a light-colored mantle, with delicately fashioned features, and the nose shaped as in the two other panels; also, she has the same thumb. Her eye has the same look, and this is rendered by the same means. The Joseph is less grave, but his features and his fingers have the same shape as in the Copenhagen and Berlin panel. The rocks slope from both sides towards the centre with the same curve, and the trees rise on short trunks with the same abundant spread of dark foliage showing the star-shaped leaves we already saw in the Copenhagen panel. The ground vegetation has in this, as in the Lehman panel, the character of a note rapidly jotted down, one might almost say, written with the brush. These affinities constitute the only cummunicable means of express- ing the identity of an authorship that reaches one by the irrational channels of intuition. And if the recurrence in all of these panels of certain features may be trusted, the close resemblance among them would tend to make these compositions, even if their dimensions do not exactly match, the scattered parts of the same original predella. In all the three panels the halos are tooled and stamped identically with discs against a pricked ground, tiny discs edging the great circle. The lesser circles dividing the different fields are the same in num- ber throughout. Then, the borders of the drapery consist of a broad and narrow stripe, running together along the edge. The closely ap- proximate dimensions, the halos and the borders, are the three obvious —if by no means conclusive — grounds for believing the panels dis- cussed to belong to a single work. Whether this be so or not, there is a great deal beside contemporaneity in the style to persuade one that the single authorship of the panels is indisputable. Who their painter was, is, for the present, hard to determine. Known only in these three fragments, it is hard to represent to oneself the ar- tistic personality of their master and his range. His chronological place and larger affinities are more easily determined. While his gen- eral traits force him into Florence, and into the middle of the fourteenth century, its more intimate “betrayals” confine him within Bernardo Daddi’s immediate circle. His type in fact is built upon Daddi’s models (Fig. 4), a type that calls into being a world of associations, of suggestions so diverse from the worlds of other artistic groups, and so peculiar to itself, that we know it at once as we know the face of a friend. In our painter’s fig- ures we touch the life, the humanity, the social intimations with which Daddi’s people are instinct. But as we come nearer to it, as we sink 46 ourselves in its atmosphere, we become aware of a gentler mood in a spirit of a less vivid mobility, and a more developed gift of pathos. But if this painter is distinguishable from Daddi he, nevertheless, certainly derived from him, and Daddi’s tradition is at the root of the very particulars that separate the two masters. Thus the general shape of the heads, the daintiness of the features, the length and smoothness of the cheek, the way the muscles draw in at the corners of the mouth, the shape of the lips, affirm the kinship of the two masters. These details, then, in both, found in the artistic environment in which one finds them, urge the conclusion that our painter was formed by Daddi. But another influence less essential, yet still an influence, passes between us and the three predella pieces. And that is the in- fluence of another, probably an older pupil of Daddi, Andrea Orcagna. Such an influence may elude the perfunctory glance; it lies at the basis of our painter’s architectural sense, however. The structure of the individual figure rises in a general inclusive contour to heavy shoulders imparting a squareness and solidity to the total mass not often present in Daddi. Both the individual and general mass are to be found in the predella of Orcagna’s polyptych (Fig. 5) in S. Maria Novella in Florence, where — and particularly in the Mourning of a King (Fig. 6) — we shall find a similar composition and feeling. Our painter borrowed the upper part of the Virgin’s figure in the Lehman Nativity from an angel in the polyptych mentioned (Fig. 7). But our painter seems to have absorbed other, more external de- tails from Orcagna. Thus the placing, drawing and setting of the eye, carry us as forcibly to the same predella, and on closer scrutiny, the double stripe we noted in the three compositions will be found here, and because it very seldom occurs outside Orcagna’s circle at this period, there is high likelihood it was appropriated from that source. Beyond this the internal evidence of the three panels will not take us. One would have to pervert it if one insisted on being more precise in placing them. Nor is there anything in documentary or historical literature to throw any light on them. It is more than likely that other works of his are extant, and somewhere, between the covers of a book or in hidden archives, he is cited as one of the glories of ‘Trecento art or the recognized master of specific paintings. But until such informa- tion links itself conclusively to these three predella pieces, they will have to be regarded simply as the exquisite products of a highly gifted follower of Daddi, influenced by Orcagna. 47 i ‘ A feature to be found in Bernardo Daddi: an gretto Nuzi. photograph No. 38176. — r Ali ° I. Ze in hed is Publ 3. ee 20448 ) % "gS ‘pedoy > VNOVOUC) 2IUI40] J *D]]920N D1dD ¢ io) a HOALdUAIOg 10 STIVLAC] Peer er MN £AAd ddd ddd. grt PYLLLL Fic. 7. Orcacna: ANGEL Fic. 6. Orcacna: Derarit or PrepELta To PotyprycHu FROM PoLypTycH Strozzi Chapel, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence Strozzi Chapel, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence 2 3 Se eee Fic. 7. Tue Focc Museum Prieta The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. THE MASTER OF THE FOGG PIETA* VU ee the evils of attribution and particularly its abuses by one side, the alarms on the other, with all its real and fancied difficulties, and the somewhat fatuous objections it raises in certain circles, its absence would be a deplorable sign of indifference. And to- day the pictures that still remain without a settled designation, even those among them of considerable merit, are accorded a very limited attention. by Besides, the most Rousseauistic aesthete cannot help putting the question of identity to himself. The more individualized one’s pleas- ure in a picture, the more will it seek to resolve itself into terms that are mentally more seizable than the fugitive aesthetic experience. These terms will differentiate it from all other adventures of its type and furnish a name to the differentiation. An attribution is a dif- ferentiation of aesthetic experience. And this baptismal habit has also its practical uses in making a work thus classified an object of general currency. The fact that a number of interesting pictures by the single master herein dealt with, are still variously named or unidentified, has de- prived them of a certain force of authority they regain in a consolidated body. Such is the case of a Crucifix (Fig. 1) in the Church of S. Croce in Florence. That this Crucifix—which now hangs in the sacristy” in its darkest corner, high up on the wall — has not, however, remained alto- gether neglected, is proved by its mention in modern critical literature. Adolfo Venturi’ (V, 492) attributes it to the School of Giotto—where it undeniably belongs by its shape and by an artistic tradition that organ- ized the parts of the figure in a solid form, primarily functioning as an integral member of the compositional structure. But if Giottesque in its tradition, certain external features in this Crucifix disguise a de- pendence on Giotto as evident as that of other contemporary F'loren- tine Crosses. On the other hand — so deep did this tradition run — our Crucifix looks forward towards, and anticipates, the greater Andrea del Castagno, who likes similarly to dwell on the raw bulk of the figure and on its bluntness of feature, and place it in a cognate psychological ambient. If it wants in that synthesis which ties our faculties in instant re- 49 sponse, if its realism stops where it begins, it declares nevertheless a vigorous personality, who expresses himself without hesitation and with- out confusion. A small number of pictures by him, extended over a lifetime of activity, is more likely on first sight, to throw into prominence their outward disparities than their radical unity. Accordingly, even the painting that suggests the closest proximity of period to the S. Croce Crucifix, an altarpiece in the Collegiata at Figline (Fig. 14), defies at first blush, by its incidental variations, all evidences of common origin. The difference in subject is alone enough to obscure them. Unlike the Crucifix, which represents a definite interval following the tragedy, the altarpiece is without time and without action. Ruin and restoration disfigure at least half of the surface, and the photograph here reproduced renders inadequate testimony of its actual appearance. Moreover the form, the movement, are gentler in effect, and the pantomime appropriately relaxes. The even mood is broken only by the restlessness of the burly bear-like Infant. His head and that of the angel at His left, however, at once offer a haunting resemblance to St. John, in the Crucifix (Fig. 2), in something that, under all the varying external manifestations, seems to spring from a common temperament, and follows a common orbit of consciousness. The mask is thrown over the same bony frame, and shows the same rises and depressions. The hair has the same tendency to curl at the ends. The lids have the same heavy outlines that hold a similar glance between them. The fingers, which part at the roots and curve together at the tips, reappear in the left hands of Christ and Mary; the drapery, which in both paintings tends to fall into broad planes of light, sinks to narrow folds. ‘These similarities of shape become the more signifi- cant by leading us to ultimate types that distinguish themselves sharply from all other contemporary painting. To these two pictures may be joined two panels, which by sharing their analogies, will serve to improve the credit of the above demonstra- tion. They are at the Museum of Fine Arts in Worcester, and repre- sent St. Francis (Fig. 3) and St. Philip* (Fig. 4). In spite of the pre-exhibitional rite of cleaning and furbishing these panels are still in a tolerably presentable condition. Of the two, the St. Francis affords features of close, clear and convincing analogy to the St. Louis in the altarpiece. The hanging cowl stretches the horizontal folds in the front into the same pattern. The chiaroscuro that lights large surfaces of the drapery, which slip into dark narrow 50 grooves, functions similarly in both figures ; and following the master’s usual practice, a dark heavy contour edges the stuff which falls into long, straight folds. If the hands of the St. Francis seem a trifle more structural and obedient to their function, the right of St. Philip with its long thumb — flat and boneless in its body and knotted at the root — is paralleled in the uppermost angel at the right of the Figline altarpiece. An ear, in which the cavity is differentiated into a larger and a smaller, is common to both. The eye of St. Francis varies from that of St. Louis only by being deeply set. It glides between sharp and stiffly curved edges of two lids that look as if they were cut in ivory. Its analogy to the eye of the St. John of the S. Croce Crucifix amounts to identify. It dips downward similarly at the inner corner, where the more sinuous curve of the lower lid meets it in a point. The same eye recurs in the Crucifix at Croce, where the lids join the face in a line that marks their springing. But the affinities extend further to the shadows around the inner extremity of the eye, and if the Francis does not, the Philip does, show the flesh-fold under the brow, that runs horizontally until it strikes the upright wall of the nose. In both the St. Francis, and the Evangelist of the Crucifix, the skin contracts over the hard shell of the forehead in a way characteristic of our master. These demonstrations throw up peculiarities of habit, of vision and of statement, that distinguish still another panel, a fragment of a Cru- cifix (Fig. 5), a lamenting Mother of Christ in the collection of Mr. F. Mason Perkins in Lastra a Signa, near Florence. The solid enamel noticeable chiefly in the quatrefoils of the S. Croce Crucifix, the skin moving over the large bony framework of the face, as an expressional agent, at once assimilate this work into the group here brought together. The surface has undergone changes, chiefly at the hands of time, so different from that of the Crucifix that at first glance its superficial disparities will seem essential. The nose has the usual bluntness, the lips an animal insensibility, and they are drawn upwards at the corners into a grimace that apes that of the Virgin of S. Croce. Although Mr. Perkins’ figure avoids the rusticity of type of the latter, the eyes and the muscles around them function in accordance with the same formula of expression, differing by being narrower in the former. They are similarly shaped with the same fold made by the contraction, that leaves a characteristic triangular hollow between the eye and the nose. The haggard look in Mr. Perkins’ figure, produced by pushing very nearly half of the iris under the lower lid, re- 51 sembles in tendency, if not in effect, the eyes of the St. Francis in Worcester. The contours that schematize the shapes with a vehement directness, suggest the course and accent of the same strong hand. In the Musée Archeologique at Rennes hangs a figure’ in three- quarter to full-length of a King David (Fig. 6), which so persistently discloses the same peculiarities, and to so close a scrutiny, that it forces itself into the same group. What still remains visible, does so in spite of a crackle that has cut deep and wide into the surface, but the web it has woven over it has the same quadrilateral units as other panels of this group. The David confronts us with features repeatedly met with in these panels — features that declare themselves in the same planes, defined by the same heavy contour as the Evangelist at S. Croce, and the master’s peculiarities in the shaping of the eye and in its setting, recur in both these heads in detailed agreement, as they anticipate the lateral figures in the panel that follows. All the tendencies that the works thus far assembled persistently bring into relief, converge in the Fogg Pieta (Fig. 7). If no definite name has hitherto been attached to it, this sublime little panel has nevertheless attracted considerable attention. And by the same psy- chological law of which I speak at the outset, it has offered a challange to the deep-rooted baptismal weakness of even those of us, who fancy the preoccupation it involves stifles one’s joy in the object. It has drawn guesses from the more adventurous. But all the enterprise has been sicklied o’er with a cautious vagueness, and although it is labelled as of the Italian School, I believe the most definite opinion of its origin swings between Verona and Southern France. That it is Giottesque, however, and Florentine, will appear from its affinity to a number of Florentine works, with which it would logically share its local origin and school. The total design, the pose, the bodily suggestions, the drawing of, let us say, the central figure, may seem on first view un-Florentine, and the arrangement of the holy women above the Christ,° and the absence of figures in front of Him, or of the usual desperate claspings, like the pose and position of the swooning Virgin, are difficult to paral- lel, and not in the area to which I assign the picture alone, but in all of Italy. Nevertheless, these deviations from the rule are not obstacles to my conclusion, however misleading they may initially be; they are motifs that are imitable, and accordingly not essential to the style. 52 This is profoundly Florentine and as radically Giottesque, primarily for the following reasons: that the squareness of the total mass in a single compositional plane produces the Giottesque sense of total weight and architec- tual cohesion of parts; that the relation of the total mass to the area is such as to throw the physical presence of the figures and their action into relief; that, as in Giotto and his school, there is a plastic isolation of the individual shapes within the compositional tension ; that the representation resolves itself into primary action and secondary action, and by methods singularly Giottesque. The primary action is contained within the converging diagonals of the central pyramid, the secondary action may be said to be at one dramatic moment’s remove from the more direct emotional response at the centre, and is represented by the two erect lateral figures, who steady the composition by their solidity and verti- cality.’ The two protagonists, the swooning Virgin and the dead Christ, are thrown on a prominent diagonal that cuts the composition in two. This diagonal descends historically from a similar line in Giotto’s Pieta at the Arena Chapel, that carries the same function, directing the gravitation of attention upon Christ’s head. In the works so far assembled the artistic personality is determined and differentiated by a certain eccentric energy in the statement and shape. The heavy mould is outlined by the cut of an emphatic con- tour, and a graduated light that renders the flexibility of the flesh. The same mould, the same decisive line, the same chiaroscuro, reappear in the Fogg Pieta. But if these analogies are general and do not suggest their significance at once, their radical importance will proclaim itself in a confrontation of details. Throughout, the edges of the lids run in curves that meet in a point at the inner corners, and the lids tending to detach themselves in sharp definition, show the line of juncture with the face. The jaws are wide, the nose blunt, the lips firm and hard like rubber. The mechanism of the facial muscles elaborates the character of the bony structure by me its expressional mobility. The drapery has the same texture, only a slightly lighter weight than that in previously discussed works. The hands are short, and show the bone and the articulations under the flesh. Turning to individual figures and allowing for discrepancies of scale and of condition, the holy woman at the left has a head which differs from that of the Virgin in the S. Croce Crucifix (Fig. 8) by being squarer. Its mould, however, is the same, and the mantle is similarly draped over both. The mouth and eyes are distorted into a grimace betraying the same feeling, the stress of which draws the brows of the Fogg figure into a curved line, like that in the Evangelist of the S. Croce Crucifix; and the lids converge in a sharp point at the inner corner exactly as in that figure. Both show the flesh-fold over the eye that runs toward the same blunt nose. What is true of the holy woman at the left, is true of the variations upon Her type, the swooning Virgin and the Magdalen in the same panel. The hands of the Crucifix again, are repeated in the Fogg panel. Thus the fingers in the left hand of the Virgin in the latter are curved like those of the Virgin in the Crucifix; the left of the Magdalen in the Fogg panel has the shape and mechanism of the right of the Virgin, and the right of the St. Francis in the Crucifix, while the close-fingered hands of Christ and Joseph of Arimathea reveal the same shape and structure as those in the quatrefoils of the Crucifix. The hair in the Fogg panel exhibits further analogies to the Cruci- fix. Itis of a firm and fine fibre with a living movement in it. That of the kneeling St. John is as diverse from that of his contemporaries as it is similar to the curled hair of Christ and John in the Crucifix, only that in the larger painting it bends with the ductility of wire. The dead Christ’s head has the mould of the St. Francis at Worces- ter, and the scalp of the St. Philip. The modulation of line and surface reveal the same bulges in the three, and the same sparse fleecy beard fringes their jaws. The hair of the St. Philip grows thinly and is brushed forward as in the Fogg Museum Christ. But however limited the revelation of these analogies may be, the Christ in the Fogg picture, by repeating the figure of the Crucified (Fig. 9) at S. Croce, furnishes a final proof of their common author- ship. The head of the former, hanging like the pitying head of John in the Crucifix, has a mute pathos worn into the hollows of the face; a face more delicately nuanced in the smaller figure, and subtler in its 54 tragic suggestions than the heroic head of the Crucifix. But the dif- ferences are those of motif, of conception, and not of type nor of style, differences fittingly incidental in each case to the discrepancy of scale. If one imagines the head of the smaller Christ more broadly formed, it will assume the look of the larger. The eyes are the same, the lids be- ing cut and attached identically, with a crescent-shaped gap between them, that swerves downward at the inner corner. These two instances of death, showing the sightless eyeball behind the parted lids, isolate themselves from all other representations of the dead Christ in the Florence of the time. The foreshortened lips are perhaps closer to those in Mr. Perkins’ fragment than to any other of this master’s works. But if the two heads, serving somewhat different expressive ends, are variations of the same ultimate type, the bodies being less expressive agents, are nearer their original formula. The torsos, showing the worn flesh over the fragile framework of the ribs, and a delicate slimness alike in both, are bounded by a contour that searches and accentuates the same undulations in the shape. In both, physical suffering has pulled the flesh over the prominent ilium and sunk it into hollows below the abdomen. The loin-cloth of the S. Croce Crucified suggests in the arrangement of vertical and diagonal folds, and in its silhouette, the drapery of St. Joseph in the Fogg panel. The shaping of the right leg of the Christ in the last named picture, with the flat knee and the downward tapering tibia below it, the pro- jecting ankles, constitute the prominent features of the original image which served our painter in both cases. All these panels join, by the analogies that have been pointed out, in a single artistic personality. But they also express a common tra- dition and a common period. The formative influence of their master, it must be admitted, cannot be as easily ascertained, possibly because of the idiosyncracies of a genius which, wanting in supreme characters, was nevertheless as original as any in Florence. It is a type of genius, that sacrifices the sublime or the exquisite qualities of the greatest ex- pression for qualities so vigorous and so individual, that they require an appraisal by standards of their own. Accordingly, if he has undergone a deserved neglect beside his most illustrious contemporaries, his in- tegrated oeuvre now makes a claim to high rank. His representations win their special significance by relieving the impelling energy in action above general suggestions of ultimate reality or ultimate mystery. He absorbs you by his passion, which is always allowed to wholly possess his figures — suggesting that aspect of human 55 life in which impulse works slowly, but with the certainty of instinct and the directness of fate. There is accordingly a kind of primitive force in his types. His modelling is not merely the abstract Giottesque medium for rendering the material existence of the figure, but a means also of phys- ical and mental description: power in the mass, nuance in the details — nuance that renders the fading of natural energies more often than the refinement of thought or feeling. He is the only painter of the early Florentine Trecento who endows the flesh that covers the face with its proper character, consistency and its peculiar capacity for registering certain kinds of inner movement. By his form, by his use of chiaroscuro, our painter sets himself apart from the body of his Florentine contemporaries. His mass, his composition, his types, however, are of the Giottesque succession; his density and emphatic statement profess affinities with Maso’s frescoes in the Bardi Chapel at S. Croce in Florence, while his types recall the earlier Master of the St. Nicholas Chapel in the Lower Church in Assisi _ and the Giottesque Crucifix at Ognissanti. It is probably in his more advanced maturity that he appropriates certain details from Orcagna (see the Child at Figline), or from Nardo (the eyes of the Worcester St. Francis). The Romanizing features otherwise absent from the Florentine painting of the time, of fore- shortened palms in the S. Croce Crucifix, in the Figline altarpiece, of Christ’s attitude in the Fogg Museum panel, point to an early part of the T'recento, when Roman influence was accessible to the Florentine Giotteschi in Florence, as well as in Assisi. But, as has already been remarked, our master’s composite mental picture harks back to Giotto, and certain Giottesque traits urge a straight derivation from him, and even actual contact with him. His radical type of face repeats the plan of such heads as those of the upper figures in Giotto’s altarpiece at the Uffizi (Fig. 10), where the features are similarly laid out. One will find the same snouty large noses, and the same eyes, only they are less schematically and emphatically con- toured, with the fold over the lid forming the pocket so common in our master. The hair in the S. Croce Crucifix again formalizes the fine hair of the Uffizi panel. All these considerations enforce the conclusion that our painter worked in Florence under Giotto’s influence from about 1320 onwards, an influence which single at the outset, gave way to a growing eclecti- cism. 56 NOTES 1. The reconstruction of this master first appeared in Arr 1n America for June, 1926, 160-176. 2. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (Ed. Hutton, London, 1908, I, 155) identifies this Crucifix, which in the seventies of the last century graced the vestibule common to the sacristy and the Medici Chapel, with one to which Vasari attributes the glorious réle of a gift to Farinata degli Uberti for prevent- ing the destruction of Florence in 1260, from Margaritone, its painter. Vasari (I, 361, 362) saw it hanging three centuries later between the Peruzzi and Giugni Chapels. Milanesi, writing in 1878 (in his notes to Vasari, I, 362, n. 1), questions this identification. And one might properly ask whether Vasari, who describes the Margaritone Crucifix as “dipinto alla greca,” would have confused the Byzantinizing style of the middle Dugento, which he distinguished in other instances from that of the succeeding century, with the fourteenth-century subject of this discussion. He was doubtless referring to another one, very likely of Margaritone’s generation, whether by him or not. In the guide-books and among the simple local tradition it still goes by the name of the Aretine master. Maud Cruttwell (Flor. Churches, London Ed., Dent, 1908, 92) says it was removed to the sacristy in 1839. 3. See also Sirén, Giottino (Leipzig, 1908), 94, where the author tentatively attributes the Crucifix to Antonio Veneziano. 4. They hang under the name of Taddeo di Bartolo. her Te Feared Seles 1g rq 5. It is labelled “Ecole Italienne”; and has recently been privately attributed to Lorenzo d’Ales- sandro! 6. The position of Christ may be explained by Roman precedent such as the Christ in the fresco of the same subject in the Upper Church of St. Francis in Assisi. 7. Parallels may be found everywhere in Giotto but the closest are in the Pieta and Visitation in the Arena Chapel; in the Obsequies of St. Francis and the Assumption of the Evangelist at S. Croce. oe Detarts From THE ParntTinGs oF THE MASTER OF THE Foce Pietra . Cambridge (U. S. A.), Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. Fiorence, S. Croce, Crucifix. Worcester, Mass., Art Museum, St. Francis. Figline, Duomo, Altar piece. Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. M~I Oy maPwhr = Figline, Duomo, Altarpiece. Florence, S. Crote, Crucifix. Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, The Pieta. = ‘ Fic. 6. MaAsrer or THe Foce Prera: Kine Davin Fic. 1. Master or THE Focc PirerA: Crucirix Fic. 5. Master oF THE Focc Pietra: Mourninc Museum, Rennes Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Vircin. (FRAGMENT oF A CruCIFIX) Collection of Mr. F. Mason Perkins, Florence ie PVs a is el een igs Sr. Puitip MaAsTER OF THE Focc PieTA 4. . Fic FRANCIS 2 Sai Master OF THE Foce PirtA 3. Fic ass, M > Museum, Worcester Worcester Art The Fic. 8. Master or THE Foce PrerA: Detar. or Fic. 9. Master or THE Focc PrerA: Derait oF THE CRUCIFIED Fic. 2. Master or THE Focc Pietra: Derait oF VIRGIN ON THE CRUCIFIX ON THE CRUCIFIX Sr. Joun, THE EvANGELIST, ON THE CRUCIFIX Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Sacristy, S. Croce, Florence Fic. 10. Grorro: Detait or ALTARPIECE Uffizi Gallery, Florence B # / i Tate tien NNA, SAINTS AND ANGELS Mapo Duomo, Figline A Master oF THE Foce Pier Fic. 14. or > } ae os a = el | “ ) me. o-4 ~~ a, tr: ay igi iee oe ie a piled in oes ih Phi it Pt aa eR es ae *. a. ; gr ® ae en ee set EF EPA SOWN PAINTINGS BY TADDEO GADDI' # peel of the Virgin and Child, w Teddeo Gaddi (Fie. . ‘ v. agit, but happily unrestored, ds anaye, beariag only eye ae bes iim that jewel-offerings and corumels heve left on it, » ve - “te, wwe : inet Florence, in the kittie church of S. Lowenzo 42 Seance Csding com ienepy evr hues been ote haded es is a [ea . ure é the a - ¥ 4 : « = j if ES | ee ie wi) oS =: met atts which | imok mas , a so apr é wap ve beoed] 3 wpse 2 | ieee ieee ts et wears uated Sagers — shaper «nid ie IW get sateals with bas said mank: Q qharacter (which fete det and dots and vorpical bale? a which the sadly repainted lunette at the Floren- ie & # variant, ts doubtless the surviving central pane! of a + 0) Neroe-quarter length figures within ctsped and pointed dis e of which occurs again in some of Taddeo’s earlier m nag upper tiers of the Pistoia polyptych. The panel has pees tromcated. The tone and the individual colors, a ohne ee tame, te tove of the drapery over Pls legs, the i <2 Ring. «te sack as ome night hove found in the ssi : on re 3} cow um the Academy in Ploreace, hed they + preserve ther ongrea! unearanhes inmxence.” Titian suit oxen naliacted then Felee’s wuenl grove on , aed the benevolentiy inclined bead her « freeier, more +s with a gleam of something in it Hie self-cecommendation. y em in conjunction with the treadth, the lengety writen “4 TWO UNKNOWN PAINTINGS BY TADDEO GADDI HERE is a panel of the Virgin and Child, by Taddeo Gaddi (Fig. ft 1), showing slight, but happily unrestored, damage, bearing only ~"** ; alle Rose.’ It seems, notwithstanding, never to have been included in any of the published accounts of this master, and yet no student of the Trecento should hesitate to attribute it to him on sight.’ For in it we find almost every one of Taddeo’s customary forms, and traits which recur most persistently in both his early and late works :* the slack and lazy line, the long straight grooves in the drapery, the broad, loose hatching, the blunt lineaments, the unarticulated fingers — shapes and habits of execution everywhere stamped with his unmistakable peculi- arities. Here also appear the same border, barbaric in character (which occurs passim among his works), of the S ornament and dots and crosses ; and his typical halo.’ Our Madonna, of which the sadly repainted lunette at the Floren- tine Academy is a variant, is doubtless the surviving central panel of a polyptych of three-quarter length figures within cusped and pointed arches, the shape of which occurs again in some of Taddeo’s earlier panels, and in the upper tiers of the Pistoia polyptych. The panel has for some reason been truncated. The tone and the individual colors, the yellow of Christ’s tunic, the rose of the drapery over His legs, the orange-red of its lining, are such as one might have found in the small press panels (see Fig. 2) now in the Academy in Florence, had they been allowed to preserve their original unvarnished innocence.’ It is less sullen and more collected than Taddeo’s usual grave and shy Virgins, and the benevolently inclined head has a fresher, more trusting eye, with a gleam of something in it like self-recommendation. Its temper taken in conjunction with the breadth, the largely written design, the désinvolture would aprioristically put it among his later works. I say aprioristically, if indeed the variations of creative habit which operates at a deeper level of consciousness than those of its movements that are responsible for specific changes — lead an artist from abstraction towards naturalism, towards a greater general com- mand, a greater fluency and amplitude of expression. 59 ° ° . . . x fur id the pious profanation that jewel-offerings and coronals have left on it, Ma enna tn te Mu within a few kilometres of Florence, in the little church of S. Lorenzo a& S fa ka PARVO f. And in searching through Taddeo’s works for affinities with our Virgin, we discover them more numerous and more profound towards the end of his activity than at its beginnings. Taddeo is essentially a fresco painter (see Fig. 3), overweeningly amplifying the Giottesque conventions ; his evolution amounting to a relaxation of the plastic bulk which, so long as he remained under Giotto’s influence, was in appre- ciable measure also a positive plastic value; but as he retreated from it, his manner drifted along with the collective tendency of the age to- wards literary expressivism. And of this age it may further be said, that the sense of seeing so strong in earlier artists was growing feebler, than the sense of sentiment or situation. This general movement in Taddeo’s evolution forces our Virgin into a period wherein the disinte- gration of the plastic consistency had reached an advanced stage, but also when the artist had arrived at a mastery within his proper limita- tions. On narrow confrontation with other of his panels, our Virgin falls definitely among those that group themselves about the fully authenti- cated altarpiece dated 1355 now hanging in the Uffizi (Fig. 4), the an- cona in S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, Pistoia,’ and the polyptych in the sacristy of S. Felicita in Florence (see S.P.5). — It is true, the silhouette of the Virgin’s head, the arrangement of the - mantle over it, the shallow fluting of the lining, the types; the pose, the pantomime and the draperies of the Child in the altarpiece at S. Martino a Mensola establish an undeniable stylistic affinity with our picture, but because the surface of the former is notably harder, the treatment more formal, more timid, while ours is freer throughout, and exhibits, anthropologically speaking, more highly evolved types, this relation no more than fixes a zone of reasonable chronological limit for the S. Lorenzo Virgin. Beyond it lies the region of the Baroncelli frescoes’ (1332-1338), and of the Berlin triptych, dated 1334.” If the relative lateness of our picture remains at this point unestab- lished, the small evidence in its favor might be confirmed by analogies to a work by Bernardo Daddi. But it would, first, on general presump- tions, be natural to wonder whether the emphasis upon the glance of the eyes, uncommonly large for Taddeo, may not owe its intention to the influence of a master, who at least once before (in the case of the Berlin tabernacle of 1334) seems to have won Taddeo to direct imita- tion. But whether this analogy be fancied or not, the likelihood of its actuality increases, when we compare our Virgin with Daddi’s altar- piece in Or S. Michele,” where over and above the identity of general 60 arrangement, the motive of the Child, corresponds — with a departure only in the upper part of His figure and in His right arm — to ours. Could the likelihood of a dependence of our Virgin on Daddi’s be sub- stantiated, it would fix as the earliest possible date for its painting the year 1347, when payments were made to Daddi for the altarpiece just mentioned.” But for decisive affinities to the S. Lorenzo panel we must go to Taddeo’s S. Felicita (see S. P. 5) and to the Uffizi Virgins ; though it is with the former that the nature of the resemblance is more significant. In both the rhythmic principle in the disposition of masses, in the pro- portions, drawn out beyond his custom, is the same, and in both there is a similar curving sweep of general directions, and the same awkward and impassive drawing. He has sought the same kind of grace in the long hands, which are by so much more closely related as they exhibit fun- damental discrepancies from the short square rude ones of earlier works. His mode again of rounding the cheek cylindrically, but also externally, so that it amounts to a mere curving of the surface, the mould of the head, its poise, the shape and speculation of the eye (see also S. P. 4), in both pictures, the hair drawn diagonally over the tem- ples, the fall of the drapery, the central position of Christ’s right hand, record the same habits of construction, and phases of taste at approxi- mately the same stage of evolution. If we may judge by the signs the Uffizi panel of 1355, in its present state, gives of itself, its analogies to our Virgin are only less close than those just reviewed, though on mere dialectic grounds their relation may be considered as strengthened by the evident narrow stylistic corre- spondence between the former of these and the Felicita polyptych. But in estimating, with what scrupulous looseness soever, the chronological interval between them, we should have to remember T'addeo’s general pace of evolution, and of his later evolution in particular. Aware of the perils of hypothetical dating in the precise terms of arbitrary, prac- tical units of time, I should prefer to place it between the S. Martino and the S. Felicita pictures or —in slightly variant form — between the 1347 Daddi altarpiece and the 1355 Uffizi Virgin. A smaller” panel (Fig. 5) in the collection of Mr. Phillip Gentner, representing the apocalyptic St. John, possesses merits above the ma- jority of Taddeo’s works. Part of a scattered polyptych similar to Taddeo’s altarpiece in S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas in Pistoia,” the St. John probably stood in a course like that running over the full-length figures in this altarpiece. 61 Accepting for the present the attribution to Taddeo™ of a number of frescoes and panels without particular distinction, we may well be astonished to find such synthesis of artistic expression and such sus- tained energy in the action, as in our figure. The firmness of John’s mouth, the fixity of his gaze, the heroic pose of the eagle, the energy of its taut body and spread wings, obey the same creative impulse that has drawn the architectural contours of the figures, the Michelangel- esque design, and fixed the unalterable stability of the group in the space accorded it within the picture. Taddeo has communicated to his figure the sweep, the vision and afflatus of Revelations; and there is a good deal in the straight and long glance of John and in the proud eagle to testify that both have penetrated vast spaces to carry out the divine prophesy in that book. So that uniting the force and the swiftness of one to the heavenly gift of vision of the other, Taddeo has presented the Evangelist as the prophet who sees surely and far with inexorable justice. Considered now as the product of a period, this painting implies a view of life possible only in an age of settled and constructive convic- tions. If we find its like much later in the Sistine Ceiling, the will there is already troubled by a sensibility, and by a sense of limitation, too great to bear; to find the equal of this figure one would have to go to the great masters of the early Quattrocento. Typical for Taddeo, the small panel is typical likewise of the evolu- tion of Trecento painting in Florence in its absence of depth, of re- treating planes; and in the symmetry of the pattern which imitates the frontal mode. The color is likewise characteristic of Taddeo. The blue of the dress, the rose of the drapery, the yellow of the reverse with a green shadow, the brown of the eagle, the vermilion of the book — we find them all in the little panels of the Florentine Academy and in the Baroncelli Chapel; only that our painting has a freshness not repeated in the other of his tempera panels. So single is the radical thought, so clear is its rendering, we can see in this picture as in no other by Tad- deo, the original vision in the final realization. The shapes, the type, the progression of the line, the manner of placing the mass, the manual idiosyncracies — everything in it is pe- culiar to Taddeo. The head of the Evangelist reappears in the figure of the high-priest in the Marriage of the Virgin; in the figure at the extreme right in the Presentation of the Virgin; and, with more fu- gitive analysis of type, in the isolated figure of St. Joseph, all in the 62 Baroncelli Chapel. Only that in the Gentner St. John, the method is more concentrated, and the execution tighter. But there are in Taddeo’s oeuvre works to which our Saint bears even closer kinship, and these are a prophet (S. P. 10, 11) in the vault of the crypt at S. Miniato” and the Evangelist in the polyptych (S. P. 9) at Pistoia. The Gentner and the S. Miniato figures exhibit the same rounded contour, the same mould and its rendering in light and shad- ow, the coarse ear, the heavy neck and shoulders, the abrupt cut of the hair over the ear, the contemptuous protusion of the lower lip, the sul- len glance, the slanting eye and the drawn brow. And in these isolated features the identical execution is evident, allowing always for the difference in medium. With this the attribution of Mr. Gentner’s St. John may be consid- ered proved. To classify it more narrowly would mean to place it in one of 'T'addeo’s periods, and this is perhaps possible by comparing it to the Evangelist in the polyptych (S. P. 10, 9) at S. Giovanni Fuori- vicitas in Pistoia. The intimate and elusive characteristics which re- veal themselves in a comparison of the proportions of the two heads, their shape, the modulation of the planes, and the individual features, are so close and carry so convincing an authority, as to draw the two pictures into chronological proximity. Our St. John would thus date from about the middle of the century. NOTES 1. First published in L’Arte, 1921, 116 et seq. 2. The panel stands on the first altar left as you enter behind a tall canvas, the iconographically important portion visible through a rectangular cutting in it. 3. Carocci’s innocent eye, the only one to have noticed it at all, went so far as to divine its “maniera Giottesca” (I Dintorni di Firenze, II, 309); but the latest list of Taddeo’s works in Thieme-Becker (1920), XIII, 29, ignores it altogether. 4. Taddeo Gaddi’s artistic character is settled and tolerably well understood, but it is perhaps be- cause he is so easily distinguished, that he has been accorded no close study, and is so often con- fused with other painters. The most serious error, which betrays also a shocking want of caution, is the persistent attribution to Taddeo of the vault of S. Francesco in Pisa. (See Crowe and Cavalcaselle [Ed. Hutton], I, 307-8; Venturi, V, 538; Sirén, I, 269; Thieme-Becker, XII, 29; Van Marle, III, 303, 334). Vasari’s (I, 575-6) testimony, confirmed by a letter from Taddeo (see La scrittura di artisti Italiani, etc., Florence, 1871), holds probably for the walls and not for the vault. This testimony is moreover, vitiated by his mention of subjects as in the vault, which are not there. It is more than possible that Vasari slipped into this blunder writing from memory, and that the walls originally had frescoes by Taddeo of which nothing is visible today. The vault, however, which is of the same time —if not earlier — is unquestionably by a master under the combined influence of Simone and Pietro Lorenzetti, conclusively un-Florentine, and very likely Pisan. Other seriously misleading attributions are to be found in Sirén, I, 149-151, who disturbs the fairly even, by no means perfect, consistency of his reconstruction, by ascribing to him a triptych belonging to Mr. Frank L. Babbott in Brooklyn, and an Assumption in the Kaiser- Friedrich Museum in Berlin (Sirén, II, Pls. 128, 129), both certainly by the same master, but as certainly not by Taddeo. On the other hand Mr. Berenson (Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, New York, 1918, 7, Fig. 3) takes away from Taddeo to give to Daddi the small Nativity at Dijon. This was correctly attributed by Sirén in Monatshefte, etc., 1908, 1121. Van Marle (III, 317-321), who makes several other unaccountable attributions to Taddeo, follows Venturi (V, 531-533) in ascribing to Taddeo the Giottesque Coronation in the Medici Chapel in S. Croce. The S, Verdiana Virgin (see Sirén, Monatshefte, 1908, 1121), and the small Virgin with saints in Strassburg (Sirén, II, Pl. 131) may no longer be regarded as by Taddeo; being by the hand that decorated the chapel in the Castello at Poppi. Of the two panels recently attributed to Taddeo, the one published by Van Marle in Arr 1n America, December, 1924, 56, et seq., is not by him; the other by Sirén, Burlington Magazine, April, 1926, 185-186, is in a state that robs any conclusion of reliability. A panel, on the other hand, that might be ascribed to Taddeo, shows a small Madonna with Saints, hitherto unpublished, in the collection of Mr. Frank Gould in Maisons-Lafitte (near Paris). It resembles the Lehman panel (reproduced in Van Marle, III, 316), but is probably somewhat earlier. I owe my first knowledge of it to the kindness of Mr. Berenson. 5. Repeated with slight difference in the Annunciation at the Museo Bandini, Fiesole, and in the altarpiece at S. Martino a Mensola. 6. The obscure retreat of our picture has spared it from the hideous and barbarous folly of modern renovation; its unimpaired, refreshing physical condition, accordingly, makes any conclusive judg- ment on the basis of technical comparison with the other less fortunate works, imprudent. 7. Documented by dated payments of the year 1353. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle (II, 136, 2). As this is the final payment we are justified in allowing its stylistic remoteness from the 1355 panel to move back the period of its conception, if not of its painting, even before 1350. Reproduced Sirén, II, Pl. 133. 8. Vasari, I, 573, n. 1. See reproductions in Sirén, II, Pls. 116-121. 64 9. 10. ETS 12. 13. 14. 15. Reproduced in part in Sirén, II, Pl. 130. See reproduction in Sirén, II, Pl. 159. It wants the commonest sense of historic actuality to realize the abundance of public- and private-paintings in Florence during this period, which, in a limited variety of persisting motives, served each successive generation with an accepted and undeniable tradition; and a reasonable knowledge of artistic custom to conclude that motives such as this one of Daddi’s picture were staring at Taddeo out of any number of frescoes and panels. To take only two likely examples of those still extant there is the Virgin on the first floor of the Arte della lana and the Rucellai Madonna. It is therefore by no inevitable necessity that our picture is derived from Daddi’s, though no other painting known to me is as close to it whether in date or composition. M. .495 x .222. Sirén, II, Pl. 133. See note 4. The tradition that Taddeo painted in S. Miniato (see Sacchetti, Novelle, CXXXVI) is con- firmed by documents dated 1341-2 published in Frey, Vasari, I, 322. See also Thieme-Becker, Kiinstler Lexikon, XIII, 30; and Bollettino d’arte, IX, 237. Onkwh = Deraits From THE Works oF TAppEo GappI Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Madonna and Angels. Ruballa (near Florence), S. Giorgio, Cross. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Crucifixion. London, Mr. Kerr Lawson, Madonna. Florence, S. Felicita, Polyptych. Pisa, Camposanto, Story of Job. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Dream of Innocent III. Florence, S. Croce, Nativity. Pistoia, S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, Polyptych. Worcester, Mass., Mr. Philip Gentner, St. John, the Evangelist. Florence, S. Miniato, Prophet. Florence, S. Croce, Adoration, Fic. 2. Tappeo Gappr: AporATion Fic. 3. Tappeo Gappr: Derait From LEGEND oF Jos Academy, Florence Camposanto, Pisa a AR CoCRtre RBA AGE SRS np ANGELS ADONNA A ‘N i Gallery, ApDEO GADDI: U a" Fic. 4. Florence fhz Joun, THE EVANGELIST ST TappEo GADDI: Collection of Mr. Philip Fig, 5- Mass. , er W orcest ) entner, G : 78 2 : ' - , : ‘a z } —_—_— \ . + ‘ . . . - : eh ° . _ * - “ ~.6 N IRGI SUMPTION OF THE V S A Tommaso TONIO VENEZIANO . AN 6 Fic. Pisa ’ nt of S Conve THE PANELS OF ANTONIO VENEZIANO’ N clearing the areas of Florentine painting of lesser growths to ad- mit more light upon the greater flora, I have often happened upon works, joined by analogies of style into groups, that would subsequent- ly link themselves to some recorded name. Such a linking, however, was attended with embarrassment or diffidence, arising in the fact, that the personalities these names stand for, have, even in notable instances, remained unknown in terms of their painted works, let alone their ar- tistic character, which had been inappropriately deduced from the lit- erature of art. Among a large company of such personalities stands the admirable Vasarian figure of Antonio Veneziano, whose oeuvre I was able to ex- tend some years back beyond the limits—the only’ limits then ad- missible — of his Camposanto frescoes,*® by recognizing his hand in a Virgin and Child (Fig. 7) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.’ I hoped at the time that it might help to take me from the problem to the solution of his origins.” Hanging shyly under the name of Spinello Aretino, it led me instead more recently to the distinction of the same hand in seven other panels,’ which, while they illuminate his Pisan activity, deepen by repeating them, the traces of Antonio’s early in- fluences left in the Boston picture. Still another,’ bearing a date and a signature, I have refused to accept until the present writing, when the first serviceable photographs of it reached me.* These revealed to me, beyond any possible doubt, that the painting is by Antonio. With this single exception among his extant panels, there is unhap- pily no available data bearing on any of them. So that certain kinds of stylistic disparities between them are the sole measure of the inter- vals between their painting; and even their order may be assumed only on grounds of relative and unsubstantiable validity. On grounds so qualified, Mr. Richard M. Hurd’s® Coronation (Fig.2) would appear to be the earliest: there is an idealism about it still strenuously confined within the subjugated forms of a recent ap- prenticeship. The shape of the compartment, the cusped moulding, are of a retarded fashion, and the staging of the ceremony has retained the formula and the solemnity of the Giottesque Coronation at S. Croce, painted more than a generation before, with the material difference, 67 that here the sorrowful gravity of Christ is dramatically contrasted with the demeanor of the meek Virgin. This difference, being also a departure from the bulk of contemporary Florentine representation, approximates the principle of action to that of Antonio’s Pisan fres- coes: dramatization through contrasts. More specific analogies will begin to appear if one compare the shape of the face of our Eternal — bulging at the top of the forehead, flat from eye to lip, pushed out at the chin —to the head of the saint in the Refection of S. Ranieri (Fig. 3) at the Camposanto in Pisa; and the shape of the Virgin’s face to that of the young monk at the right of the same composition (S. P. 1). The rude, jointless hands with the oddly attached thumbs in the Coronation, reappear in the unserviceable left hands of the same figure of S. Ranieri (S. P. 11), and of the frocked youth offering him wine. Profoundly Florentine, externally Gaddesque, its crackled enamel softens the light over a surface, wherein defacements have been well enough disguised. On some equally humble occasion, probably during his Pisan so- journ, Antonio painted” the Virgin and Angels at Hannover (Fig. 4). Here again the Gaddesque formula stares out of an arrangement, which, however, lacks the coordination of filled and empty spaces to be found in Gaddi. Far from the hallowed hush of the Coronation, the lusty angels seem oblivious of their holiness. This change of mood and the way it manifests itself, record what a rude genius like Antonio’s took from the lyrical Bernardo Daddi, who becomes the tempering influence of Antonio’s maturity. One will, nevertheless, continue to find the same stiff, crooked and horny fingers here as in Mr. Hurd’s picture, and the square-headed Child looks out of the same eyes as the children over the bier of S. Ranieri in Pisa and in the Boston panel. These three heads coincide detail for detail, and exhibit the same puffed-out cheeks, the same high sloping foreheads, the same round eyes and sockets. (S. P. 12, 13, 14.) Antonio mechanically varied his types out of a full and diversified stock, to heighten the illusion of actuality, and our Virgin borrows the mask of the ecclesiastic at the saint’s right in the Refec- tion of S. Ranieri, both heads being modelled with the same untamed sense of physical density (S. P. 10, 6). The upper angel (Fig. 5) on the right of the Virgin, again simulates the monk carrying the salver at the right of the same fresco (S. P. 1). Confrontation, however, might be carried to the most illusive par- ticulars without bringing final conviction. For the proof of authorship, reposes in the tractable, watchful — in the clairvoyant attention. And 68 to such a one the identity of style between the Hannover Virgin and the Camposanto frescoes must be clear, and its realization as immediate, as revelation. So close in my opinion, is this identity, that it is rela- tively certain the two were painted at about the same time. In the very Pisan character of our picture, in fact, Owing, it is true, rather to the traces Antonio has left in subsequent painting there, than to the admis- sion of local influences — lurks the probability of its having been painted in Pisa; and this surmise, if allowed the status of a fact, would bring its painting close to the date of the Camposanto frescoes, which documents confine between 1384 and 1387. If these three years measure the whole extent of his Pisan sojourn, the painting of an Assumption (Fig. 6) now in the conventual chapel of S. Tommaso in Pisa* cannot have followed very far after that of the Hannover panel, though its inclusion within this period would de- pend upon the additional hypothesis that the present was his only visit.” Antonio’s only surviving panel on Pisan ground, the Assumption, in figures somewhat below life-size, would none the less seem to have been painted considerably later than the Hannover panel. On first glance it looks rather Sienese than Florentine; one cannot hesitate long however ; on closer view it carries one towards the following of Taddeo Gaddi, and the beginning of the last quarter of the Trecento. But for the extreme right side — where all the lost original surface has been covered by a veil of thin modern repaint — and local restorations else- where, the panel is in tolerably good state. To decide the question of its authorship, the foregoing considerations would almost commit us to a choice between Spinello Aretino and An- tonio Veneziano, two Florentines of gifts above the average, working in Pisa around 1380 and subjected to slight infiltrations of Sienese in- fluence. Between painters so distinct in character and so unlike each other, there can be little hesitation in deciding. Asuperficial glance, however, should glean enough reason to bring the painting within our master’s work. The angel on the left with long nar- row eyes and fleshy face, playing a zither, repeats the type and expression of the dropsical woman in the fresco at the Camposanto representing the Death of S. Ranieri (S. P. 5, 4), and the Virgin resembles the same figure in feature. The level upper lip of the “Assunta” will be found in the acolyte and in the putto (S. P. 12) over the bier of S. Ranieri. The large eye underscored by a line parallel to the lower lid in the profile of the piping angel at the left, reappears in the three 69 profiles turned right in the Refection of S. Ranieri at the Camposanto. The shape of the right hand of the same angel is from Antonio’s varied stock, and might have been noted in the right hand of the Hannover Virgin. While the similarity of the two upper heads on the left in both paintings should alone constitute a proof of common authorship, one would be led to expect the foreshortening of the head of the uppermost angel on the left in a more advanced stage of the Antonio who painted the angel in the corresponding position in the Hannover panel. The way he has furrowed and lighted the interval between the nose and upper lip will be found everywhere in his frescoes. One other detail that appears in both these pictures and nowhere else among his works (nor, for that matter, among those of any other Florentine) is the motive of the double ellipse in all the halos of the Assumption, save those of the Virgin, the cherubs, and the upper angel on the left; and in the right cuff and the hem of the Hannover Virgin. But though conclusive in my opinion, the occurrence of the ellipse in these two pictures makes not nearly so insinuating a proof, as the character of its stamping in the gold, or the feeling for solid mass. There are not many devotional pictures of the latter half of the fourteenth century at once so fresh, so temperate, so blissful, as the Virgin and Child (Fig. 7) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It might appropriately have been an offering of thanks or praise made by the gentle and eager spirit of the tiny donor. The painting has none of the over-urged gravity which had become, and was to remain, a con- vention before the secularization of art in Italy. There is sweetness, piety, benevolence, but no passion nor pedantry. Its animation irradiates from within. It presents the moment when a sudden gladness has floated up into the Child’s face, who, arrested by an inner movement, deeper and vaguer than His knowledge, looks up in a sort of wonder at His mother. The glance is grateful to Her and She responds with a nod full of tenderness, and proffers Him the breast. She raises the left shoulder in the act, in an attitude that had been running in the blood of Sienese art like a family trait, ever since the thirteenth century.” Our painter avoids symmetry, throwing the group off the axis to emphasize its air of impulsive spontaneity, which the action, suspended for an instant in passage, the unaccomplished movement, and the studied casual relation between the act and its end, the psychological absorption, all confer upon the picture. Even the bird is not merely an abstract symbol. He has his situation, whose logic forces him into 70 fluttering struggle for release. The profounder possibilities of the subject were not deliberately set aside, they simply found no place in the present conception. A strong and lively color flashes over the picture, rising from the dark blue of the Virgin’s mantle to a high yellow in the Child’s tunic (which is reddish in the shadow), and to the light green in the scarf over His legs. In spite of the modelling of individual parts, which car- ries the shadow to a deep gray, in spite of the architectural pattern and rounded contours, there is a singular flatness over the face of the group, which is inherent, as we shall see, in the aesthetic of this master. Christ’s body is, accordingly, faced outward and extended along the surface rather than foreshortened, and His legs are crowded in depth, cramping the right arm of the Virgin. The forms are not granted their full share of relief or of free space, in a scheme which is built up architecturally, but maintains the flatness of a facade. The vertical outer contours of the Virgin’s dress rise with the later- al boundaries of the panel toward the gracefully pointed top, em- bossed with cusps, the like of which is not to be found in the earlier Florentine painting, but commonly in Siena. The gladness, the exchange of glances, the divine familiarity, the design, are reminiscent of Bernardo Daddi, and, back of him, of the Lorenzetti, only our picture manifests a more deliberate research of infantile psychology. In the endeavor to trace the identity of the painter of our panel, accordingly, conjecture would take us to Siena, to those among her masters of the late fourteenth century, who had not forgotten the Lorenzetti (Ambrogio rather than Pietro) and still felt the strong in- centive of Daddi. But Siena produced no one who is stylistically close enough to our picture to have painted it. Nor did Florence, unaided. My refusal of the panel to Spinello Aretino,” under whose name it for some time hung, should require no substantiation. Our Virgin is too remote in temper from this grave and ponderous master, and nothing less than the failure of repeated conjecture can have been responsible for the attribution. To find a combination of Sienese and Florentine characteristics one often has to go to Pisa, and it is in Pisa, in the Camposanto, that we find our master, in three damaged scenes from the life of S. Ranieri. Admitting natural disparities between fresco and tempera, and assum- ing a discrepancy in the dates of the two paintings, the manner, the 71 types and the aesthetic content of our picture betray the same artistic personality. Antonio Veneziano has a Florentine understanding of physical den- sity, and the modelling shadow within, or beyond the edge, in the Cam- posanto series, is a Florentine convention that goes back to the thirteenth century, and in its persistence in the typically Florentine low marble- relief, manifests its suitability to a peculiarly Florentine feeling for plasticity. ‘This mode renders the figure in flat masses, as in the Ob- sequies of S. Ranieri, where it best shows its desired effects of archi- tectural solidity and breadth. Thus our Virgin’s head and the Christ’s body are modelled by a narrow margin of shadow like the figure of S. Ranieri, and the smiling putto at the right, of the above fresco; and the arms of both the frescoed figures are handled exactly as in our picture. The tendency to cut the shadow sharply at the line of the jaw in the acolyte above S. Ranieri and in the putto at the left of the group of children on the right in the same fresco, reappears in both our principal heads. Antonio is fond at times of puffing out the cheek as in the afore- mentioned acolyte, and repeats it in our Christ along with the inner contour. The cheek is treated differently again in the foremost figure in the galley in the Return of S. Ranieri, and almost exactly as it oc- curs in our donor. The faint furrows below and above the heavy out- line of the eye and the white circle round the iris, so characteristic of the frescoes, recurs in our faces. The hair drawn in strands, in the child above S. Ranieri’s head in the Obsequies of S. Ranieri, and in the old angler at the right in the Miracles of S. Ranieri, is seen elaborated, though virtually the same, in our Child. The large ungainly hands, that misleadingly recall certain ones by Spinello are of the same make as ours, and the left one of the acolyte in the Obsequies of S. Ranieri, is drawn and modelled with less hesita- tion, but on the same pattern as the right hand of our Virgin. The resemblances of type afford more obvious proof. The head of the young fisherman at the extreme right of the Miracles of S. Ranieri is a reversal of the head of our Virgin (S. P. 3, 2), only the feminine mould is rounder. But the heads incline similarly and the eyes with their long tapering tails have the same mischief-lurking glance. The nose, the sensitive depression at the corners of the mouth, and the re- cesses below the lower lip, help to constitute a family resemblance. And the Child is conceived in a spirit, and upon a model, which served the master in the painting of the putto left of the group of children at the extreme right of the Obsequies of S. Ranieri. Only our Christ is 72 / «ah oo younger, and the irradiation of joy in His face cannot yet be called rapture. The startled head of the putto left of the same fresco is equally remote in mood from the two just mentioned, but the heavy and deliberate line, the posture and the collocation of parts, are as near- ly identical with our Christ as is possible in two heads painted at dif- ferent evolutionistic moments. (S. P. 13, 12.) In the Spring of 1923, chance brought two panels representing saints Paul and Peter to Florence, where they turned up at a visiting English dealer’s, and passed directly thereupon into the collection of Charles Loeser (Figs. 8,9). Of twin shape and dimensions (.435 x .295 m.) with the same embossed course of cusped arches following the curved edge of the panel, they belong to the same polyptych. My eye was instantly struck by the identity of these courses and that of the Boston Virgin. I, then, noted that the halos had the same ground of dotted tooling, and the same triads of tiny crosses producing a notched edge around the circle, and only this difference among them, that those of the saints were appropriately less ornate. The borders of the draperies had the same width and similar ornamental motives. In view of stylistic analogies, these incidental coincidences persuaded me that the two saints stood right and left of the Boston Virgin in the original three-leaved —or, five-leaved—polyptych. Let the larger di- mensions of the central panel (.587 x .394 m.) hinder no one from ac- cepting this conclusion: the relative sizes of the three parts represent a not uncommon ratio. But now what are these “stylistic analogies?” They appear in the drawing of the left hand of Peter and those of the Madonna, of the eyes of the Child and those of St. Peter, in the swing- ing and unconstructive line of the draperies. The three panels were all painted by Antonio. To clench the proof one would only have to compare Peter’s head, his ear and his hand to those of the old man standing next the S. Ranieri in the Miracle of the Wine and the Water (S. P. 9, 7), or Peter’s Figure to the St. James at Gottingen (Fig. 10), where the thin light streaks the ridges of the folds in the same way.” The borders show the same type of ornament; the heads the same drawing and modelling; the pigment the same texture. The state of the panel representing St. James at Gottingen bestows an advantage upon it over the others. It still bears the original im- pasto, and only local restorations. His head partakes of the type of S. Ranieri in the Separation of the Wine from the Water (Fig. 11), and of the greybeard who leans a face towards him (S. P. 7), in pose and mien repeating ours. The left hand with the arched thumb 73 will not startle one to dissent, if one will try to recollect the hands at the extreme right of the Refection of S. Ranieri. The appealing glance, the suffused sentiment are Antonio’s own. His head is an almost un- modified reversal of the head of the Boston Virgin (S. P. 8, 2), and re- peats her mood. There is the same stark curve in the line, the same border and the same arbitrariness in the draperies. But for the differ- ent moulding and frame, which, notwithstanding, are joined by family likeness, one might suppose him to have stood in the same original polyptych. One more panel in the possession of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, has only the other day found its way into this group. Itis a fragment (Fig. 12) of what was originally a course of half-length saints that ran above the full- sized figures of an altarpiece. The resemblance of the medallion between the shoulders of the frames that enclose the two young saints, to those in the spandrils at Gottingen suggests a close chronological relation be- tween them. The larger heads display all the characteristic traits of the master that have been reiterated in the course of this essay; but the execution has the cursory directness of long habit. ‘The two saints, who exhibit features paralleled more visibly in the Hannover and Pisan panels, than elsewhere, are as evidently in the tradition of Gaddi; ac- cordingly it would perhaps be reasonable to place them nearest the former picture. Until recently I have been confined by ignorance to the usual cau- tious inconclusiveness, in dealing with the small panel at S. Niccolo Reale in Palermo. In an article published in Art in America for April, 1923, I felt obliged to deny it to Antonio.” The panel” lists the names of departed members of the Confrater- nity of S. Niccolé in four double columns, which alternate with three decorative bands containing medallions with busts of saints. The four corners of the square are held by the four Evangelists in larger medal- lions. This area is crowned by a gable-shaped representation of the Scourging of Christ (Fig. 13) with still larger medallions containing Mary and John lamenting at its sides. Just under it stands an inscrip- tion with the date of the painting: MIJIILXXXVIII.* In the sig- nature below the two lowest medallions, only the following is legible: A (a small part of the downward stroke of what may have once been an N) LO ... DA VINEXTASPTINAT =. This is the only painting by Antonio bearing both the autographed name and date, but as it is the only one we possess on so small a scale, we should have to know just how far to avail ourselves of it as a basis 74 for further attributions. So that apart from helping to clench those al- ready made, by repeating the testimony furnished by other paintings, its inclusion among his works will help us only in a limited measure in placing any given panel with any greater precision in a chronological order. But before going any farther, let us see if it is possible to draw the S. Niccolo panel securely into the line of Antonio’s works. First, then, let me say that the mutilated signature need not be regarded as conclu- sive evidence of authorship ; and even if complete, it might refer to an- other painter of Venetian origin with a similar Christian name. Of the patronymic, which would distinguish our Antonio from all others, barely two letters are left, and these are not in our Antonio’s name as given in documents. In any case the signature can only be considered decisive when confirmed by the internal evidence of style. This it has been difficult to reach under the conditions under which the picture is at present visible, and to make examination still harder, the surface though essentially in good state is grimy and worn in spots. But once the eye has got its chance, the picture yields the in- formation one requires, and adds faith to one’s final convictions. It should not take one long to find it charged with Antonio’s peculiarities. The summary, sweeping, decisive line, swifter here than in his frescoes or larger panels, carries in it Antonio’s character at every point. The types are spirited, and there is a vivid animation about his figures which is lost when they are stretched to large scale. The pattern in conjunction with the chiaroscuro render shapes that are paralleled in the frescoes, and as might be expected, in the small figures chiefly. Thus the heads of the mariners in both the representations of ships, show the same juxtaposition of lights and darks, the same vividness of life in the impulsive movements, the same type of realism as the Scourging in Palermo. There is a broad and widening track of the brush to render the high light on the nose, rising above the same shad- ows at either side of it, with a similar setting of the eye in the mari- ners of the Embarkation (Fig. 14) and in the Scourging. Allowing for obvious differences, analogies as conclusive will appear between the S. Niccold panel and the larger panels. An interesting instance of such analogy is afforded by the Loeser St. Paul and the left flagellant in the Palermo Scourging, to be discussed later. They have the identical pattern and type, only that the latter is more emphatically charac- terized, and that the characterization is more concentrated than in the larger painting. The hands in the Palermo panel reveal a 75 feeling that may also be detected in the hands in the frescoes. The arched thumb and the rounded interval between it and the index finger, so frequent in the frescoes, recur in the panel, especially in the St. John, the Evangelist and the St. Matthew (Fig. 15) who so closely resembles the sleeping greybeard in Pisa (Fig. 16), but the smaller scale brings with it shorter fingers, drawn more closely together, and though clenched, in instances, with a similar tension, they are bounded by a swifter line. ‘The huge ears, present everywhere in Antonio’s frescoes, reappear in the St. Luke and in the St. Mark, only more conspicuously than elsewhere in this panel. In the drapery there are analogies be- tween the smaller figures in the Camposanto frescoes and the Scourg- ing in the choice of its prominent features, and the instantaneous way they are set down; between the sweeping folds of the St. Paul and those of the S. Niccolo St. Luke. But these particulars should be regarded merely as indications of immanent affinity. All these panels are linked together by points of crucial agreement among themselves, as well as to the documented paintings at the Cam- posanto. But while they are all by the same hand, the aesthetic and material factors in the production of panel and fresco painting divide them. Their differences originate in the divergent aesthetic intention of the two techniques. It was designed that the Camposanto frescoes should deploy the miraculous gests of a venerable saint rather as his- toric than as symbolic events. To compass this Antonio crowds and animates his scenes by juxtaposing rapt and wandering or amused at- tention, and sudden movements, in emphatic contrast, in order to simulate the full and random shuffle of life, the life of a quick and hardy race, magnified to heroic scale and moving against the back- ground of soaring Cyclopean cities. Such a type of narrative had to go in search of large wall spaces, had to be painted upon slowly drying intonaco — which means rapidity of execution —in a medium that produces a pale lustreless surface. ‘The bands that run around the four sides of each compartment are but a means of delimiting it. The panel, on the other hand, standing free of the wall, begins by being confined to a much more limited area by the dimensions of the altar, and the physical nature of wood. Unlike fresco, the slow, strati- fied tempera-technique brings up a richer color against a gold back- ground, which replaces the sky, and haunts the painting with sugges- tions of space and of light. The altarpiece stands alone over a sym- metrical altar, a symbol of eternity before the worshipper who bows be- 76 fore it in absorbed prayer. It avoids progressive action which would require continuous space, and would besides tend to fix it in time; and declares itself rather in terms of “being.” The figures against this ab- stract setting are faced outward in a single plane and in a bilateral arrangement from left to right — immobilized by the altarpiece’s in- herent symmetry in which the two halves neutralize each other. And any betrayal of feeling in the faces is there by a concession, which those later less austerely religious ages have wheedled from the relaxed holi- ness of the sacred personages. Panel painting is thus committed by its function and its materials to the idealistic mode. And the presentation being ideal, the frame, does not merely delimit it as in the essentially realistic fresco, but is absorbed in its plan and decorative organization. It determines the architectural character and independence of the panel. Accordingly, while the panels and frescoes of Antonio Veneziano are radically iden- tical in style, these differences, as I have said, isolate the panels, and open through them upon a more intimate corner of Antonio’s genius. They confess finally to certain influences with less reserve. If the wall paintings exhibit radical forms derived exclusively from Taddeo Gaddi; if his sprawling scenes puff out Taddeo’s pompous and clumsy decorations ; if the make, scale, pattern, type and state of his figures, the hands, the hair, are habitual adaptations from him; the panels uncover a more poetic temper in Antonio, which tends to dis- guise his Gaddesque origins, by showing him now under the influence of Daddi, now under that of the Sienese. It is true that the Hurd Coronation and the Hannover Virgin con- tinue the testimony of the Life of S. Ranieri. The stolidity, the squareness of the figures in these two panels, their bearing, and their types, are out of Gaddi’s studio-stock, but the lusty voices of the angels of the Hannover picture seem already to be raising a protest against the sullen dumbness of Antonio’s master. The first hint of specific appropriation from Siena comes in the sen- timent of the St. James and the Boston Virgin — an appropriation one might think due, as I once have, to the mediation of Daddi, and with right possibly, in spite of certain explicit features—here and else- where — in Antonio, not present in Daddi, nor in his taste, nor again Florentine, but apparently come along with more essential characters from Siena. Though it is hazardous to be too precise in separating influences so deeply rooted in a Florentine subsoil, it would seem likelier, in the light of what he took in details from Sienese painting, 77 that he had gone directly to the Sienese. The sentiment in the relation between mother and child in the Boston panel especially, flatters sucha view. But if one finds the like of it more often in Siena in the Lorenzet- ti, one will also find it nearer home in Florence in Daddi’s Virgin now in the Naples Museum, not to mention many similar works of sculpture. The architectural mass bound by verticals in the Boston panel, is canonically Florentine; it serpentines downward, however, in — to take the most conspicuous of extant instances— as in the Ambrogio Lorenzetti Virgin in Mr. Platt’s collection, or in his Virgin in S. Fran- cesco in Siena. And yet its bodily twist also resembles the movement of the Virgin in Daddi’s Uffizi triptych. The type of Mr. Loeser’s St. Paul is more explicitly Sienese in derivation ; just as the beauty-proud young falconer at the extreme left of the Separation of Wine from Water in the Camposanto haunts many a Sienese painting and seems here to be aping the youth in the foreground of A. Lorenzetti’s Consecration of St. Nicholas of Bari (one of four scenes illustrating his life) at the Uffizi. The S. Tommaso Assumption follows the traditional Sienese for- mula for the subject, even if the masses are left large, and the surface has nothing of the Sienese ripple. The close adherence of the Virgin’s dress to Sienese fashion renders it even likely he had a specific model before him; and more than one detail, the angels’ wings for example, the fall of loose rich locks over the neck — of the uppermost angel on the left particularly — are of Sienese cut and fashion. But perhaps the most exclusively Sienese of all his borrowings, is the ornamental detail of the double ellipse, which occurs in the As- sumption and again in the Hannover picture. This particular, besides, being profoundly un-Florentine in taste, and appearing in no other Florentine instances known to me, is frequent in Siena as early as Duc- cio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and as late as Matteo.” Another feature as un-Florentine in form, as it is strikingly Sienese, is the cusp running within the arch of the frame of the Boston — Loeser triptych, of the Hannover Virgin and Angels, and of the St. James. The like of it occurs from one end to the other of Sienese painting, but closest to the present instances in Simone’s Christ’s Return from the Temple at Liverpool and the Senator Clark triptych by Vanni. Here and there, the types, and chiefly in some of the profiles, seem foreign ; and Antonio’s treatment is occasionally so un-Florentine as to make one wonder how and where he could have come by it. The soft modelling of the smaller heads; of the donor in the Boston panel and 78 of some of the mariners in the Camposanto, of the heads in the me- dallions over the St. James, and in Mr. Hurd’s two saints there is a chiaroscuro that suggests Sienizing painters of Northern Italy like Giovanni da Milano or Barnaba da Modena both of whom he prob- ably knew, and on either of whom he might willingly have drawn. Finally the thin streak of light on the ridge at the ends of the folds, most evident in the healthy surface of the Loeser saints, and of the St. James, appear, in Andrea Vanni, and clearer than elsewhere in his two well-preserved saints at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and in the drapery of Beato Andrea Gallerani by the same master in a private collection in Perugia.” This enumeration of Sienese analogies would dispose one for the conclusion that Antonio was at some moment following his formation, deeply taken by the spell of Sienese art, that he became steeped in its atmosphere, which he drew in with the air he breathed. The likelihood of Siena as the site of this influence is heightened by entries Milanesi found under the dates 1369 and 1370 in the books of the Works of the Sienese Cathedral, recording that Antonio (di Francesco da Venezia) worked for that church in company with Andrea Vanni.” This scrap of information then would prove, that at a relatively early period in his activity, a first hand and abundant Sienes influence was accessible to him, fifteen years before he is registered in Pisan documents, and when he was still young enough to feel its enchant- ments and carry them about in him. In Pisa we know, they continued, as they had doubtless begun in Florence,” where as in Pisa, Sienese paintings were present in sufficient abundance. To these enchantments as I have said, the panels bear more evident testimony than the frescoes.” More poetic than large realistic repre- sentations they find more to imitate in the lyrical painting of Siena. And painted in a different medium, within diverse material limitations, they betray the weakness of this rude though stately Florentine for its mobility of temperament, for its melodic line; albeit a true Florentine’s remoteness from the heart of its genius. The most Sienese of them all, the Boston — Loeser triptych, his St. James, exhibit a tendency, a movement, which while still involved in the inconvertible Florentine bulk, already anticipate the Gothicism of Lorenzo Monaco and of the early Quattrocento. 79 IO. II. 12. 13. 14. NOTES . This essay has been partly anticipated in two separate studies in Arr 1x America for April, 1920, p. 99 and August, 1923, p. 217. . The fragmentary frescoes — of which the Christ here reproduced (Fig. 1) is the best preserved figure —in the ruined tabernacle at the Torre degli Agli, at Nuovoli, near Florence, have on Vasari’s word (II, 666) been accepted as Antonio’s. On purely internal evidence I should at present incline to attribute the surviving wreck to Antonio, because of clear affinities to the Camposanto cycle, without attributing it entirely to his hand, on account of a certain hesitation in statement. Of all the frescoes at the Camposanto, other than the S. Ranieri scenes, given to Antonio by Vasari (I, 665-6), and Cavalcaselle (II, 286-7), only the two flying angels and the two adjoining angels in medallions bearing legends, under Traini’s Hermit Life, are by him. . Ciampi, Notizie Inedite, etc., 151-152. Vasari, II, 663-666. Lest, 1,°282,.n. 2: . Published in Arr rv America, 1920, p. 99. . See note 23. . Five of these were published in 1923 in the August number of Arr mv America. Altogether I recognize Antonio’s hand in eight panels; rejecting all, but most emphatically the following, among those that have been openly claimed for him: A Crucifix at S. Croce (attributed tenta- tively by O. Sirén, Giottino, Leipzig, 1908, 94, to Antonio, and restored here p. 49 to the Master of the Fogg Pieta); a Bearded Prophet, reproduced in the Artaud de Montor Catalogue, Paris, 1843, plate 17 (attributed by Schmarsow, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1898, 502, to Antonio, later properly ascribed by Sirén, in Lorenzo Monaco, Strassburg, 1905, 44, to Lorenzo Monaco); a fragment of six Apostles, in the Gallery at Altenburg, and the Nardesque Saints in Munich (attributed by Schmarsow to Antonio in the Festschrift zu Ehren des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, Leipzig, 1898, 131); a Pieta in the Jarves Collection at Yale University, attributed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle (first English Ed., I, 491) when belonging to “Mr. Jervis in Florence,” and by Rankin (American Journal of Archaeology, 1895, II), to Antonio Veneziano. See Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, New Haven, 1927, 42, where this Pieta is attributed to Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli. . The panel in S. Niccolé Reale, Palermo; reproduced as a whole in Testi, I, 289, 291. . Through the kind offices of Mrs. Walker D. Hines. . Formerly in a collection in Florence. I note here as a curiosity that may be interesting to the student, Raimond Van Marle’s disagree- ment with this attribution (III, 451). See Stechow, Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, 1924-5, 209, who seconds my opinion. Van Marle (op. cit., V, 248) airily ascribes this picture to Turino Vanni, the Second, who, by having the works of several masters confused with his own in these pages, renders the attribution even more perplexing. One wishes some document would turn up to prove that this is part of the altarpiece Antonio painted for the organ-chapel in the Cathedral of Pisa in 1387 (see B. Supino, Il Camposanto di Pisa, Florence, 1896, 135); Forster, Beitrage, etc., 117-118. : This position of the body occurs in only those Florentines who have exposed themselves to the influences of the Sienese among whom it appears with frequency. A designation bestowed upon it in the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (for 1916, XIV, 12), by Osvald Sirén, who has since verbally admitted the attribution to Antonio. The 80 ye. 16. 77. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. Museum authorities, I am pleased to see, have altered the label, but not without inserting a timid qualification. This attribution is accepted in Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, in the article cited in note 10. I had known the picture in a poor photograph only. m. 1.50 X 1.00. To read as 1388. See De Marzo, La Pittura in Palermo nel Rinascimento (Palermo, 1899), 48, 49; also Testi, I, 288-292. To take familiar instances, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maesta in Massa Marittima, Sassetta’s Ma- donna in Chiusdino, and Matteo di Giovanni’s Madonna in the collection of Mr. Clarence Mackay. This is not to say that this peculiarity occurs in no other master. Milanesi, Documenti Senesi, I, 305. Registered in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali in Florence in the year 1374. If the panels added to the frescoes broaden the basis for his Florentine derivation and his Sienese influence — they help to contravert the now unfashionable, but still reiterated, absurdity that Antonio was formed on Altichiero, first suggested by Schubring (Altichiero und Seine Schule, Leipzig, 1898, 131) assumed by Testi (I, 286), and, evasively, by Venturi (V, 916). The exact contemporaneity of the works of these two masters alone defies this thesis. Van Marle (III, 451, 452) derives him from Maso, and the painters confused with him, but this can result only from an incomplete and erroneous view of the masters involved. Antonio, as I have pointed out, is intimately Gaddesque in his radical type, and in his statement. SI Ae DETAILS FROM THE ParntTincs or ANTONIO VENEZIANO 1. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 8. Géttingen, University Gallery, St. James. 2. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Madonna 9. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser, St. Peter. 3. Pisa, Camposanto, Miracles of S. Ranieri. 10. Hannover, Kestner Museum, Madonna and Angels. 4. Pisa, Camposanto, Obsequies of S. Raniert. 11. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 5s. Pisa, S. Tommaso, Assumption. 12. Pisa, Camposanto, Obsequies of S. Ranieri. 6. Pisa, Camposanto, Refection of S. Ranieri. 13. Boston, Museum of Fine Art, Madonna. ee eee ee ae eee eae aR ae FE RS SS AR OP lee SS SRS, TPO, he I Amasle PS at EEE EOE We, vi Fic. 1. Antonio VENEZIANO: Last Fic. 12. Antonio VENEZIANO: Two SaInTS JUDGMENT (Detatt) Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, New York Tabernacle, Nuovoli L\Se Fic. 2. Antonio VENEZIANO: CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN Fic. 3. Antonio VENEZIANO: REFEcTION oF S. RANIERI Collection of Mr. Richard M. Hurd, New York Camposanto, Pisa ri} — iz Fic. 4. Antonio VENEzIANO: Maponna AND ANGELS Fic. 5. Antonio VENEZIANO: Maponna Anp AnceEts (DETAIL) Kestner Museum, Hannover, Germany Kestner Museum, Hannover, Germany Fic. 8. Antonio VENEZIANO: St. Paut Fic. 7. Antonio VENEZIANO: Maponna AND CHILD Fic. 9. Antonio VENEZIANO: St. PETER Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. Collection of Mr. Charles Loeser, Florence Fic. 10. AntTonto VENEZIANO: ST. JAMES Frc. 11. Anronto VengziANo: Mrracte or SEPARATION OF THE WINE FROM THE WatTER (DeraiL) University Gallery, Gottingen, Germany ° Camposanto, Pisa Fic. 13. Antonio VENEZIANO: THE Scourcinc oF Curist (Detai.) Church of S. Niccolo, Reale, Palermo Fic. 14. Antonio Veneziano: Tue Emparcation (Deratt) Camposanto, Pisa Fic. 16. Antonio VENEZIANO: THE Miracle OF THE WINE AND THE WarTEeR (DeEraiz) Camposanto, Pisa Regge SE eee 5 Pas | pen “ge << je fe F f t \ . wy TAG nse AnTonio VENEZIANO: St. MatrHew Church of S. Niccold, Palermo (Deratt) —" ~ fa WENA MHA a a ee Be eee iP 7 ee “ — EP. NNT RLS Nicco.o pi Prerro Gerini: St. ANTHONY es Fic. ANGELS ND THE ABBOT A ardner Muscum, Fenway Court, Boston G NICCOLO DI PIETRO GERINI' NTIMATE knowledge of the Florentine Trecento is still so scat- tered, our command of its aesthetic and evolution still so uncertain, that we should hardly regard the two pictures here reproduced a necessary pretext for a reconsideration of the most prolific, if unequal, of masters on the declining slope of the century. The pictures besides, (and we shall speak of them first) being, in spite of all stylistic dispari- ties, of the same period, help us to a complete and closer view of an advanced stage in Niccol6 di Pietro Gerini’s activity. The earlier of the two, in fact, the Virgin at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston (Fig. 1), so much higher in pitch than other pictures by him, might well reconstitute the disparaging estimate critical con- vention has made of him. It is the most genial and well-rounded of his works, and nowhere else does he as happily sustain the mood from first to last. If his Crucifix (Fig. 2) at S. Croce, his diffuse Entomb- ment (Fig. 3), with all its fundamental difficulties, represent the best he was capable of, never again is he so lyrical, never again does he find a note so well suited to his voice. This radical character, indeed, of our Virgin, while it distinguishes it from the run of painting in his own day or of that of earlier Giotteschi, brings it close to the work of the Cioni, whose influence was strong and enduring within the Gerini school. Its presence in our picture is persuasive, even if Niccolo’s method is more rigid, more dryly intellectual. Its peculiar aesthetic is the result of a scrupulous tempering of all the components, which reduces their individualities until they integrate themselves by close and reciprocal cohesion. ‘They cease at a certain moment to be objects of visual apprehension to become objects of men- tal synthesis. The master has simplified the inner contours, and am- plified the outer edge to a unified continuity. Outline thus becomes an architectonic rather than a descriptive element and both figures, close-locked and upright, are held firmly within it. By the same prin- ciple the throne has been frontally placed, the group appropriately evading a rigid symmetry ; but the symmetries of both being concentric, the two terms, the architecture and the figures, are, on this account, at once assimilated to, and differentiated from, eachother. In harmonious agreement with the architecture at one moment, the suspended action 83 and the reticent figures detach themselves from its immobility at the next. Even the conspicuous horizontals at the base and the seat of the throne, and of the Virgin’s lap only serve to set off theimmanent and centralizing verticality. Everything within the frame holds together under a controlling upright symmetry, while the extended surfaces of the figures, and the spread throne sustain the flatness of a facade. As the eye moves upward from the broad to the suggestive passages, along the leading lines that converge in the Virgin’s head at the eminence of the topmost angle, it takes in all the tranquil majesty in the ascent. Below it we scarcely become aware of movement or action. Behind it the crockets wave like feathers. The Virgin’s head, the gentle hesitating hands, harbor a certain intensity. And we become sensible of the unexpressed thought, the contained movement, a sentiment not urged, barely articulated, by the same quality in the design. In our attribution of the Boston picture only its spiritual grace may give us pause. All the particulars come clean out of Niccold’s formula. Every stroke is true to his artistic character in so eminent a degree that the picture might be autographed, like the single figure of St. Catherine at Prato (S. P. 2, 3), which it most clearly resembles. Al- lowing for the diversities of medium, of the procedé and of proportion, the construction of the two heads and the total look are identical. There is a feature-for-feature correspondence. The eyes in both are long and narrow, and the more extended ones dip and rise at the cor- ner. The noses are similarly foreshortened, the mouths have the same arrow-head at the upper lip, and both have the same frail chin. In method our picture is yet closer to the Baptism in the National Gallery. It manifests the same type of flat modelling, the same drawing, the same quietism. In the arrangement, again, the design, profess their superiority over, but also their affinity with, the Virgin on the high altar at S. Croce.” In both we find the unyielding line drawn like wire along the edges of the drapery and the contours of the hands; the same throne, the same hair and the same scarf over it. The identity of the hands and the Christ in our picture and those in a panel representing the Virgin at the Museum in Avignon (a reversal of the S. Croce Virgin) establishes an identity of authorship, and the relative con- temporaneity of the three panels. Our Madonna, finally in many re- spects anticipates the central compartment of the 1404 altarpiece (No. 11) at the Academy in Florence. And the period of its painting would fall among these works, one of 84 which only, the National Gallery Baptism is dated (1387). Our picture would appear.to approximate the period of the several others which are later, the Baptism establishing with fair certainty a terminus ante. But as caution is more prudent than too narrow precision in all matters of chronology, it is reasonable to place our picture in a period between the Baptism and the Prato frescoes’ (dating probably from about 1395) which would mean around 1392. In the Virgin belonging to Mr. Ryerson (Fig. 5) the proportion of the uncovered area to the group is designed to isolate and enhance its plastic solidity. There is no place for spatial suggestions; no ex- pansion. The level background is reduced to the special and limited function, of quickening and reinforcing our apprehension of the cubic mass, of the visible passage from flatness to relief. The parts being extended, we read from left to right along a surface sustained at a swelling evenness of low plasticity. The artist avoided breaking into the space to draw the eye inward, to prolong and complicate the sug- gestions of depth with foreshortening and overlapping. Our picture then, recommends itself primarily by a determinate and quantitative roundness proper to periods that belonged originally and essentially to sculpture. Tectonically our picture is Giottesque. The organization of struc- ture through immanent movement was the exploit and glory of another century, but the Trecento had begun with a vision of form in which the forces of life triumph over the dead weight of gravity. Does not much of the fundamental aesthetic of figure art arise out of the balanced con- flict of these two principles? The full weight of the solid Child, the relaxed and inclining head of the Virgin are drawn into close opposition to the rise of the verticals. And in effect with its balance of up-and- down tendencies: of weight bearing downward, of resistance holding it at equilibrium, our group is in essence architectural. It conforms throughout to the boundaries of the picture, and the generalized con- tour rising with the sides of the frame closes at the top under its arch. The mass thus becomes part of the total architectural idea. The ulti- mate fact of its aesthetic, then, abides in the constant conflict and reconciliation between the sense of growth and the sense of gravity, and the whole seen ingenuously has the character, and something of the grandeur, of a cathedral. Undifferentiated below, the mass complicates as it proceeds upward. The interest has been swept into the more variegated area within the arc from one elbow to the other of the Virgin, and the curved gable 85 formed by the line from head to shoulder on one side and continuing along the two heads on the other. The system of long crossing and recrossing lines generalizes this part of the picture for the eye, and simplifies the action. The main lines, those of the forearm of the Virgin, of the Child’s arm, of the eyes, of the parallel axes of the two heads, are graphic abstractions of the psychological moment. The Mother lays her hand tenderly on the Child, the Child caresses the Mother, and the reciprocity is implicit in their glances. However, as in all artistic expression, the sentiment is but another manifestation of the visible characters, and there is just so much of it here as will go into the specifically artistic terms of the painting. The yearning in the Virgin’s face may be read easily enough, but it will not fire the imagination. If it reaches the Child it does not penetrate Them both, and the panto- mime becomes almost wholly symbolic. But is our Virgin by Niccolo di Pietro? A question that involves the radical one of his identity. Cavalcaselle and more recently Dr. Sirén* have gone far enough in their reconstruction of this master to make more conclusive definition possible. An artist is but the sum of works consistent among themselves, and constant to the stylistic char- acter of those that are authentic. Our attribution must ultimately rest on the concept of the total personality — our proof upon confrontation with single, and if possible undeniable examples. The shapes then, and the types of the Ryerson Virgin may be found again in the signed and dated frescoes in the church of S. Fran- cesco, Pisa. The silhouette of the Virgin’s head, her face, its large mould, the glance, the strong neck are repeated, with certain adventi- tious differences, in the haloed woman behind the Magdalen of the Resurrection, and in the Blessed Virgin of the Ascension. The total aspect comes yet closer to other paintings, all of them modelled upon the same set of ideations, the same composite image: the Virgins in the Musée Calvet in Avignon, on the high altar at S. Croce in Florence, and in Prof. A. Kingsley Porter’s collection in Cambridge, Mass. But the resemblance — amounting almost to identity — of our Virgin to the St. Lawrence in the polyptych (dated 1404) at the Academy in Florence, puts the identity alike of hand and period be- yond all question. Niccolo’s development carried him from tall, un- articulated, leptocephatic to the compact, round-headed, flat-crowned type, from the narrow to the full eye. The St. Lawrence and our Virgin exhibit the same measure of these two characteristics at a conspicuous degree of similarity. But the analogies go farther and deeper: St. 86 Lawrence’s carriage, his bulk and make correspond with those of our Virgin, and he is grave and heavy-lipped like her. Now, as Niccolo’s evolution was uncommonly slow, degrees of resemblance or disparity between his works will not be disposed to the commonly implicit de- velopmental measures. I should incline, accordingly, to place the pic- ture within a chronological field, let us say, five years on either side of St. Lawrence’s date. But the conformity of our child to the type in the S. Croce altarpiece, and of the Virgin to somewhat earlier instances in works already mentioned, would, for an additional number of minuter, and more fugitive reasons, move Mr. Ryerson’s picture back towards the year 1400. If the natural sequel to purely intuitive reflexes be their determi- nation with reference to some one or several partis pris, then the process of separating the works of Niccolo di Pietro Gerini will be more difficult than in the case of almost any other Florentine, because the artistic content seldom carries us beyond the zone of common undiffer- entiable aesthetic experience. The imagination is indisposed to de- scend from its level to compass him, and barring a small number of exceptional cases, consents to do violence to the sensibilities only to have done with him once and for all. Owning then a primary artistic deficiency in Niccold’s work, it is impossible to make a positive estimate of it, because criticism arises in positive aesthetic adventure. Like Taddeo Gaddi, who was probably his first master, he fails to project himself by a want in the most dynamic and transforming of creative forces, intensity of the imagination. It is by this supreme en- ergy that vision becomes revelation, and revelation finally passes into emotion at the moment when it draws all differentiated details into the aesthetic vortex. But before his frescoes — at Pisa or Prato for ex- ample — the eye gropes, but fixes nowhere, and the attention hangs loose, there being no immediately discoverable relation between space and pattern or shape and shape. There is no compositional tension to hold them together. With an equal claim on our interest everywhere, mass and movement, repose and action are scattered over the surface to produce a sense of material progression, of physical importance, or merely a negation of void. The abstract currents of lines and masses, their organization in depth, are confused and uncertain, because his art is an externaliza- tion of vision that is neither immediate nor synthetic. He ends by 87 loading us with aesthetically unjustifiable circumstances or exhausts us with inanition. Nor, again, is there any element of sensibility in his work. Belong- ing to the grosser artistic intelligences, his paintings strike upon us with a brutal hardness. There is a total absence of quality. Instead he gives us the vision of a barren world of low-browed, obtuse, rock- hewn saints and great heroic clean-lipped women, sullen rather than solemn, ponderous rather than monumental, stolid rather than severe. To complicate the initial difficulty of classification, the work of Niccolo is too often involved with that of pupils and fellow-artists whose help he needed to carry on the business of turning out a huge number of frescoes and altarpieces. Few other Italian painters of such contemporary reputation called in the assistance of as many collaborators. This mixture of hands seriously troubles the special problem of the critic, who would discover the guiding artistic per- sonality among those mixed with it, and differentiate between, first the unchanging, and then, the unstable principles of his style: his personality and his evolution. But as Niccolo’s artistic personality is so inextricably bound up with others, rather than seek to isolate it, we must content ourselves with tracing the progress of this many- headed hydra, which, with all its complexities, after all proceeds towards a common aim along a common course. It is accordingly, not impossible to determine the direction in which his art drifted. The problem of his origins is only in the course of solution. It is generally assumed that Niccolo was T'addeo’s pupil, and that there the problem ends. But the likelihood of this notion is diminished by a narrow scrutiny of the work — early as well as late — which discloses another influence, at least as determining in the total effect of his painting. This is the influence of Orcagna, for which the early docu- ments alone — running between 1370 and 1373 — ought to dispose us. In these he is spoken of as working in collaboration with Jacopo di Cione, who had taken over the practice of his brothers Nardo and Andrea. An independent master in 1368 (when he is registered in the Guild of the “Medici e Speziali”), he must still have been a young man, with his death occurring forty-seven years later, and must, judging from his works alone, have been deeply affected by Orcagna in the pre- ceding ten or even fifteen years. His early attested collaboration with Jacopo, which I have men- tioned above, tells us nothing about Niccolo’s first manner, because his share was nominal only, and the two Coronations, in London and 88 Florence, are by Jacopo from beginning to end, but the other incon- testable works by him and his ambient, hold a large element of Orcag- nesque influence. It is interesting that the painting, which professes it almost exclusively and more than any other by Niccolo, should be the Nation- al Gallery Baptism, the predella of which is full of the sullen reminis- cences of Taddeo. The sharpness of definition, and the color an- nounce the Orcagnesque affinity at the start, and the mould and out- ward truculence of Peter and John recall Nardo’s male types. But it is the figure of St. Paul that most completely betrays its origin. Whereas the Christ bears a more general relation to the characters in the Or- cagna’s polyptych in S. Maria Novella, the Paul is taken directly from the same personage in this altarpiece. Inessential deviations apart, the total pattern, posture, the draping, the glance, the shape of the crani- um, are very nearly identical in both; but the direct derivation of Gerini’s figure is settled by the scalloped hair, by the long, straight sharp-edged folds, by the zigzag light on the right arm, by a detail, typically Orcagnesque and as common in Gerini, the caret of the upper lip; by the relative position of the feet, and the way the stuff breaks over them. Less evident, but conclusive liens between the two masters will be found in almost every one of Gerini’s paintings, but chiefly in the types, the sharp lighting and hard definition of the Academy Entombment, the Gardner St. Anthony, the S. Croce Virgin; in the pure drawing of the hands, most conspicuous in the Boston Virgin. These appropriations overlay characters taken from Taddeo in a still earlier stage of Niccolo’s formation, but harmoniously fused from the first. The following series based upon dated works, represents a sus- tained stylistic change in Niccold’s activity though it would be pre- posterous to claim that such a change is discoverable between any two consecutive works. While the direction of his evolution may be cor- rectly indicated, the order of the items is not determinable. I have tried besides to differentiate between those works in which Niccold’s intimate characters were traceable and for those which he was less directly responsible, scrupulously avoiding too great precision in the absence of precise tokens. Tue Works or Niccotd D1 Pierro Gerini 1370. London, National Gallery. Triptych: Coronation, Saints and Angels. Ordered from Niccolo di Pietro Gerini and Jacopo di Cione. First 89 1373. recorded commission to Niccolé. The cartography and the treatment is of the school of the Cioni throughout, without a trace of Niccold’s participation. Reproduced Sirén, II, Pl. 220; Van Marle, III, 495. Florence, Academy. Coronation. Commissioned for the Zecca Vecchia from Niccolé di Pietro and Jacopo di Cione, but here again Niccolé seems to have had no share in the execution whatever. Reproduced Van Marle, III, 494. 1380. Florence, S. Croce, Castellani Chapel. Crucifix. (See Fig. 2). 1386. Inscription A. D. MCCCLXXX Mess Iu Ter Ven Dni Miniatis ABBATIS. Earliest dated work by Niccolo. Still very Gaddesque (cf. with Tad- deo’s crucifixions in sacristies of Oquissauti, and of S. Croce, Florence). The Christ and particularly the head is so close to Taddeo’s Crucifix at Ruballa in the church of S. Giorgio, as to tempt one to the theory of direct influence. Drawing anticipates Entombment, and the Pisa frescoes. Florence, Academy. Entombment. (See Fig. 3). His most ambitious panel. Betrays his derivation from Taddeo, but is already a mature work and full of his constant characters. Philadelphia, Johnson Collection. Pieta. ‘~o *) 36% x 24%e Ins- A product of Niccolé’s shop, probably on his design. New York, Formerly Mr. Carl Hamilton. Crucifixion. Munich, Dealer. The Crucified between the Virgin and St. Anthony. Florence, Bigallo, Sala del Consiglio. Fresco: The Return of Lost Chil- dren by the Captains of the Misericordia to their Mothers. Reproduced in Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, 1926, Fig. 114. Authenticated and dated by document of final payment to Niccold di Pietro Gerini and Ambrogio di Baldese (See Il Bigallo, Florence, Fratelli Alinari, 1905, pp. 24, 25, 45). Dr. Sirén in his Catalogues of the Jarves Collection, and of a Loan Exhibit of Italian Primitives held in New York in 1917, endeavours by separating the already known form-image of Niccolé from the fresco, (wherein the mixture of two styles renders the residuum all too uncertain) to arrive at the formula of Baldese, whose name he joins to a group of paintings constant to a single artistic personality, consistently professing contact with Bicci di Lorenzo and possibly Lorenzo Monaco, and a stage in the collective development proper to the second quarter of the 15th century. The hypothetical Baldese of the Bigallo fresco, however, seems to be an independent master in 1386, is born therefore in all likelihood between 1350 and 1360, and in the fugitive signs he gives of himself demonstrates a much crasser sense of weight and of life than Dr. Sirén’s master of paper saints and imponderable Virgins. I am glad to see that Van Marle, III, 610, follows this: view. gO 1387. 1392. Fiesole, Church of Sta. Primerana. Presentation of Christ. Ruined and repainted fresco, left side of which leaves unmistakable traces of Niccold’s hand. The woman and child at the extreme left repeat a motive, and something of the spirit of the Bigallo fresco. Oxford, Christ Church Library. Young Saint. (No. 12). Identified first by Sirén, Thieme-Becker, Kiinstler Lexikon, 1920, XIII, 465-7; Pl. IV, of the Catalogue (Tancred Borenius) which calls it Florentine 1350-70. London, National Gallery. Baptism. The date is inscribed. Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 619. Florence, S. Miniato. An Apostle (possibly St. James). This conjectured date is based upon faint traces of an inscription the date of which has been partly reinforced, partly supplied in black lead to read as MCCCCXXXVII. As the figure above it is obviously of the fourteenth century there is high presumption that under the last C there was originally an L. London, Mr. Kerr-Lawson. St. Anthony, the Abbot, and St. Peter. Cambridge, Mass., Prof. A. Kingsley Porter. Virgin. This panel has been attributed to Lorenzo di Niccold (most recently by Mr. Berenson, Bollettino d’arte 1926, 312), who is, as we know him through his indisputable works, a master of a very different character. He can be responsible only for the execution of some of the details. Reproduction in Catalogue of Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives, New York, 1917, No. 11. Pisa, S. Francesco, Chapter-House. Frescoes. The signature and the date visible today only in part were read by Lasinio in his Raccolta de ’Pitture antiche etc. Tav. II. Pisa, 1820. Florence, S. Croce, Left aisle. Fresco-fragment of Crucifixion. Ex-refectory. Fragment Head of Crucified Christ (?). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Virgin. (Fig. 1). In Van Marle, III, 638, as a Lorenzo di Niccolo. Boston, Gardner Museum. St. Anthony, The Abbot and Angels. (Fig. 7). Attributed by Sirén, Giottino, 89, to Jacopo di Cione. Prato, S. Francesco, Chapter Hall. Frescoes. The signature given in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, (Scribners, N. Y., 1903) II, 268, note 1. Florence, Mr. Charles Loeser. Crowned Personage and Attendants Kneel- ing Before a Column (Fragment). Avignon, Musee Calvet. Virgin. Florence, S. Croce. Virgin with two Saints, and the two predella scenes under St. Augustine and St. Gregory in the Choir Altarpiece. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 146, 4, of their Italian edition, attach the date 1372 to this picture, at present no longer visible in the exposed gi 1401. 1404. parts of the panel. Its stylistic affinities, however, being with his more advanced works, draw it away from such early ones as the Crucifix in S. Croce, and the Entombment in the Academy, in Florence. If not misread therefore, the date given was not unlikely the date of com- mission. Pistoia, Museo Civico. Madonna and Two Saints. (No. 2353 Florence, S. Croce, Sacristy. Fresco: Resurrection. The hands that shared in the covering of the same wall have never been satisfactorily differentiated. The Ascension is by an assistant of Niccold; the Way to Calvary by an assistant of Spinello Aretino; the Crucifixion with the border around it, including prophets and small scenes, by Taddeo Gaddi and assistants. Chicago, Ill., Mr. Martin A. Ryerson. Virgin. Oxford, Christ Church Library. Virgin in Prayer. (No. 9). Florence, Academy. Left Compartment of Triptych representing Corona- tion and Saints. Documents dated 1401, (see Vasari, I, 691, 3) record the commission of this altarpiece to Spinello Aretino, Niccolé di Pietro Gerini and Lo- renzo di Niccold. The central panel bears same date. Oddly enough the very clear and profound disparities between Spinello’s part, on the one hand, and that of Niccold and Lorenzo on the other, have never been noticed. The silvery tone of the right and central sections alone announces fundamental differences in the treatment of form. Lorenzo’s share in the painting is less apparent, but a certain haste in the drawing and shaping in the predella under Niccold’s saints remind one of similar traits in Lorenzo’s polyptych at S. Croce. Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 598. Magnale. Polyptych: Virgin and Saints. Execution largely by assistants. New Haven, Conn., Yale University, Jarves Collection. Annunciation. Empolt, Collegiata. Triptych. Assisted. Wings of polyptych, 4 saints. Predella, 3 scenes. Galuzzo (near Florence), Certosa, Chiese Antica. Window of Six Saints. Florence, Sta. Felicita, Chapter Hall. Crucifixion. (Assisted). Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton. St. Anthony, the Abbot. (See S. P. 10). Florence, Academy. Polyptych: Madonna and Saints. Date inscribed below central panel. Vincighata (near Florence), S. Lorenzo. Virgin. Attributed by Count Carlo Gamba (Rivista d’arte 1907, 24) to Giov. del Biondo. (Fig. 4). g2 Florence, Uffizi, Magazine. Dead Christ. Crucifixion with Brethren of the Order of the Flagellanti. Christ the Pilgrim. All of the same period. 1408. Florence, Via Aretina, Tabernacle. Madonna and Saints. Dated. Execution largely by assistants. 1408-9. Florence, Or S. Michele, first pillar right. St. Nicholas. Under these two dates are recorded the commission and payments for the painting of this saint. Trinity. (Fig. 6). (Opposite the Trinity), A Saint. These are the last works by Niccold known to us. Works sy Niccoto pit Pretro Gerini’s IMMEDIATE FoLLowINc. 1375. Impruneta, Pieve. Entire central section and predella of polyptych on high altar. Painted by Pietro Nelli and Tommaso del Mazza in 1375 (see Vasari, I, 609, n. 3). The central compartment is an adaption of Daddi’s Virgin and Angels in his large polyptych now at the Uffizi. Florence, S. Ambrogio. Deposition. Florence, S. Simone, First altar left. Birth of St. Nicholas. Same hand as that which painted a number of female figures in the Bigallo and in the Prato frescoes: possibly Baldese. S. Stefano in Pane. Virgin in Robbia frame, Close to S. Simone fresco. Florence, S. Felice, First altar right, Pietd. Florence, S. Felicita. Cappella del Crocefisso. Medallions in ceiling. Florence, Academy. Triptych: Crucifixion and Saints. Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 624. Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Trinity. Florence, Bargello. Two Saints. Rome, Capitoline Museum. Trinity with Donors. Florence, S. Ambrogio. Deposition. Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Trinity with Sts. Francis and Magdalen. Paris, Louvre. Virgin and Angels. Coronation and Angels. By same hand. New Haven, Conn., Yale University, Jarves Collection. Triptych. The Virgin: Very close to lower central compartment of the polyptych in the Pieve at Impruneta, and the wings to Lorenzo di Niccolo. Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. Madonna, Two Saints and Angels. (No. 89). 93 Florence, Academy. Small Panel with Virgin, Baptist, Saints Lawrence James, Anthony, the Abbot, and Six Angels. Boston, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy. Madonna, Saints and Angels. Parma, Gallery. Dormition. Braunschweig, Gemaldegalerie. Virgin and Angels. Arezzo, S. Francesco, Chapel to right of choir. Assumption with St. Thomas and Other Saints. Influence of Agnolo Gaddi in Virgin and type of Mariotto di Nardo in some of the saints. London, Lord Crawford. Sacred Allegory. Published by Tancred Borenius in Burlington Magazine, 1922, 156-8, but the work has refinements due to a hand that might easily be an assistant’s. Florence, Uffizi, Magazine. Four Saints; Two panels representing two saints each, Florence, S. Felicita, Chapter Hall. Annunciation (2) Left transept. Nativity (?). Philadelphia, Museum. Madonna and Child. (No. 118) ( Prot.) Odd mingling of Gerinesque and Cionesque characters. Munich, Dealer. Madonna and Child. Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton. Madonna and Child. Florentine Market (1926). Small Virgin, Angels, Saints. Cambridge (England), Fitzwilliam Museum. Annunciation. Southampton (L. I.), Parrish Museum. Virgin and Angels. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. The Redeemer. Lyons, Musée. Trinity. Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. Virgin, Four Saints, and Two Angels. Reproduced in Van Marle, III, 628. Florence, Bargello. Small Madonna, Saints and Angels. Florence, Palazzo dell Arte della Lana. Coronation in Tabernacle. This lunette stands over Jacopo del Casentino’s altarpiece and ap- proximates very closely the style of the preceding panel in the Bargello. Florence, La Quiete, Conservatorio delle Montalve. Madonna and Two Angels. 94 NOTES me scription given in Rossi e Lasinio, Raccolta de’Pitture antiche intagliate da Paolo Lasinio designate da Giuseppe Rossi. Pisa, 1820; and in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 265, note 4; see also ; of note I, 267. : The “placing of Gerini’s paintings with those of his followers,” in my original list in Arr rv America, 1921, 233 et seq., which Van Marle (III, 625) so justly laments, is due to a deplorable slip explained in the issue following the one in which the article appeared. 95 Mabwnea DETAILS FROM THE Parntincs or NiccoLo pi Prerro GERINI Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Entombment. 6. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Madonna 7- Prato, S. Francesco, Frescoes. 8. Empoli, Collegiata, Tripytch. 9. Prato, S. Francesco, Frescoes, 10. Florence, Academy of Fine Arts, Entombment. Boston, Gardner Museum, St. Anthony and Angels. Pisa, S. Francesco, Frescoes. Florence, S. Croce, Crucifix. Florence, Mr. Arthur Acton, St, Anthony. Fic. 5. Niccoio pi Pierro Gerint: Maponna AND CHILD Fic. 1. Nrccoxo pt Pierro Gerini: Maponna ANnp CuILp Collection of Mr. Martin A. Ryerson, Chicago The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Fic. 3. Nicco.o pr Pierro Gertni: ENTOMBMENT Fic. 2. Nicco.o pr Prerro Gerini: CRUCcIFIXx Academy of Fine Arts, Florence : Church of S. Croce, Florence ee a & Si ry Le, SR ee A ‘ . Ce a et Ae PRB Pm tne ADONNA AND CHILD M S. Lorenzo in Vincigliata (near Florence) Pietro Gerini . c.4. NuccoLo pi Fi ; TRinrTy FLORENCE right) Fic. 6. Nicco1o pr Prerro GErini 2 Or San MicHELe (First pillar, ‘TrRipTycH Narpo pi CIoneE: Fic. 1 oldman, New York Henry G Mr Collection of NARDO DI CIONE A PRECIOUS little triptych (Fig. 1) come some years back into the Henry Goldman collection in New York* under Orcagna’s name, recalls to one that so much of the fourteenth century still lies in shad- ow, and that the most romantic artist of his age, Nardo di Cione, its actual painter, still remains one of its most mysterious figures. Sirén’ is the only student to have prepared a large enough historical area for the building up of his oeuvre, but he ended by heaping up the ground with erroneous ascriptions, and by breaking through his outlines into those of his greater brother.’ And yet, there seems to be no good reason for such a misconception of Nardo, still less for its having held on so stubbornly among the professionally learned; especially as his indis- putable frescoes* in S. Maria Novella exhibit their own characteris- tics, and their divergencies from the altarpiece by Orcagna in the same chapel, so decisively.’ Until now, Nardo’s single authenticated® work, these frescoes (see Fig.g andS. P. 4, 5, 7, 8) remain radical for all further attributions to him, as the altarpiece does for all attributions to Orcagna.” Although at different times daubed over, and although, as in works of a similar scope, so much is due to the hands of assistants, there is enough of an evenly high quality to relieve and isolate the guiding genius, and to measure the resources of his style. These frescoes display in sharp clearness beside Orcagna’s panel (see Figs. 5, 6, 7. A Daddesque Pre- della), a plasticity incidental to the description of shape, rather than the direct bodying forth of plastic existence. They are instinct with a gentler life. The figures in them are suggestive rather than substan- tive, and their interest consists largely in what they convey in panto- mime. But in shifting our glance from the walls to the altar, we will be startled by a vital and amplified sense of physical reality. Or- cagna’s figures stand firm and eternal: they are inalienable portions of the visible universe like the earth itself, and divine, in their inde- pendence of it. More convincing in their organization, in their exist- ence, they are expressions of a sharper, less faltering vision, and their bulk declares itself forcibly in its space, as if predestined to occupy it, and as if the elements themselves could not displace it. The world they hint at is deep and undeniable, and contrasts with the world of of the self-recommending people of Nardo’s frescoes. Orcagna’s persons are grave with a contemplative calm, and unlike Nardo’s, who betray an inner flutter, Orcagna’s wear an inner composure. These are per- fectly self-contained and unconditioned whether by time or space, without specific relation to either, and like all godhead, instinct with the male principle. But Nardo’s figures, both male and female, are feminine in essence, feminine at heart, and he is, therefore, at his best when glorifying female beauty, before which he stands in ecstatic adoration, and his Paradise is a sort of Dream of Fair Women. If the disparity of the genius between the two brothers declares it- self in a difference between the formal energy of one and the poetry of the other, the antithesis of their style appears in every line. Thus the bounding planes and the enclosing contours in Orcagna are less flexible and arbitrary than in Nardo, and more final. The shapes are given their ultimate form. There is always something hard about them, as if they were cut out of an eternal substance, and even the draperies, the flesh and the hair have scarcely anything left of their actual texture. Orcagna’s individual features, the unwavering glance of the eye and its shape, the thick ears, the strong and fine hands, the drapery with its straight folds and darting lights, should be confronted with the same details in Nardo, for proof of the gap between the two masters. Nardo’s painting is essentially suggestive: he is the earliest among the Italians to have sought insinuation in expression. This he achieved by half hiding the iris between narrowly open lids, which betray only a part of its mystery. Full of intimation, it seems to swim languidly in its white field, without fixing upon a definite object or specifying a practical relation to it. Its meaning is farther complicated by the modulations around the eye, which run into the narrow band of shadow under it — a shadow that softens its look to languor. ‘The cheek rises abruptly below it into a light that models it tightly, and then drops gradually to the rounded jaw. The mask thus wins firmness and mo- bility at once, and the feline passivity in the supple features, startles at times by its Leonardesque suggestion. Nardo, too, modulated his expression, only that while in Leonardo, it becomes something disem- bodied and luminous, in Nardo it was an undetachable characteriza- tion of the flesh and its propensities, its instincts. There is a sense- seeking, unfeeling allurement in Nardo’s women, and a profane co- quetry, a little cruel, as in Leonardo’s women, but without their ir- radiation of inner light. The male figures have an odd purring gentleness about them — 98 sometimes under a mock-ferocity — as if in such a paradise women, _the determining factor of life, imposed the determining character upon the species. Even the old men who have a deep hollow running round a prominent cheek-bone, with softly rippling beards and long flowing locks, manifest rather than a stubborn resistance to decay, only a com- plaisant senility. The figures move with a sweeping grace flaunting long majestic proportions. Certain details in these frescoes are peculiar to their author. The hair lies in clear threads against a dark ground, as it was left by the passing of the broadly-spaced teeth of a comb. The hands, which sug- gest a fastidiousness, are affectedly bent at the wrist, and generally relaxed. The fingers are long, slender, at times bony. The draperies now hang full and heavy in long soft folds, now break with a sudden, capricious sharpness. Where the wall carries the original surface, and in the finest of the heads chiefly, it reveals a trait of execution more evident in the school of the Cioni than elsewhere, and used with more explicit intention by Nardo. This is a fine streaking that follows the curvature of the planes, designed to tighten them upon the bony mould: a detail of exe- cution that shows more clearly in the frescoes than in the panels, but found on close examination to have been habitual with him. It should be noted along with this dissimilarity between his fresco and tempera paintings that there are others, but only such as inhere in the physical differences between the two techniques. The minute facture of tem- pera produces a crisper definition, a more slippery chiaroscuro, a stiffer, more wiry line, a squarer shaping (S. P. 3,9, 10, 11) (and particularly in the fingers). The straight level furrows in the male foreheads do not look worn into them from within, but rather as if they had been slashed with a sharp metal. These isolated differentia of the Cappella Strozzi frescoes seen in a context of more elusive and incommunicable traits, characterize a definite personality endowed with a fancy, a taste and possessing a hand, that appear unequivocally, and have been recognized in the fol- lowing works: 1. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Cloisters. Four Scenes from the Life of the Virgin, Two Figures of Saints (frescoes). Very largely assisted. 2. Florence, Badia, Cappella Giochi e Bastari. Scenes of the Passion, (frescoes)? In both series I see the loose execution of assistants of Nardo’s design, very nearly throughout. 99 3. Ponte a Mensola (Florence), Collection of Mr. Bernard Berenson. Scene from the Life of St. Benedict (fragment of Predella).” New York, Historical Society. Large Virgin and Saints." (Fig. 2). London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Coronation of the Virgin.” Fiesole, Museo Bandini. Crucifixion.” me hy gtAbe gt o Munich, Alte Pinakotek. Two Panels each containing Five Saints.” (Fig. 3). Execution due largely to assistants. In addition to these I am claiming the following paintings for Narpo 8. New Haven, Yale University, Jarves Collection. Saints John the Baptist and Peter.“ (Figs. 4, 5). 9. London, National Gallery. Saints John the Evangelist, John the Baptist and Saint James.” (Fig. 6). 10. Minneapolis, Mr. Herschel V. Jones. Madonna Standing." (Fig. 7). 11. New York, Collection of Mr. Henry Goldman. Small Triptych Repre- senting the Virgin between Saint Peter and Saint John, the Evangelist.* (Fig. 1). 12. Frankfurt a. M. (Germany), Herr Rudolph Bauer. Crucifixion Repro- duced pl. IX, and commented on p. 51 of idee aa eister aus Frankfurter Privatbesitz, Frankfurt a. M. 1926. CD. I intend this group, which I consider to contain all the works as- signable to Nardo, to imply a rejection of all others; and among these the rejection of two alone may require some explanation. They are two triptychs in Florence, one in the Church of Santa Croce, the Madonna with Saints Gregory and Job; the other in the Academy, the Trinity between Saints Romuald and John, the Evangelist,” both dated 1365, and executed by a contemporary of Nardo, far the ablest among his assistants who seems to have had a hand also in the paint- ing of the Munich panels.” Here is a master working under the joint influence of Nardo and Orcagna, very likely on the latter’s designs or ideas, which he does his middling best to conform to. But he is haunted besides by Nardo’s romanticism, by Nardo’s types and Nardo’s beauty, and there is something of lyricism besides that has tempted Sirén to regard them as partly by him. The dryness of expression, however, in the male figures, the incomplete articulation, betray the imitator — an imitator for all that, if one will stop to examine the predella, with enchantments of his own. There remain two frescoes in Florence and in New York belonging to the Nardesque milieu, still unplaced. A Saint Benedict standing in I0O0 full-length over a small scene from his life is now in the Museum in _the Cloisters of the Church of Ognissanti, Florence. I once regarded it as by Nardo, and only the most rigidly controlled scrutiny has lately convinced me that its crudities are fundamental to another style. Nevertheless, it is wholly dependent upon the master. The identity of its painter for the present eludes me, though the scene below has more than a shop affinity to the predelle of the two paintings just discussed. The other is a Christ in life-size (Fig. 8), erect in His tomb, His eyes closed in death, and His arms held out diagonally displaying His wounds in the open palms. The fresco, now in the Barnard Cloisters in New York,” was found by its owner in Florence in a niche, which its present site imitates. Very close to Nardo, it cannot be associated with any of his known and independent followers, and must be by some assistant who was at the moment of its painting leaning entirely on him. It adheres slavish- ly to Nardo’s formula. The bossy cheek-bones on either side of a rather flat nose, the hollows of the eyes, the furrowed forehead, ape the mould of Nardo’s masks. The head in general make and pattern resembles the Christ bearing the Cross” in the Giochi e Bastari Chapel, in the Badia in Florence, and the thumb that tapers above its roots also oc- curs there. The panels in the Jarves collection (Figs. 4, 5, 7) with which Orcagna has been consistently credited are austere, spirited, and in style so close to the Historical Society panel that they may be assumed to fall into its period. The drapery is of the same stuff and drawn into festoon folds as in the Virgin and in the Baptist of The Last Judgment in the Strozzi Chapel, and in the lowest figures on the left in The Paradise. The structure of the Baptist’s head and neck, reappear in the aged Apostle in the lower tier at the extreme left of The Last Judgment. His ear recurs in the angel nearest the centre in the fifth tier left of the Paradise. The level upper lid, the glance, the inorganic modelling appear in the Strozzi Chapel. His long black locks, which will be remembered in the Historical Society painting, are to be found in the Baptist of the Last Judgment, and in an Apostle seated behind him. The rim of St. Peter’s ear painted in a light tone with the inside running down to a much lower key, recurs unfailingly in the frescoes (S. P. 5, 8), and the whole ear and the left hand are repeated in the Evangelist of the Goldman triptych. The hair is sparse and thready as in the frescoes, in a way distinguishing for Nardo, and the hands (S. IOI P. 9, 10) are sharply outlined and articulated as in his acknowledged panels. The expression of Peter’s face, the emphasis in the gesture, the hesitancy in the action, typify the cardinal discrepancies between the temperaments of Nardo and his brother. One might enumerate as many reasons to dispute the attribution of these two panels to Orcagna, as one should have to in order to prove them by Nardo, still no demonstration would seem to be conclusive to anyone, who cannot see the contrasting calm, command and promise of ultimate energy in Orcagna’s figures. In these the movement is more decisive and final, because the will and the nerves are uniinpaired, and there is also a latent conviction, as in all great art, that gives every gesture an air of inevitability. The conviction of Nardo’s authorship of the National Gallery saints (Fig. 6) can hardly be communicated in bare confrontation. They are so deeply impregnated with his genius, that our first glance, before it descends to details, should persuade us of it. Their manner of standing, with an evasion of direct fall of weight, and the suggestion of a lazy, swaying gait, make them look as if they had just stepped out of the Paradise. The slit eyes of the St. John, for example, with the half-covered iris bound by a well-marked contour, and sharply pointed - with a pupil, moving mysteriously behind the level lids, contain the same insinuation as the eyes of the sainted ladies in the lower tiers of this composition, and in the panels (S. P. 2, 6, 7). They have the same flat noses and high rounded cheek bones that sometimes give them the air of savages. The third from the right in the bottom row holds her book similarly and a little to her right the angel leading the nun by the hand is wrapped in draperies that break into the same angular folds. The hair of St. John is streaked and falls in hanks down the neck ex- actly as — to take one of many instances — in the fourth figure from the right in the bottom row of the Paradise. One would have to go to other paintings on panel, rather than to fresco, for the finished execu- tion of the National Gallery figures, and although one should meet with the same full, neatly contoured mouth in almost any youthful head in the Paradise, one would find the closest repetition of John’s lips, curved, crested and tipped like his, in the Goldman and Jones Virgins (S. P. 2,6), and in the Virgin and in the Child of the New York Historical Society altarpiece (see Fig. 2). What is true of the St. John would hold of the two other saints. A Madonna (Fig. 7) not previously recognized, is by all its charac- 102 teristics, committed to the same classification. The manner in which the outline joins it, and the modelling detaches the figures from the gold plane, associates them at once with the Virgin of the Goldman Triptych (see Fig. 1). It exceeds the latter somewhat in size (m. .95 x .442) and has a lower, softly swelling relief, achieved by a more warmly and subtly graduated modelling, upon the typically Nardesque mould (S. P. 6, 7). Although there is a heavier languor in the Jones picture, with a narrower eye and a gliding glance, the pervasive sentiment is the same: the same hands hold an Infant that shows a similar solicitude for the Mother.” The drapery has the same character, the same hesitantly drawn edge and silhouette, and the same features as in the Goldman Virgin. The ear shows a hard rim like some of the figures in the Strozzi fres- coes (S. P. 5, 8), and the silhouette from ear to shoulder is seen in a continuous line as in the Historical Society and in the Goldman pic- tures. Over Her head the veil falls into folds as in the Goldman Ma- donna (Fig. 7, S. P. 6) exposing the same strands of hair. The mouth has the typical small bud-like immaturity, with a sharp arrow-head above it (S. P. 5, 6, 7) to which the school of the Cioni likes to give an especially sharp angularity. The nose has the daintiness it consistently maintains in most of his youthful faces (S. P. 2, 6, 7). Finally the stamping of the halos and the borders is identical with those of the Goldman picture; with close affinities to the Yale and the National Gallery panels. More fragile and delicate, more dreamful and remote than any other of Nardo’s feminine personages, this Virgin has some of the over- charged poetry of a youthful work. Its resemblance, however, to some of the female figures in the lower tiers of The Paradise suggest a prox- imity in the moments of their painting. Of all the panels hitherto attributed to Nardo, the small triptych (see Fig. 1) of the Goldman collection is the most happily planned. The stamping of the borders and halos, the tooling of the stuffs, the laying on of the color, from beginning to end, are of the most finished workman- ship, in which sharpness and honesty of execution become a kind of preciosity. The figures, in the healthy gem-like solidity of their color, stand against a patined and luminous gold, which shines out like the tremulous light of early morning. The two flanking saints are turned ceremoniously toward the Virgin as if in observance of some divine usage, unifying the three leaves in a single symmetry by a composition- al scheme similar to Orcagna’s in his polyptych. ‘The draperies gener- 103 alize the silhouette, and assimilate them to the architectural plan of the whole triptych. In the central compartment which tapers upward in a graceful convergence, the Virgin, in larger scale than the two saints, conforming to its lines, looms to emphatic dominance; and the hush She spreads about Her affects one like a musical pause into which the unheard melody continues. The Child, wrapped in gorgeous brocade, seems sympathetically absorbed in the Mother’s preoccupation (S. P. 6), and Her frame, like an attuned instrument, responds sensitively to the Child. In the pious hush of the action a look of passionate tenderness floats up to Her face, as in no other Florentine Virgin earlier than Botticelli, and She is sunk in the same dream a hundred years before him. But if the mood of the triptych has later affinities, it separates the picture from the prevailing contemporary feeling in Florence, which is directer and less attenuated through refinements. Even Daddi’s Ma- donnas, of all Florentine Madonnas most closely related to those of Nardo, seem to live in a far different world. They betray a smaller degree of introspection, greater warmth and simpler humanity. In Nardo’s world there is no drama, and the action of the people is a survival of critical happenings long passed. Everything is in a state of lyrical rumination, and lives in a dreamland of wonderful hopes. The individual is the object of a fate that detaches him from all actual life. This lyrical mood in Nardo, with its implications of sensibility, is intimately related to the Siense painting of the early Trecento. The romanticism, the exquisite acuteness of emotion of Simone Martini and his followers enchanted him, as they enchanted all Florentines not too deeply rooted in the native genius. In style he is true to the Giottesque tradition, but his taste, his sentiment and his allure have become Sienized. The most conspicuous and distinguishing trait in Nardo, the long slit eye, derives at least in part from Simone. Even the unequal scale of a Virgin represented in three-quarters between smaller saints in full length—the unique Florentine instance—would seem of Sienese origin, and occurs similarly only twice (to my knowl- edge) before this: in Duccio’s triptych at the National Gallery in Lon- don and in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s polyptych in the Siena Academy. The Goldman picture measures 0.75 x 0.66 m. and with the excep- tion of the trefoil is in perfect state. The differences between this and the Historical Society panel are incidental to discrepancies of state, scale and period. The heads of both are similarly constructed 104 in light and shade. Both have similar width, similar long narrow eyes similarly spaced in it, with the boundaries of the face continuing in those of the neck ; the same shadow dividing one from the other. The lower lids are underscored with a long, faint shadow. Below it rises the cheek-bone with slight depression under it. The fine tapering fingers of the Goldman Virgin have grown sparer; but they have re- tained the same delicate touch. The Christ’s face is younger and plumper, but the hair is streaked identically over the same under painting. There are other analogies, which if scattered are still telling, such as the posture of the right legs in the St. James in London, and the Evangelist of the Goldman triptych; and the left edge of the Evan- gelist’s drapery in London and the right of the St. Peter in the triptych. The Goldman Virgin, however, stands even closer to the female figures in the Strozzi Chapel Paradise (Fig. 6). The lurking move- ment in her easy posture, the slight yielding tilt of her head, its mould, the hair, the flat nose, the dainty budded lips and above them a sharp caret joined by two parallels to the nostrils, will be found again and again there. But that depth of wistfulness in her glance will not be met with until one has reached the Virgin at the top. The contours throughout are neither descriptive nor constructive. The artist instead generalizes the patterns of the figure to bring them into directer rela- tion with their areas and with each other. The lack of explicit plas- ticity in the lateral leaves is due to an over-elaboration of the drapery. The foreheads, cheek-bones, the noses come forward into light by the same gradation and have the same easy way of slipping back into shadow as in the heads at the Strozzi chapel. The frown has the same fork between the brows; the hair, the identical fall, texture and con- sistency. These analogies are specified in the Evangelist of the right leaf and in the greybeard in the fourth tier on the right in the Para- dise, third from the centre. If, now, the four works I have added to the other acceptable ones by Nardo, help us to define his vision, his taste, his sentiment, they do not lead us into the mystery of his evolution. It is reasonable to conjecture that the Strozzi chapel frescoes were painted about the time of Orcagna’s polyptych dated 1357, but there is nothing in the relation of these two works that could give us a key to the chronological distri- bution of the other paintings about them. None of them bears either a date or a reliable clue to one. Taken together, however, they do release a consistent and distinct 105 personal quality. The Berenson and Ognissanti predelle, and the pre- delle of the two triptychs of 1365 by a follower, besides give us a peep into heavenly landscapes lying under the spell of a magical light, that Nardo’s example must originally have inspired. His spacing of figure- patterns over romantic settings of rocks and trees, is the most evoca- tive in the fourteenth century. Nardo’s loveliness, his elegance, make it clear his imagination was warmed and caressed by the beauty that may be seen — and by beau- ties, as well as by beauty — but here and there, as in the Virgin and the Eternal of the Paradise (Fig. 9) there is also a poetic exaltation, which sometimes suggests even such a master as Giorgione. 106 NE OrlEE eS . First published in Arr iv America, April, 1924, 99-112. . I, 241-255. . Sirén, as will appear below, continues in the error of his predecessors in attributing to Orcagna Nardo’s saints in the Jarves collection and at the National Gallery; see Notes 13 and 14. . See reproductions in Venturi, V, 761-765, Suida, Tafel, X-XIV, Sirén, II, Pls. 199-202. 5. There is no published view of Nardo which consistently detaches him from his environment. 16. 17. : , 18. 19. Cavalcaselle (Ed. Murray), V, misled by Vasari’s attribution of the Strozzi frescoes to Orcagna (I, 595) nevertheless, acutely gauged the status of the problem, and cautiously avoided con- clusions. Suida (1905, 18-24) was the first to catch the trick of Nardo’s central style, without, however, realizing its limits. Venturi (1906, V, 766), with over-cautious temerity rejects indis- putable works by Nardo, and classes them with works of his school. Sirén, Giottino; in Giotto and Some of His Followers, I, 241-255, begins, as he almost invariably does, on a sound basis, but he eventually loses Nardo among his pupils. Van Marle (III, 475-490) begins his section on Nardo unfortunately by bestowing upon Orcagna:a share in the painting of The Paradise in the Strozzi Chapel, thus betraying his failure to see its harmony of style, and its eternal irrecon- cilability with the altarpiece by Orcagna. . Ghiberti (ed. Schlosser, I, 40, II, 140), is the most respectable authority for Nardo’s authorship of the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel, but whether it was Nardo or another, my concern in this essay would still be primarily to establish a link between a group of works and these frescoes, and their stylistic independence of Orcagna’s altarpiece. . The Strozzi altarpiece, as Mr. Berenson insisted in the Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1912, 22-23), continues in my opinion the only admissible painting by Orcagna. . Suida, op. cit. 20, and Venturi, V, 766. . Attributed, following their discovery, to Buffalmaco, by Peleo Bacci in Bollettino d’arte, January, 1911. Sirén, I, 244-247; II, Pls. 203-204, ascribes them outright to Nardo. woirens 1l, Pl. 213. . Suida, 21. From the Artaud de Montor Collection (see Catalogue, Paris, 1843, Pl. 7), where it is attributed to Guido da Siena, under whose name it still hangs. Reproduced in Sirén, II, Pl. 206. . Sirén, I, 251; II, Pl. 208. meoiren, 1,252; II, Pl. 209. . Sirén, I, 252, Pl. 210. . William Rankin (in The American Journal of Archaeology for 1895) attributes these to Orcagna, and is followed by Sirén (Catalogue of the Jarves Collection, Yale University Press, 1916, 40) and by Van Marle (III, 468). See Richard Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, 1926, 16. Sirén (I, 222) attributes these figures to Orcagna; Van Marle (III, 509-511) ascribes them to a heterogeneous personality he styles Compagno dell’ Orcagna. This was very probably the Madonna formerly in the Bergolli collection, and when there at- tributed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to Giovanni da Milano (see Venturi, V, 915). It has since hung in the Tucher Collection, Vienna, under the designation of the Florentine School, from which it passed in the fall of 1925 to a New York dealer, and finally (1926) to Mr. Jones. First published in Arr rn AmerIcA, 1924, 99-112. Suida, 44, attributes these two altarpieces to an Allegretto Nuzi (not to be confused with the painter of Fabriano); Sirén (I, 253-4; II, Pls. 211, 212) to Nardo. 107 nse apie hora isd in 22. These cloisters and the contents passed in of Art 23. See Van Marle, III, 483. 5508 24. Instances of same motif occur frequently in Daddi bee oe in ! and ina beautiful Madonna Sree to Mr. fost eae re 108 ont o ee DerTAILs FROM THE Paintincs oF NARDO DI CIONE Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. New Haven, Yale University, St. Peter. New Haven, Yale University, St. Peter. London, National Gallery, Three Saints. New York Historical Society, Altarpiece. London, National Gallery, Three Saints. Fiesole, Museo Bandini, Crucifixion. Florence, S. Maria Novella, The Paradise. Florence, §. Maria Novella, The Paradise. New York, Mr. Henry Goldman, Triptych. Sgr = — Fic. 4. Narpo pr Crone: Fic. 5. Narpo pi Crone: Fic. 2. Narpo pi Crone: Vircin St. Joun, THE Baptist St. PETER AND CHILD FROM ALTARPIECE Yale University, New Haven Yale University, New Haven Historical Society, New York rai « i RRR es we x tt Ped #a Ge TT, in RY, zx Roe — SAINTS Ss: ASSISTANT Narpvo pi CIonE AND ae Fic. Alte Pinakotek, Munich oie Firg.06: Naxpo pi CIoNE “a ogee Ap ae ae a “a Pk ee of Se ; SS. Joun, THE Evancetist, Joun, National Gallery, London THE Baptist, AND JAMES t &.! y Ny Ki | \ . & & N N ® ¢. S & & . & N & Fic. 7. Narpo pi Cione: Vircin AnD CHILD Mr. Herschel V. Jones, Minneapolis . eid -d w! . ~ 7 - =. “ ~ - . we err eke F al 1) Ping, ny Cal - & - 5 “ - + ° — ” re wits — tre a a ; , a re 3 Pan Saat ct Mae Ae = ‘ ad ee ie +4 Thee aa ay 2- eS Tae camry yi Sontad ie - ° , ; \ uggs tot ee pe ARG Spek es a henge andy Sig av Ta) pe ee oat : “ ‘.- r ad ~ (eee eT a ie) 2 . t = : "i - adhe Sie oe = ’ * — ; ie a eee, “e- Lag 5 ~- & ia ale “~ ie oe ies ' a . a ; 7 _ nage oe * Aged ieties or oie pht, and tress .vetim. 4. But as the figurws a® | das (gy Davee Wwah fOetacwoT ra Eiljottes rd | bp fantastinneae A sb ores , the extensiver) ieee , and th e the frescurs & the Hepes Soa Phase ce thee Vee ed Cues | Hon ¢ i the Fa 2: theese on the wa us the Obd Tova ae | a ask divas at @ Parrdise sredette in Fhe Stransi Chapel ia & Mar. Sere ol ng, which is the mest preter. rile Beet oe , the narrative moves with sdnaelenid yes it : intains the surface: the figures, maxtritei rane the foreground, and the landscape, ave adibing. yar sg yertically, so that the action reads againet i ae age sat @ ‘The persons are few in number, and the setting gives just ager objects to characterize the site of the action. Lo y universe there is as yet no naturalistic unity, only « Aubeh has the effect of something stealing upon you, like _ which he background i ig a low accompaniment. There s ac- . al relation between the space amd the light, which, teat mn ep how to shine, favors the figures alkume, and ileal all rd beyond (th dirknens)s neoethod of presentation, without plaatie | aalionces, without 5 is i tr ees aes os / Citak Pav we By wey a : ao iis : > , ‘ ae SS ey A, on NICCOLO DI TOMMASO'* AND THE RINUCCINI MASTER’ N the idle bustle of provincial Pistoia, among the sober refinements of its Romanesque, stands a dwelling-house that was once a mon- astery.’ Its outer walls still affirm an ancient origin, but the inside has since been cut up into modest apartments; and as you climb the steep and dingy stairs, traces of old fresco greet you. They prepare you for the flowering of the upper walls and the vaults, which a wide modern daylight surprises. Nothing could be more unexpected in such a place, and yet nothing so well suits its ineradicable genius! At first a rosy pallor dawns on your delighted attention, a color that rises with the light, and breaks overhead into contrast with the dark- ened background. But as the figures are neither massive nor animated, nor so grouped as to force your eye, before you have looked at them closely, they make a fantastic arabesque over the surface. Of all that is left, the extensively legible parts alone can serve our purpose, and they are the frescoes in the uppermost rooms on the nar- row side of the building. Those of the vaulted ceiling* represent scenes from the Creation and the Fall; those on the walls just under it, small episodes from the Old Testament, from the lives of the Virgin and other saints; and a fragment of a Paradise modelled on Nardo’s Paradise in the Strozzi Chapel in S. Maria Novella. In the ceiling, which is the most pretentious part of the surviving decoration, the narrative moves with absorbed gravity. Everything jealously maintains the surface: the figures, modelled summarily, are pushed into the foreground, and the landscape, avoiding perspective, is tipped up vertically, so that the action reads against it as against a backdrop. The persons are few in number, and the setting gives just enough in individual objects to characterize the site of the action. In this rudimentary universe there is as yet no naturalistic unity, only a unity of mood, which has the effect of something stealing upon you, like music, to which the background is a low accompaniment. There is ac- cordingly no actual relation between the space and the light, which, only just learning how to shine, favors the figures alone, and leaves all the world beyond in darkness. Such a method of presentation, without plastic saliences, without 109 recessions, is rewarded for its respect of the level wall, by producing a sense of decorative justice. To an innocent modern taste there may be small plausibility in this Paradise of our painter. It wants, certainly, in its boasted benefits, and offers too little compensation for rejections in this world, to make it its dangerous rival in our preferences. Besides, it allows too narrow a range to the modern romantic fancy. It must not be forgotten, how- ever, that a fourteenth century representation of Paradise was deter- mined by the undeniable and undisputed conventions both of contem- porary Weltanschaung and of contemporary art, which we have been centuries breaking down. Unlike our Paradise of rapturous extensions of earthly freedom, of perpetual surprises, of infinite ease, and healing calm, our painter’s Paradise was, in its simple intention, a supreme opportunity for amorous longings. Rock-bound, bare, it is soft and leafy only for the Fall (Fig. 1). The Serpent has the head of a com- plaisant and furthering procuress, and Adam and Eve are all-forgetful in their desire. How harsh and unsparing seems the final Expulsion of such gentle and trusting children of nature! The first of the scenes illustrating Genesis, in the quadripartite ceil- ing, the Creation of the Beasts, imitates the formula of the traditional representation of Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds, and in fact, judging from their share of the space these would seem also the Cre- ator’s favorites; the other animals are crowded into subordinate posi- tions, and we see them all under the divine spell, pert and orderly like a class of pupils impatient to please a beloved master. The Creator, full of appropriate grace, rewards them with a blessing. In the next compartment (Fig. 2), Eve, firm-breasted and languor- ous, pauses at her shuttle, and looks yearningly towards Adam, who is breaking the ground with a hoe. Although the action is of an idyllic mood, the barren rocks around them, surrounded by a murky void, be- speaks a primeval and shelterless solitude. But the scene changes in the Fall, where a diapered background of small leaves and flowers spreads like a mille-feuille behind the fig- ures. Standing like Aphrodite before the dazed Paris in fifteenth cen- tury representations of The Award of the Golden Apple, Eve seems to have risen from the earth, on tall and slender limbs, chastened in shape like a Greek jar, and displays the miracle of her pearl-tinted body as she offers it in the symbolic apple: Adam accepts it, as if to maintain a dramatic as well as the merely physical symmetry. Here, as elsewhere, there are no psychological distinctions, and the IIo action sustains an evenness of mood that characterizes the whole of the narrative, even where it would require sudden or violent outbreaks of feeling. Discovered in hiding after the Sin, Adam and Eve conduct themselves as if unaccustomed to such unsettling crises, and the in- exorable Dispenser of retributive justice seems mild for the thunderous Jehovah of the bible narrative. Nor again is there anything seriously disorganizing in their grief when they are finally driven out of Eden. We accord their tears and their distress the sort of mock pity we as- sume for children in their make-believe. Our painter ignores the possible consequences of action and its moral implications, in his concern with the poetic illusion. He appears at his best, accordingly, when he shows the Blessed standing before the Eternal and the Virgin in the fragment of his Paradise, where no action, only a sort of trusting expectancy is required of them. In the smaller scenes the narrative runs more briskly among pro- fane familiarities he felt much more at home in, than in the solemn events of the ceiling. The increase in freedom of treatment and in- formality of action in the smaller representations, corresponds to the differences between the body of the devotional altarpiece and its pre- della. The differences in style— and they are slight enough — are only such as one would find in works as discrepant in scale. But the shapes, the types, the line, the look are identical in all the frescoes ; they lie in the same context — a context of characters more elusive to language than these — and point to the same guiding, if not actually painting, hand.’ The heads (S. P. 1, 3, 5, 7, 10) are predominately short and square, with long eyes occupying almost the entire width. The lower lid runs into the narrow band of shadow under it. The large iris cut by a level lid, leaves only a tip of white visible, as in Nardo di Cione, and the look of immersed, lingering feeling — always determining to the expression of the head — is of the same kind of evocation as Nardo’s. The crow’s- feet, which leave their imprint indiscriminately upon all of Niccolo’s faces are drawn in parallel furrows — varying in number with the stage of life — from the eye across the temple (S. P. 5, 7). The heads of the old men receive an additional fold in the upper and lower lids, a prom- inent cheek-bone and shrunken hollows under them. The individual filaments of the hair are drawn in parallels over a dark ground (S. P. 1, 2, 3, 6) very much as in the lower frescoes of the Rinuccini Chapel. The fingers are bony, sharp-jointed, with a sudden hook-like break in the contour, and sometimes flattened at the ends. III The nose is generally wide, and its outline forms an acute angle at the bottom where it joins the face. The light that goes down the ridge forks at the tip in a manner that recurs at times in the knuckles. Not being an expressional factor, the ear is flimsily constructed of a warped rim around a loose concavity. The draperies of a heavy stuff hang free, generalizing the mass of the figure rather than revealing its structure. The edge often folds over below the neck to make a sort of a flap. It is evident from a glance that the temperament of our master dom- inates his vision. Without ever being directly expressive, his painting induces a mood by means of a chiaroscuro diffused in a pictorial effect, never concentrated in plastic form. To this end the heavy contours, inner and outer, block out the figure generally, and the modelling, once it has given a statement of the bulk, becomes a means of softening the forms and qualifying the meaning of the features. Narrow in their range of expression, everywhere keeping close to their radical type, these frescoes so plainly resemble each other in every detail as to separate themselves easily from other works of the school, and to furnish an obvious link by which to join other paintings by the same hand. Of these, the one bearing the closest relation to the frescoes, is a small Coronation at the Academy in Florence (Fig. 3. S. P. 6), there attributed to Giovanni da Milano. Indeed, the genius of the ceiling seems to have descended to this delicately poetic picture. It shows a type of vertical arrangement first made fashionable by Nardo’s Para- dise, and lasting down to Angelico. From the kneeling angels below, and the female saints beside them, who consolidate the centre of the composition, the figures rise with graceful dignity on both sides towards the tall throne, spread with a gorgeous, daintily-figured brocade, before which the sacrament is being solemnized. The pictorial treatment may not at the first glance seem to possess the same radical character as the frescoes of the monastery ceiling. But the kind of disparity that exists between the two, accords with the rule that Italian pictures on a small scale are freer and broader in execution than monumental paintings. The opalescence and the loose heavy contours together ought to suffice to join this difference in a common origin, however. Notice further that the schematization of the hair and the exposure of the ear recur here exactly as in the monastery vault. Finally the head of the Virgin repeats the head of the Serpent and is a reversal of the head of the Eve in the Fall in the ceiling (S. P. 6, 1, 3). The shape and look of the large iris which covers almost the entire eye, the nose sharply lighted at the 112 tip, the cheek, are identical in all of these. The shorter squarer heads at the sides will surprise no one who recalls the Paradise in the Con- vento del T. A small picture, a triptych in the Walters Collection in Baltimore (no. 718, and attributed to Giovanni da Milano), representing the same subject in the central compartment, exhibits the same points of re- semblance to the frescoes. The angels, however, maintain the formula of those in the Naples altarpiece, discussed below, so consistently, as to make it probable the triptych was painted later than the Academy pic- ture, very likely around 1370. Another picture (Fig. 4) that joins the frescoes, and by liens more obvious still, because of its scale, is a St. James in the collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs.* The panel, presumably cut down, shows an in- tact figure, which is compensated for having had the gold round it scraped by the mellowness of its patined enamel. The type and bearing of the figure are of an inveterate aristocracy. There is a slow, vertical swing in the movement that suggests a stalking gait, which conforms with the dreamy absorption of the head. ‘The some- what mannered refinement may be expected of the painter of the Cre- ator and of Eve, the Temptress (S. P. 2, 10), in the ceiling of the Con- vento del T. That same low roundness of relief will be found again in the Paradise; the steeped look and the schematized hair exposing the same ear, appear in the Eve at the shuttle, and the wide nose terminates below at the sides in the same sharp wings as evident chiefly in The Temptation, and the Academy Coronation (S. P. 2, 1, 10, 6). The right hand is bony and heavily outlined, with the joints bent as — con- spicuously —in the scenes of The Creation and The Fall (S. P. 9, 8, 10). The thumb of the left hand repeats the thumb of the same saint among the Blessed, and the ear is one of many variants of a type that recurs everywhere in the vault of the monastery (S. P. 2, 1, 10). Two saints in the Horne Foundation, in Florence (Nos. 75, 76, Sala terza) a St. John, the Evangelist (Figs. 5,7), and a St. Paul (Fig. 6), by the author of the frescoes, were attributed by their former owner, Herbert Horne, to Giovanni da Milano, a designation superseded in the recent catalogue (1921) by that of “prossimi ad Andrea da Firenze.” The excellent state of these panels reveals a modelling that is firm- er, and an enamel harder, than in any of the other paintings by the same master. Here the light pink and light blue draperies, that occur in the work of no other artist, repeat the color, hang, texture, weight and con- sistency of the drapery in the Paradise, and in the vault of the Con- ic vento del T. The draperies of St. John, the Evangelist, closely imitate those of the Almighty in the Creation of the Beasts, and break the same way against the ground. The wistfulness of the glance carries you back to the St. James, in Mr. Griggs’ collection, with whom the Evangelist has profound affini- ties (see Fig. S. P. 2). Fortuitous differences apart, the hair obeys the same formula, the same large iris gives the same heavy look to the eye, only the Evangelist’s age has left more numerous and deeper furrows around them. The same nose shows the same width, the same angle where it joins the cheek at the bottom, the same double light at the tip; and the right hand of St. John displays the angularities to be found in the right of St. James. St. John’s hollow-cheeked type will be found among the greybeards in our master’s Paradise. Lastly, the heavy con- tours profess the same hand throughout. The St. Paul (Fig. 6, S. P. 4), which belongs to the same original dismembered polyptych, shares all these affinities. To the same period in the activity of our master may be assigned three panels, united in a group by identity of theme, almost exact correspond- ence of representation as well as by analogies of style. They area pretty Nativity (Fig. 8) in the Vatican Gallery, a triptych (Fig.9) in the John- son Collection, in Philadelphia (with a Nativity in the central com- partment), and a Nativity in the collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs. Of the three, the Vatican" panel has a crispness and a freshness that fade in the other two, and that should help to determine the order of their painting. But whatever their order, there are features, in the mode of representation, which distinguish the panels from all others dealing with the same theme— and, with possibly a single exception, profess the same hand. They all show the Virgin and Child before a large almond-shaped aura, the former to the left, Joseph to the right of the centre, in almost symmetrical arrangement, before an open grotto. The upper portion of the panel is alive with angels, turned toward Christ in the centre; and in the Johnson and Vatican panels there are the uncommon features of words issuing from the mouths of some of the personages, and the names of the more important saints in Gothic uncials in the halos. But if these three panels are drawn together by common motifs, they are assimilated into our painter’s oeuvre by disclosing all the traits and tricks witnessed in the review of his other works. The mood of the representations, as of the single figures, has the blandness and prettiness of the Ceiling. 114 In the Nativity of the Vatican Gallery (Fig. 8) you will find the prominent contours, the soft eye, the small ear, the broadly spaced hair, the cloven high-lights. But while the drawing is misleadingly looser, and the shaping and execution more perfunctory, and the con- tent less poetic than in other of our painter’s works, the St. Joseph re- peats a habitual formula, and more completely betrays than any other portion of the picture, the hand that carried it out. His head occurred already in the Paradise of the Convento del T in the aged saint (S. P. 5) whose face has his hollows, his straight sharp-edged lids, his nose, his ear, and straggling tendrils in the beard. Joseph’s eye has the Nar- desque shadow under it — that has the same suggestions as in the head of Eve (S. P. 3) — and his hands and drapery, the haphazard outlines of the frescoes. Among the panels by this master, Joseph’s head parallels that of the St. John in the Horne Foundation (See Fig. 7). Whereas the triptych of the Johnson Collection® (Fig. 9) bears signs of the same authorship as the Vatican panel, these signs do not as quickly unite in the same total meaning to the determination of the same personality. That is due, in part at least, to the admixture of other hands— modern as well as ancient—but chiefly to the slack- ness of the painter’s advancing years. So that while the execution ex- hibits a smoother finish than is natural in our master, such an im- pression leaves everywhere a residue of characters that establishes his predominant share. With these qualifications the figures of the Nativity in the central leaf of the triptych will join themselves as closely to the earlier works of this master as to the corresponding figures in the Vatican panel, by the hollow-cheeked faces and knotted fingers of the old men, the thread-like hair, the hook-like ears, the steeped glance, and the slender bodies. These details, however, will testify more eloquently to the author- ship of their painter when we compare the Virgin’s head to Eve in the Fall (S. P. 10) ; the St. James in the left wing (with his long face, his silhouette, his high-placed ear, his hair, his spare beard) with the same saint (see Fig. 4) belonging to Mr. Griggs; or the St. Anthony, the Abbot, with the same figure in Naples (see Figs. 10, 11)—-where the mould, the beard, the nose, the furrows recur—or the angels, and the Annunciate with the heads of the Florentine Coronation (see Fig. 3). The third of these panels in the Collection of Mr. Maitland F. Griggs has lost too much of its original surface to furnish definite ad- vantage to the demonstration. ‘The design and the grace of the figures, 115 the drapery, the rock-shapes declare the same taste and genius —al- though the condition of the panel, which has been reduced to the preparation and underpainting, suggests the possibility, that these were carried out by assistants before the panel reached the hands of the master. Not far behind these works, come four gentle saints that having been separated from the lost central panel containing a Madonna, are now in the store-room of the Vatican Gallery (n. 201). The com- partment that originally stood left of the Virgin with SS. Julian and Lucy, displays first of all, the same halos as in the Nativity (in the same Gallery), and a brocade, which although patterned, is streaked like the floor of this picture. The hair, the high ear and the hands of the St. Lucy imitate those of the Temptation (S. P. 10), while the left hand of Julian with its knottiness and double lights, is a looser and swifter rendering of the prototype of such hands, as those of the Horne Evangelist, e.g. (see high): There remains one other work by the same hand as the foregoing —a painting to which the Horne St. John (see Figs. 5, 7) bears closer correspondencies than any other, and which is in Naples in the church of S. Antonio Abbate. It is a triptych” (Fig. 10), flanked by Sts. Francis and Peter, left, and Sts. John, the Evangelist, and Louis of Toulouse, right. Though dismembered, each of the leaves of the altar- piece is on the original site. But a fate almost as hard as loss has be- fallen it: for there is no violence of which humanity, in its abject wan- tonness is capable, that has not spent itself on this defenceless panel, and all the fatuity of modern renovation has completed the work of destruction. In replacing the gold, the restorer has marred the out- lines, and the halos have been outrageously daubed over. At present the surface is flaking away, with no pious hand to stay its utter ruin. But while the malice of man and of time have done their worst, the few well-preserved parts do honor to the soundness of the classic technique. By a lucky chance the figure of St. John, the Evangelist, which the Horne St. John (see Figs. 5, 7) most closely resembles, is among those injured least. It will be seen at once — allowing first for the discrepancy of state of the two panels —that the structure, types and drawing of the two figures are radically the same. The heads have the identical make, the Horne head, like the whole figure, being more tightly knit and more emphatic in treatment. It would seem, accordingly, of an earlier 116 fruiting. The hollow cheeks alike in both, show the same hair starting from them. The upper lid cuts the same spreading iris in the eyes of both figures, and puts a look of vague and detached absorption into them. At the lower end of the nose the heavy outline forms the same shallow angles; two vertical lights mark the tip; and two horizontal ones, the knuckles of the right hand, which is forged of the same sub- stance, and bound by the same brittle line. The left hands differ from the right in both figures in the same way, and coincide among them- selves in shape and character. They lie similarly under their burdens, and the fingers bend sharply, spread and flatten under the nails at the tips. The drapery, which discloses the same white through its thin paint, is identical in color with that of the Horne saints, breaks into the same folds, and wraps the figure in the same way. One might subject the St. Paul in the Horne Foundation (Fig. 6) to the same demonstration, and pile up evidence by pointing out that the head of St. Anthony (Fig. 11) furnishes another instance of inti- mate resemblance to the Horne Evangelist (Fig. 7) ; but it will prove more profitable to note that the cusped arch of the Horne panels re- peats that of the central panel in Naples. If, as I am assuming, all these works exhibit a radical rhythm, a taste, types, shapes, style peculiar to a single personality, then they would all have been painted by the hand that painted the Naples triptych. This, as it happens, bears an inscription at the base of the throne which discloses the name of the artist and the date of its paint- ing, and runs thus:” A. MCCCLXXI NICHOLAUS TOMASI DE FLORE PICTO The Naples triptych would accordingly bestow the name of its painter on the frescoes of the Convento del T,, on the Academy Cor- onation, the Walters triptych, Mr. Griggs’ St. James, and small Nativ- ity, the two Saints of the Horne Foundation, the Nativity and the four Saints at the Vatican, the Johnson tabernacle; which between them yield a sense of a coherent artistic complex, as it exercises itself in the various forms of fresco, monumental and small painting. It may be less simple, because of wanting evidence, to speculate on the sequence of the individual works in this series, or on the length of the gaps between them. Happily, with the aid of temperate conjecture, however, and a sparse scattering of data, one might reach some likely 117 notion of the relative chronological position of our master’s activity, and possibly even of some of his works. Sacchetti, in his facetious account of a banquet of artists at San Miniato, mentions a Niccolo di Tommaso along with Orcagna and Taddeo Gaddi. If this be our painter, as some have supposed, then he might be considered a contemporary of these two masters. Again, a Niccolo di Tommaso who may be our painter is among the earliest reg- istrations in the Guild of St. Luke, founded in 1339.” On these grounds, such as they are, one might, tentatively assume that he was a mature artist at that date, and probably not under twenty-five years of age. On the other hand, he cannot have been much over thirty, if he painted the Naples polyptych as late as 1371, which shows him already in an advanced, though not yet, declining maturity. His activity as a painter might, therefore, have begun around 1330. If it did, then none of his earlier works has yet been identified. All those I attribute to him would seem to fall into the third quarter of the Trecento. And oddly enough, the two documents bearing on him, are of the same period, that is of the years 1365 and 1366. Their contents imply middle life and a settled reputation at the time of their drawing up. In 1365" he is a witness at the proving of the will of Nardo di Cione. Under the following year, 1366, he is recorded with Orcagna — among others — in a list of art- ists consulted by the Operai del Duomo. And the stylistic relation of Niccolo’s works to others of his school force them into the same chronological position. Taken in a body, they represent a continuation of Nardo’s style, as we know Nardo about the middle of the century; a stage that cannot be far removed from the painting of the frescoes by Giovanni da Milano and his Nar- desque associate in the Rinuccini Chapel, about 1370. A contem- porary, a younger contemporary, if his juniority may be surmised on the basis of his derivation from Nardo, his entire artistic vocabulary is appropriated from him. The types, the lazy postures, the cut and look of the eye, the bony hand, the split light, repeat Nardo’s forms and spirit so closely and so consistently, that they must have become rooted in him from a tender and early discipleship under him. And yet, while Nardo’s style arose in response to an original vision, and therefore, always shares and reflects its endless self-renewal, Niccold’s style is the result of habitual repetition of Nardo’s stock of images; and in the natural effort to seize and to hold them, the hand obeying the mind, rendered them in a heavy schematized contour. In its simplifying, summarizing, mnemonic effort, it reduced the forms of Nardo’s free 118 and fluid expression to diagram, and so the hair of Nardo and the wrinkles become parallelized, the articulation of the fingers, over-ac- cented, while the larger representative units are seen less as incidents in a harmonized and infinitely varied system of nature—which in Nardo they also reveal—than as abbreviations of nature accommo- dated to a decorative vision. But these assimilations from Nardo, and Niccolo’s dependence on him, express a deeper temperamental affinity between master and pupil. Both possess a tendency to sink the action in a pervading mood, and each object, as in a piece of still-life, becomes steeped in a life beyond itself, the life of its suggestions and associations. ‘This poetic factor in Niccolo’s paintings, in a stylistic context so explicitly Nardesque, urges the conclusion that only Nardo’s example could be responsible for it. With this dependence once admitted, there still remains a quality in Niccolo’s painting which, if wanting in original genius, yields a unique savor and makes him an extraordinary figure among his con- temporaries. In an age when art was not a personal but a traditional expression, Niccolo, pursuing a path struck by his master, evolves an art that draws on intimate experience. His painting is neither deter- mined to an idea, nor does it liberate a direct force; his figures release a mood, and spread an atmosphere about themselves. They have their being in an ante-motor world, in which the monotonous bliss of life has not yet felt the vehemence of the heart, nor reached the light of full consciousness. In a final reckoning, it is an ingenuous insinuating but unevolved expression, still in the stage of the protoplasmic dream, dumbly shaping its half-formed images. How inaccessible and unreal the Giottesque idealism of his day must have seemed to this provincial little Florentine, whose only reality was the drifting state of the feel- ings and the instincts! Niccold’s large inheritance from Nardo has been responsible for the confusion of Niccold’s works with those of Nardo’s other artistic heirs and artistic kin. We have seen that the greater part of Niccolo’s pan- els, were attributed to Giovanni da Milano. This is due first of all to general appropriations of sentiment and atmosphere (see Fig. 12), then, to the fact that Niccolo took over from Nardo, along with other traits, some that are of Sienese origin, there being a good deal that is ultimately Sienese in Giovanni. There is, besides, evidence of Nardo and Giovanni having borrowed something from each other. But there is a more specific reason for the confusion. Niccolo’s panels, which are 119 strongly Nardesque, resemble the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel, painted by a pupil of Nardo’s,” but often incautiously assumed to be by the painter (or his assistant) of the upper tiers.” With these, con- temporary evidence credits Giovanni da Milano. But the analogies of the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel to Nardo are so much deeper than the analogies between these and Giovanni’s frescoes in the same place, that the difference in degree of analogy alone, would establish not only two distinct hands, but hands of radically distinct derivation. Suida,” whose eye would not be deceived, saw this difference of style clearly enough, but because he saw not beyond it, attributed the lower frescoes, with evasive caution, to an assistant of Giovanni’s, without further qualifications. It had escaped him that the significant fact about this painter of the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel, is not the fortuitous one that he helped Giovanni, but rather that he was an autonomous master, intrinsically independent of him. Giovani, it must be remembered, was a foreigner, with a foreign manner and a foreign accent ; the painter of the lowest tier was, on the contrary, formed on indigenous Florentine traditions. Now Giovanni’s painting in the Chapel was first surmised by Cavalcaselle,”* and authenticated by the later discovery” of an agree- ment between Giovanni and the captains of Or San Michele dated 1365; but 1366” marks the last occasion on which he is documentarily cited in Florence, and not impossibly also his breaking off at the lowest tier, either because of non-fulfilment of the difficult terms of the con- tract, or because of his desire to be bound by another.” If the master who undertook to complete the series was of different affinities and character, his share of it on the other hand, reveals that he pledged himself to carry the painting forward so far as possible on Giovanni’s plans, and what is clearer still, in Giovanni’s palette. It is this adherence to Giovanni’s color that has been deluding most eyes. But leaving the color for the present out of our reckoning, notice how wide the disparity between the two styles really is. Giovanni’s figures (Fig. 13) are organized to a rhythmic coherence on the flat from left to right by the flowing lines of their clean-edged patterns. Such organization implies a direct scale-relation of these to the area and its limits. Every object is in the compositional system and becomes a directly operative factor in it. But the figures are at the same time organized in depth —in a way that reveals depth and surface to be correlated manifestations of the same organizing principle. Everything is further harmonized by a I20 fluid and binding chiaroscuro, by a physical atmosphere, by a poetic and sensitive vision which is of a different racial quality than that of his Florentine successor. In this atmosphere, the individual figure — of the texture and consistency of which Giovanni had a northern sense —1is modulated to a soft, swelling plasticity, which together with the line, liberates it from the mere heaviness of mass. Such a way of seeing is radically diverse from that of the master who finished the Rinuccini cycle” (Fig. 14). In his share of the fres- coes there is by contrast, a rude heaviness of bulk, a modelling that al- ways uncovers the raw saliences of the figure, but never becomes quali- tative. No linear melody unites the elements of the surface; in fact there is no such linealistic consciousness in this painter, as in the Sienizing Giovanni, and none of his optical sensibility. The action, which in Giovanni’s frescoes moves with an ideal dramatic progression, becomes in the lowest tier, scattered and manifold, to produce the il- lusion of a fullness and variety of life. There is no gradation of ac- cents, and no swiftly seizable relief of its determinants in an ideally unified action as in Giovanni, whose poetry is here replaced by an _ austere, somewhat crabbed prose. Passing from the upper to the low- est tiers, the total effect is starkly realistic. Such disparities between Giovanni and the painter of the lowest tier, might lead one to expect no link of kinship between the latter and Niccolo di Tommaso; and it must be admitted that temperamentally Niccolo stands closer to Giovanni da Milano, and that he was pro- foundly influenced by him. Niccold’s imagination and optical vision as well owe a great deal to the north Italian master, but his manual habits are as profoundly Florentine, and join him by close stylistic analogies to the master of the lowest tier. These analogies fix, beyond any question, their common origin in Nardo. Leaving for the moment Niccold’s affinities to Giovanni aside, there is indisputable evidence of this in the radical types (Figs. 16, 17), the parallelized hair, the heavily underlined long eye with the large swimming iris, the horizontal upper lid, the loose ear, the nose with the cloven light and the sharp alinasal angle; and in the heavy contours. But if their origins are the same, their individual styles are irrecon- cilable. Their outward resemblances confine them within the Nar- desque group, but the divergencies of their fresco technique, of their drawing (of hands especially), of their modelling, of the scale, and the deeper discrepancy of feeling, and of taste, divide them within that I2I group. The dryness, the heroic detachment, the realistic action, the mass distribution, in the lowest tier, ought to set its painter apart from Niccolo conclusively. This differentiation might be finally confirmed by the discovery of other works by the master of the lowest tier. It happens that one such work comes to hand, and that it substantiates the above argument and the artistic independence of his personality. First, however, it will be necessary to demonstrate that it was ac- tually painted by him. A five-leaved altarpiece (Fig. 17), it hangs in the Florentine Academy, in all the glory of its original tempera, un- marred alike by restorer and the abomination of modern varnish. It represents the Vision of St. Bernard in the central compartment, with saints in the wings, and is well known in critical literature as an “Orcagna.” Its attribution to this great master boasts a line of high sanctions. Suida (1905, 13) sees in it more distinctly than elsewhere “Orcagna’s Eigenart” (intimately personal style), and Venturi (1906, V, 772), all the “nobilta dell’ artista.” More recently Sirén (1917, I, 230) in- clines to assign it to a “rather advanced stage of Orcagna’s activity, when his younger brothers or other helpers took a considerable part in the execution of his paintings.” Van Marle (III, 465-6) on the contrary, would put it into Orcagna’s earlier period, but he cautiously places a question mark after Orcagna’s name under the illustration. Such persistence must have its grounds, especially after Mr. Beren- son (in his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, ed. 1912, 161) al- lowed only one extant painting — the Strozzi altarpiece—to Orcagna; and these abide largely in the immanent genius of the picture. For the eye there can be no two opinions: the physical, measurable factors, the graphology, distinguish the Academy and the Strozzi polyptychs for- ever. On the other hand it is easy, in the thick of minute evidence, to forget that all the glow of St. Bernard’s Vision is reflected from the Strozzi altarpiece. The shining grace in the attended Virgin, and the swelling rapture of the saint, give off a sort of intensity which bestows not a miraculous, but a lyrical reality upon the moment. Although the analogies stop here, one is tempted to continue to see them in certain resemblances which, purely external, are due to the fact that the painter was here imitating a design by Orcagna. But there is not a single figure in the Academy polyptych that harbors any of the significance of the Strozzi figures, that has any of their sweep, 122 their majesty, the heedless preoccupation, the detachment, fatefulness and finality of their action. Orcagna’s figures belong to a higher and more evolved race, and their position in their field, their relation to it, suggest a wider world and deeper universe. The types, again, and the individual parts, are, upon close exami- nation, correspondingly disparate. While Orcagna’s people move with a courtly decorum, while their hands are designed for divine ministra- tions, the figures in the polyptych are of humbler stock and their hands for profane tasks. The figures themselves, suggest little beyond their momentary employment, whereas Orcagna’s action spreads eternity round it, and infinity round its figures. His drawing discloses at every point the precise function as well as the form of the shape it encloses. His mass has firmer subtance beneath draperies that help to articulate It. As the qualitative superiority of the Strozzi altarpiece differentiates it from the Academy polyptych, so the same atmosphere in this and the Rinuccini frescoes ought, at first blush, assimilate them to each other. But if this analogy is present and manifest throughout these two works, the stylistic identity of our master is more readily demonstrable and appears more sharply and clearly in the following features of the altar- piece and frescoes (see Figs. 15, 16); in the heavy contours; in the figure the wrinkles have worn in the forehead; in the crow’s-feet and the folds at the root of the nose; in the continuous diagonal of the pro- file (S. P. 3, 9, 13, 14); in the loosely adjusted mask; in the cloven light often on the nose and chin; in the collapsible ears (see Figs. 15, Pompeo’, 4,12, 13,9, 14). As might have been foreseen, the predella reveals more numerous affinities to the lower Rinuccini frescoes than other parts of the altar- piece. It contains figures (Figs. 18, 19) of the same stolid dignity and poetry, recalling Spinello, only more restrained and inspired in their action. The frescoes, it is true, are more mature, freer and more varied in incident, completer in dramatic illusion. But these are differences which attend the variations of a normally evolving individual as well as those of scale and of procedé. Analogies will be found by comparing the aged priest in the Mar- riage of the Virgin (S. P. 7) with St. John, the Evangelist, in the altar- piece (S. P. 4), the profiles in the Marriage of the Virgin in the Rinuc- cini Chapel (see Fig. 14) with that of St. Bernard (S. P. 14) in the central compartment of the polyptych, and also with those in the two scenes from his life in the predella below (see Fig. 18). The type of 128 the very characteristic head of the greybeard at the right (S. P. 12) in the fresco of the Miracle of the Magdalen reappears in the second head from the left in the predella representing the Decapitation of St. Quentin (S. P. 8); and in the head at the extreme left in the Ordeal of St. John, the Evangelist (S. P. 6). Finally the types, profiles, hair, ears and hands, the chiaroscuro of the Maries at the Tomb (S. P. 1) in the Rinuccini Chapel undergo only the slightest variation in the central compartment of the polyptych (S. P. 2) ; and the angel (S. P. 3) at the right of the former composition is in almost exact correspond- ence with the seated figure of St. Bernard in the predella (S. P. 9). Particularly characteristic of his profiles is the way the modelling shadow inside the eye runs clear down to the volute of the nose, abutting sharply on the light along its edge. These two works then, the lowest tier in the Rinuccini Chapel and the Academy altarpiece, should form the nucleus of an ideal personal- ity, to which, for the present, nothing else can be plausibly attributed. Nevertheless, linked together, one serves to extend the revelations of the other with regard to their author, whose variability besides, they in a measure adumbrate. Alike fundamentally, they both betray in different ways, the teach- ing of the Cioni. The Academy polyptych, however, shows a pre- ponderance of Orcagna’s influence, and if we judge by its tightness and its lyricism, it would seem earlier in its painter’s activity than the frescoes which are larger and looser in treatment; and which thus bear witness to a change of heart and a very nearly complete submission in his later stages to Nardo’s enchantments. The period of the Rinuccini Master may only be surmised on the specious, though inconclusive, basis that his painting in the Rinuccini Chapel cannot have taken place much after Giovanni left off, some time, therefore, between 1366 and 1369. Their style, moreover, com- mits them a priori to this period, which probably saw the full maturity of the master. If so, then the painting in the Academy panel would have to be earlier by some ten years, and of the epoch of Orcagna’s Strozzi altarpiece. 124 10. Il. iz, 13. 14. Ae 16. 17. NOLES . A briefer version of the study on Niccold di Tommaso first appeared in Arr in America, December, 1924, 19-35, giving rise to a brief comment in Van Marle, V, 478, where he denies the frescoes in the Convento del T to this master. . I am assuming that this designation will furnish no ground for confusion with Suida’s “Meister des Rinuccini Altars” (45-48, 50). . This edifice, now called Casa Tonini, No. 355 Piazza S. Domenico, Pistoia, was originally a church and monastery dedicated to St. Anthony of Vienna in 1340, and popularly called Convento del T, because of the Greek tau worn by the monks on their frocks. (See Giglioli, Pistoia, 134). . The fresco representing the Savior in Paradise with the signs of the Zodiac above Him, described by Cavalcaselle (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ed. Hutton, I, 414) is no longer distinguishable. . Ciampi (in his Notizie inedite della Sagrestia Pistoiese de’ Belli Arredi, Firenze, 1810) attributes some of the frescoes in the chapter-house of S. Francesco, Pistoia, without any basis, to one Antonio Vite, who to this day remains, in spite of desperate efforts, nothing but a name. This author sees enough similarity in the paintings at the Convento del T to those of S. Francesco, to assume they are by the same master. In this Tolomei (Guida di Pistoia, Pistoia, 1821) follows Ciampi. Cavalcaselle identifies the painter of the Convento del T with the one who decorated the ceiling of the said chapter-house, and with the one who painted The Marriage of the Virgin, The Stoning of St. Stephen, The Mourning over Stephen’s Body, in a chapel in the right transept in the Prato Cathedral — these three being, incidentally, by two independent fifteenth century hands. . Reproduced in the Catalogue of an Exhibition of Florentine Painting before 1500 (The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1920), plate I, under the name of Giovanni da Milano. . This panel has been fully described in the Guide to the Vatican Picture Gallery (Rome, 1914), No. 183, where it is ascribed to Sano di Pietro. . The Agnolesque fresco on the entrance wall of S. Maria Novella, is the only painting similarly composed, that occurs to me. . Attributed in the Catalogue of the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, 1912, I, 69, to the Following of Allegretto Nuzi. See L. Salazar, La Chiesa di Sant’ Antonio Abate (in Napoli Nobilissima, anno XIV, 1905, 53-54); also Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281; Khvoshinsky e Salmi, I Pittori Toscani, Il Trecento, Roma, 1914, II, figs. 34-36. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281. Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton), I, 281. Vasari, L 694, 0, 2: Vasari, I, 583, n. 2. Compare Niccoldé di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Master with respect to the mood, the mask, the narrowly open eye, the furrows around it, and the hair. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle (ed. Hutton, I, 339) where the authors attribute the entire Rinuccini Chapel to the hand of Giovanni da Milano. Far from giving him a name, Suida (32 et seq.) does not even attempt a characterization of this master. Toesca (in his Pittura e Miniatura nella Lombardia, 226, n. 5) attributes the lowest tier to Giov. del Biondo, followed in this view by Sirén, Catalogue of Jarves Coll., Yale University, 1916, 47. Venturi, V, 913, sees the distinction vaguely and incompletely; Van Marle (III, 528, n, 1) thinks them by a pupil of Giov. da Milano. 125 ~ “we e 18, See note 16. ro8 Vocarh T5723 n, 2. 20. Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani, II, 1858, 65. 21. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, II, 187 et seq.; Suida, 29. 22. See reproductions Venturi, V, 913, 914. . 126, Mmrwnd = DeErTAILs FROM THE Paintincs oF NiccoLo pi Tommaso Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. New York, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, St. James. Pistoia, Convento del T., Adam and Eve. Florence, Fondazione Horne, St. Paul. Pistoia, Convento del T., Paradise. (3), &. 9. 10. Florence, Academy, Coronation. Pistoia, Convento del T., Paradise. Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. New York, Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, St. James. Pistoia, Convento del T., The Temptation. Ankwne i | DETAILS FROM THE PAINTINGS OF THE Rinuccin1 MAsTER Florence, S. Croce, Maries at the Tomb. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. Florence, S. Croce, Maries at the Tomb. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. Florence, S. Croce, Marriage of the Virgin. SHNv=- OO DM Florence, Acadeniy, Polyptych. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. Florence, S. Croce, Marriage of the Virgin. Florence, S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. Florence, S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. Florence S. Croce, Miracle of the Magdalen. Florence, Academy, Polyptych. DOI “f Jap OywseUoy “I “SI L aNvV NOILVLINA], 3H, /OSVNWOT Id OTODDIN ra NOISTNdX) FH ee ‘ > 4 oe Hv 7 oa a ‘ a7 6 oP 3 * L By 45" Rad gee ¥ es i a , ‘ LF aw fhe ee Bs : hat be : ras re 2 wake é Lis a “ “ ™ Od . * ies ac ae a N Bs r ms ai # « bf “? . . j s . e < A iu i > zl > Cle iliac bel ‘ Fic. 4. Niccoto pt Tommaso: St. JAMEs Mr. Maitland F. Griggs, New York —— * 4 AS I % Ay 1 4 At fP , 5 f ! FiG.33; et et Ae eee ee Mee i i es Ee ee Bt —~ r+ NiccoLto pt Tommaso: THE CoronaTIon Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence Fic. 7. Niccoto pt Tommaso: DetaiL oF Fic. 5. Niccoto pt Tommaso: Fic. 6. Niccoto pt Tommaso: Fic. 11. Niccoio pr Tommaso: St. Joun, THE EVANGELIST St. Joun, THE EVANGELIST St. Paut Derait or St. ANTHONY Fondazione Horne, Florence Fondazione Horne, Florence Fondazione Horne, Florence S. Antonio Abate, Naples Fic. 8. Nuiccoto pt Tommaso: Tue Nativity Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome “”~ Al | MASO: TABERNACLE Tom he Johnson Collection, Philadelphia a ° o ic) oO 4 Al 5) Sado ‘21VqQP Oww0jwP *g fo yruny ‘Ol ‘OI OSVIWWO T Id OTOODOINS HOALdIY [, ASAOTNOT, AO SINO'T “LS aNV ‘LSITZDNVAQ, FHL ‘NHOfL “1 YwaALad “LO GNV SIONVUY LS STAINY HALIM “Loqy FHL ‘ANOHINY “LS APN SG tl SNe MMMM AS fm Fic. 12. Grovanni pa Mitano: Fic. 13. Giovanni pA Mrtano: Birra oF THE VIRGIN Derait or SAINTS IN ALTARPIECE Rinuccini Chapel, S. Croce, Florence Uffizi Gallery, Florence & Fic. 14. THe Rrnuccint Master: MarriacE OF THE VIRGIN Rinuccini Chapel, Church of S. Croce, Florence Fic. 15. THe Rinuccini Master: Detam or THE PRESENTATION OF THE VIRGIN Church of S. Croce, Florence Fic. 16. THe Rinuccini Master: Derait or THe MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN Church of S. Croce, Florence Fic. 17. THe Rinuccrni Master: Potyprycu Academy, Florence a Wat sarin Fic. 18. Tue Rinuccini Master: St. Bernarp ANp DiscipPLes (Derait or PrEDELLA To PoLyrprycH) Academy of Fine Arts, Florence Fic. 19. Tue Rinuccint MAster: ScENE FROM THE Lire-or Sr. Joun, THE EVANGELIST (Detar. or PrepeLLta To PoLyprycH) Academy of Fine Arts, Florence oa AN OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF METHOD ‘ORe may safely say that the criticism of art is not only in a stage, but in a situation. It is enjoying a peculiar ascendency with an eager public, which, in the more intellectually awake Europe, has for several decades past, been aware of its existence. But now at last, and in America especially, it has come out of its proper ambient of museum and library, is being taught in colleges, juggled in conversation, and applied with daring enterprise, by professional and novice alike, in the traffic of pictures. Of course, from the point of view of Knowledge — or at least an honest pursuit of it — these progressive changes become grotesquely humorous, but perhaps also somewhat alarming, by providing a new scene, after all, not natural to it, and by extending its normal uses. It is this that, in spite of the exalted claims of its practitioners, tends to divert a discreet study from its true course by setting up two kinds of truth: the truth which represents a conformity to fact, and the truth inspired by practical convenience, which, in so tight an economic or- ganization as the present, is more cogent because concrete, and more intelligible because automatically operative. The crowning fact in the inherent comedy is that sanctioned authorities have, in some instances, been dividing their allegiance between the two kinds of truth, without differentiating in every case as to its kind or object. With this situation prevailing, general ignorance and a defective sense of scholarship, have been complicating matters even farther. This is perhaps the best that can be expected — certainly I should not set myself up as a judge of that — it, nevertheless, renders the practice of scholarship, and its diffusion a problem. The more friendly and thoughtful public that skirts the subject has, generally speaking, nar- row experience, small reading, smaller culture, and no tried technique for appropriating it independently. It has consequently no secure standards for appraising the pronouncements of learning; and so in- fluences its output retroactively. Meanwhile criticism itself has in the course of the last two decades taken a turn, which is hardly being adequately realized. Following a period of pioneering, in which the student extended himself over the various schools in all the length of their evolution, comes the present, 127 wherein the field is beginning to contract both chronologically and ter- ritorially. Whereas the outgrown past fixed its centre of research in the isolated head of a school, admitting a certain shading-off in quality to his artistic dependents, the historical area today is being cut up into smaller units, and seen with a shifting focus. The older generation of critics — incidentally one may say, more richly endowed and inspired than the present — working with a large field before them, singled out the great figures of known name. And the result was a historic panorama with only the peaks visible above the nebula that covered the lesser heights and foothills. Such limitation of prospect was imposed upon criticism by a fashionable snobbery ; but also by an exquisite sense of value, and a consciously exalted taste in the critic, who held to his preferences the more stub- bornly, the deeper their subjectivity. Fashion and ignorance can still afford to condescend to none but the consecrated names. Besides, simple self-endearing human indolence threw its weighty sanctions on the side of this attitude. It will always be more winsomely natural to ignore all that is not conventionally great, and to mind only what is easy to remember. The most important issues in the universe rely for their very existence on the human mind’s limited capacity for seeing and retaining. Wherefore, the pictures bearing the stamp of a known style were, by common habit, and in the practice of criticism, labelled with a name best known of those who painted in it. It is to all these circumstances, mingled with hero-worshipping sentimentalism, that a generous tolerance of this baptismal habit is to be laid. But the error involved in its indulgence proceeded from a tendency at once more radical and more dangerous, and that is the reading of ancient artistic motives by modern notions of individualism in artistic creation. Of course, theoretically the critic is too knowing to slip into so elementary an error; but in the heat of performance his egoism plunges him into the most childlike variety of muddled inno- cence: He will admit as an intolerable commonplace that there are scores of names in the archives and in early literature, with which no existing works may be identified; that the dim aura of satellites surrounding the great masters must have kept up a steady production — but a reputable name emits a human warmth and personal suggestions that appeal overwhelmingly to his heart, and its explicitness, irresistibly to his understanding, against the welter of shadowy anonymity. A name 128 is after all a name, and I have heard him exclaim in a sublime despair, that where there is no sure way to the truth, blind inspiration may hit onit. What a comfort must it be to him that his subject lacks the rigid exactions of a science — although it has been so designated (“Wissen- schaft”) in countries where accuracy is forever overreaching itself! And yet science or no science, I seriously believe that the art-histori- an has this in common with the better part of thinking humanity, that he knows by a sort of Kantian intuition when he is right, or at least when the tendency of his conclusion is. For if scientific truth will never be arrived at, in a subject that draws its material from a func- tional reaction, our conclusions, as will be seen, are capable of reaching objective validity. Unhappily, such is the genial perversity of our kind, this intuition is unavailing against the vicious determination to stamp fact with the mind’s own idiosyncracies, on top of the willing admission that fact has its own nature, its own laws, its own logic and its own whims. The critic, being tenderly human, constitutionally perhaps rather than mentally, fails to realize the disparity between modern and an- cient conditions of artistic activity ; and upon this error rests the bet- ter part of modern critical practice. To-day, art is first of all a privileged calling, tolerated but seldom collectively encouraged, because it has no economic justification. In order to exercise his vocation, the artist must first win his freedom of the worldly exigencies by some form of ransom or by rebellion. As his activity is in its nature ideal rather than practical, he cuts himself off from the world; as it touches the spirit, as it is expansive rather than strenuous, it raises him above the grouillement of common life, and the neutralizing effect of its shared interests. In his isolation he evolves a personal language and addresses himself to a specialized audience. All this makes him look upon his expression as an attribute of the ego, a badge of distinction, a concession of something greater and more pre- cious. His self-sufficiency reinforces his fancied superiority ; his aloof- ness endows him with mystery; his privileged activity, with glamour, and his reputation, with a prestige-value; until, as in notorious in- stances, he comes to regard himself, and to be regarded, as something almost holy. Hence the modern romantic attitude, of art as self- expression, and its modern debasement to self-exhibition. In the tightly organized community of the early Renaissance, on the contrary, the artist was a product and an incident of its life, a creature of its need, part of the solid body social and economic. Life having 129 been lived in normal function, people had their being on earth and above it in vital alternation. They had dreams and longings which, because founded in function, had a spiritual validity untainted by de- spair or distrust. They arrived the more directly at a personal organ- ization, and a vision of life at once simple, vivid and clear. On a scale which was consistent with perfect social and economic coordination, the community, often divided by party strifes, unsettled by wars, nevertheless had the same religion, and within the same walls, the same local tradition touching all things. This was continuous and pervasive. Serving a smaller group of needs, and needs more harmon- ized, such a tradition changed slowly. And opportunity being narrow- ly limited, vocation had to be subsumed under a limited variety of conventional occupations, in which by general rule, the apprentice, in painting as in other crafts, from early boyhood worked in accordance with a small number of settled formulas. He repeated the drawings of his master, learned to paint like him, and adopted the subjects, shapes, motifs, used before him. Properly speaking he never imitated nature. The artist’s creative effort, like his personality, was merged in a common consciousness, and a common past; and in his practice, ac- cordingly, he drew upon images that were remembered collectively as well as individually. All earthly vexation, disabuse and despair were rendered tolerable by the comfortings and guaranties of an indestructible Church. The promises of this Church filled the ultimate void; as the whole system of human life, a life without radical changes, provided ultimate con- victions. The creative energy did not waste itself, as it does to-day, in having to combat the modern malady, the futility of effort. It was this very Church that furnished the explicit occasions for creative expression. T'o render herself sensible, this Invisible Church must needs build churches, and to interpret herself to her worshippers, she had to cover their walls with her teachings. And the artist painted because his services were direly required for this supremely important end. The practical necessity on the one hand, and the impressive signs of her consequence, on the other, lent a solid basis to his activity. His work might be bad, it could never be useless, fatuous or questionable. Born into such a world, the painter was bound to regard his calling humbly as a means of mere livelihood. He had come by the mastery of his art in the harmless animal process of growing up, in an environ- ment wherein its value rested in its practical suitability, rather than in arbitrary superiorities. 130 Art, accordingly, was not looked upon as a personal expression. It was a racial expression. Nevertheless, by availing itself of artistic media tried in a long tradition, individual achievement presented an individual character reinforced by real power, more naturally than in the isolated painter of to-day; because, with small exception, all the artistic output had behind it besides, the energy, experience, maturity, conviction, of a great race and a fortunate age. Under such conditions the artist had no romantic illusions regard- ing the sacredness of his art, still less of his person, and because of it, thought nothing of allowing assistants to help him in the execution of his works, and even to paint independently under his name (as notably in the case of Giotto or Giambellini). Now, whereas the older criticism, as we have seen, by a sort of genteel transcendentalism, confined itself to known figures, and sur- rounded them with a void; the ideal, more detached, specialized mod- ern historian of art is scrupulously bent on according every painter his proper character, and proper place, as he would the objects of a land- scape — leaving appraisal to another critical occasion. Although it must be conceded to the champions of quality in art, that some of these painters are of slight intrinsic importance, the knowledge of them, at the very worst, furnishes a more enlightened view of the area, helps the critic besides to gauge the peculiar genius of the determining historical figures, to sharpen their features, to draw their outlines more tightly around them, and to measure the extent of their influence. | As the painter did not approach art as self-expression, he fell in with traditional modes, and contented himself with painting like his forerunners or confréres, by analogies that were common within a school. In the search for the identity of the master of a single work or of a group, accordingly, it would be necessary to remember how intricately involved a hypothetical personality was with others, how much more objective the methods of discovery have consequently to be from those of preceding generations. But the difference between modern and older methods is one of degree rather than of kind, and the methods of the present follow from the stage just before it in the normal course of evolution. They involve refinements — let us say refinements of technique rather than of sensibility — which the older pioneering generation formulated, but with notorious exceptions, was not in so good a position to apply as 131 the present, on account of the general preparation of the field it was called upon to make. To find a personality one must discover the term common to a given series of works. The technique of approach from authenticated works is prejudicial to an objective conclusion. A personality dis- closes itself in certain terms common to a group of works, which the limited number of authenticated ones may contain in a misleading measure or combination. Moreover it is not the social and human identity, not the name of a master that we are seeking, but the in- trinsic artistic personality. Finally, the method of the common term leaves us free to work from the heart of the problem, regardless of all external or fortuitous incident. But to evolve a conception of an artistic personality one must have found its style in the individual work. Style cannot be known save through its direct experience. If such an experience be positive — and none other concerns us — it is exclusive and unique. By the last at- tribute it is also differentiable, furnishing the first condition of con- noisseurship. In normal susceptibilities it produces a kind of ecstasy, the ecstasy of perfect adjustment, distinguished from mystic and sensual rapture of love or prayer, by its instant resolution into its constructive factors, that may be called shapes. Shape is the ultimate unit of style — as the condition of style is an ecstatic experience. This has its systole and diastole: it contracts with the binding synthesis; and expands again in flyingly noting the relation of individual shapes to the total shape, wherein they stand in sharply and swiftly perceived relation to each other. It is thus in terms of shape that we divine style; it is in shape that we arrive at it. But so long as our total consciousness is suffused, so long as its content is single and synthetic, we assimilate shape in de- nominations of visual measure too fine and elusive for the mind to hold. We know it neither through the mind nor primarily through vision, but directly by its correspondence in function. At that instant we are organized by the aesthetic impact. A new lucidity is struck out of our chaos. Our life-cells are reassembled in accordance with the pattern of the object, our organic rhythms timed by it, and our structure caught in a new tension. But that instant once passed, shape becomes material for the cognitive faculty — at the point at which chemistry becomes 132 physics. ‘There precisely actual shape forfeits its ultimate but fugitive reality, and becomes generic, typical shape or represented shape. It ceases to exist as a work of art: it describes something else to which it directs the attention. As long, however, as it remains an experience, the actual shape carries the radical rhythm, that pervades the whole work of art. This rhythm sustained at its own pitch, holds the con- structive vitality of a work of art. By it every part is absorbed in the whole in a synthetic tension, as every sense is absorbed in its experi- ence; and by it all the associated aspects of the shape are drawn into the aesthetic vortex. ‘The greater the work of art, the more swiftly will this happen, the more surely will the binding radical rhythm lead us to the whole from any of its parts. It would be falsifying the psychology of aesthetic experience to suppose that it contains nothing besides these abstract values. It is true it reveals itself primarily as shape, but as such it is only a mani- festation—its immediate manifestation. In so far as the artistic object is representative—and it is representative art that concerns us here— so long as it contains animate figures related in action, it is charged with the atmosphere and the ethical implications of the action, so that the object has at one moment direct vibrations as shape, at the next, suggestions of its action, and its identity in nature; the intrinsic ma- terial denotations of shape, that is, alternate with the connoted meaning of its action, and of its identity; but none of these is capable of sepa- rate existence, cach being a manifestation of all the others in an 1n- extricable oneness. ‘Thus a certain length, bend and position of a line describe a figure and its gesture, even as that line releases its own force and quality. It is the critical fact about art as distinguished from practical life, that the effect it produces in a normal consciousness is felt in the terms of the object; the more explicitly in a visual art like painting, as it works with definite and concrete images. It is accordingly in the in- stantaneous evolution of the aesthetic series that the suffused con- sciousness of the aesthetic crisis steadies itself in the shapes that first produced it; and only the voluptuary or hysteric would content himself with the ecstasy without returning to its dasis. It is in this re- turn from the ecstasy to the objective source, from a suffused to a see- ing consciousness, from rapture to vision, that the critical moment con- sists ; whereas on the contrary, the “aesthete” would avail himself of art _ as he might of a scent, to set him drifting through a state of the con- sciousness, rendered delicious by its sensual analogies of effortless and 133 uninhibited, lulling or gliding, movement through space. The imagery of such a consciousness is uncontrolled. It has neither pattern nor or- ganization. In fact it is by its independence of any controlling prin- ciple, that the sensation is capable of sustaining and reproducing itself. And every instant bears it farther away from the premises of the object. The content of the sensation will consequently tend to become arbi- trary, and its end will be the unfolding of a series of sensations and images drawn from the stock of an intimate and eccentric dream-world, varying with each individual. But the normal person, who has experienced the object, who has consequently appropriated it, grants it its artistic prerogative, by for- ever correcting the sum of his reactions with it, carrying them back to their visible terms, checking them up with the shapes in which they arose. By this process criticism accomplishes an objective, if it fails — as it must do to the end of time — in reaching a scientific validity. Scarcely then, have we become aware of the principle of unity (of the actual shape), than it resolves itself into its conventional substi- tutes, generic or geometric shapes. ‘The memory, at one remove from authenticity, being a sort of blind vessel, in order to retain what is sub- mitted to it and stored in it, by first-hand experience, is reduced to simplifying its material by generalizing it, by grouping it according to kind. That is how —as the incessant chemistry of mind and body bears us from state to state, from mood to mood, varying our imagery in atomic units of change, in focus and in sharpness — the aesthetic crisis (actual shape) tends to forfeit its peculiar conformation and its explicit character. So that by the rule, that no tension can sustain it- self beyond its moment within the human organism, the aesthetic ex- perience perpetually drifts towards a fading memory of function and a simplifying memory of vision. On the other hand, the object’s intimate correspondence in function tends to hold it for us. One might put it differently by saying that the experience wavers between actual shape and generic shape. Just how far actual shape will tend to become generic shape will depend on the practical question of purpose. When that is — as it is here — to find the personality, then actual shape will seek its type— typical shape, before, that is, it has lost those vital terms, which, corresponding in function, hold it together; while it iso- lates those fortuitous terms, that are primarily visual, and that vary from work to work. The vitality, being constant, belongs to the creative individual, the fortuity to the work — just as, letting the fortuitous terms drop away 134 from the actual shape, we have left the typical shape: the shape that typifies him. Thus by moving from the actual shape to the typical shape, we are relating one work to others by the same creative identity. Such group- ing of one work with others of its kind, however, is an inner gesture, enacted spontaneously in the function itself, before the extinction of the aesthetic moment, when the faculties are still vibrant with it, and before experience becomes the object of memory. This is the act of attribution — attribution, in reality, being no more than the recognition of a recurring experience, with free varia- tions. The confusion, to say nothing of wilful distortion, of two or more masters is, therefore, at its best, a failure of function; and frequently simply recklessness, incompetence or insensibility. Now, as the aesthetic moment gives us the actual shape, the object is classified by its generic shape. In language the generic shape would be described by a conceptual word (a noun), the actual shape by a combination of them or by qualifying ones (adjectives). But even then language would have described the actual shape partially, for language cannot really reach beyond generic suggestions, beyond the generic shape or the geometric shape. Language is conceptual; it consists of classified terms, capable of describing only the ideated experience of sense; it begins to capture that experience at the point at which it becomes the object of memory — at which it becomes memory. And as memory generalizes all such experience by classification, all adventures of the eye like those of touch, of taste, of smell, of hearing, elude language. Language can barely approximate them, and then only by analogy or example. The farther a shape is removed from the geometric, the less capable will language be of rendering it. Language has only one conceivable means of reproducing the ac- tual shape, and that is by indicating the exact position of every one of its points. But even then, a point being a theoretical concept, those concrete agents of texture and color under which it manifests itself to sense would still be inaccessible to literary statement. It is for such reasons that literary and pictorial modes are eternally irreconcilable; and it is a fair presumption that if shape could be presented in words, it would never have been painted. For it is in the material elements of wood, of canvas, of gesso, of pigment and its color, used in a special order, that the radical differen- 135 tia lie of such a work distinguishing it from literature as from every thing else. Words failing, there remains one way of adumbrating pictorial images, and that is by black-and-white photography. This is not near- ly as adequate as it is plausible, but it has until now been the only means accessible. If photography were an entirely mechanical process it would ren- der the pictorial object with a calculable difference from it. Unhappily, photography is largely an interpretative affair. It has this in common with general artistic practice, that the result is determined by the whim and genius of the operator, and the camera is only one of the determi- nants of the result. The operator of the machine adjusts it to those factors in the object which the human eye, subject to individual varia- bility, distinguishes in it. We need not even speak of the absence of color. Photography has not yet learnt to reproduce that with any accuracy or reliability. It can render its values, but then only with a proper correction of the lens by screens, specially sensitized plates, and so on. The degree of cor- rection, besides, will depend on the retinal sensibility in the photo- grapher. But photography has further limitations. It forfeits scale, which is an essential aesthetic factor, in reducing the original to a small fraction of its size, and thereby not only contracts the shapes, but congests them. Nevertheless, photography remains the best available simulation of the original, and the only corrective of the verbal system. The sole admissible method of demonstration therefore would be by collateral reproductions made by the most recent mechanical contrivances, and representing the average photographer’s record of the original. And even then, even if we were conceding photography the power of rendering the original with calculable differences, the changes it un- derwent through the centuries, the violence to which it had been sub- jected, the wanton, innocent, or obstinately benighted restorations, would still have to be discounted in order to leave us anything like the truth. 136 INDEX OF ARTISTS, AUTHORS, AND PERIODICALS Agnolo Gaddi, 31, 94. Albertini, Francesco, 20. Allegretto Nuzi, 48, 107, 125. Altichiero, 81. Ambrogio di Baldese, 90, 91, 93. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 104. American Journal of Archaeology, 80, 107. Ancona, Paolo d’, 14, 21. Andrea da Firenze, 113. Andrea del Castagno, 49. Andrea di Cione (see Orcagna). Andrea Vanni, 78, 79. Angelico, Fra, 1, 112. Anonimo Gaddiano, The, 39, 42. Antonio Billi, 20. Antonio di Francesco da Venezia (see Antonio Veneziano). Antonio Veneziano, 57, 67-81. Antonio Vite, 125. Art in America, 20, 64, 74, 80, 95, 107, 125. Arte, L’, 41, 64. Arts, The, 21. Bacchiacca, 2. Bacci, Peleo, 107. Baldese (see Ambrogio di Baldese). Barnaba da Modena, 79. Beato Andrea Gallerani, 79. Belvedere, 28, 33, 42. Berenson, Bernard, 21, 31, 48, 64, 91, 100, 106, 107, 108, 122. Bernardo Daddi, 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 20, 24, 25, 27, 30, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68, 71, 77, 78, 93, 104, 108. Bicci di Lorenzo, 41, 90. Bollettino d’ arte, 31, 32, 39, 41, 42, 48, 65, 91, 107. Bonaventura, S., 20. Borenius, Tancred, 20, 91, 94. Botticelli, 2, 104. Buffalmacco, 17, 21, 24, 107. Burlington Magazine, The, 21, 30, 31, 41, 64, 94. Cavalcaselle (see Crowe and ——). Cavallini, 17. Carocci, 64. Ciampi, 80, 125. Cimabue, 42. Cioni, The, 38, 83, 88, 90, 99, 103, 124. Cockerell, Sidney, 21. Coppo di Marcovaldo, 42. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, 23, 31, 41, 57, 64, 80, 86, 91, 95, 107, 120, 125, 126. Cruttwell, Maud, 21, 57. Daddi (see Bernardo Daddi). De Marzo, Giov., 81. Dami, Luigi, 31, 32, 39. Deodato Orlandi, 26. Donatello, 30. Duccio di Buoninsegna, 2, 26, 28, 38, 39, 104. Dugento, The, 21, 25, 27, 42, 57. Farinata degli Uberti, 57. Fogg Pieta (see Master of the). Forster, 80. Frey, Karl, 42, 65. Gamba, Count Carlo, 41, 92. Gazette des Beaux Arts, 80. Gerini, The, 83, 95. Ghiberti, 20, 21, 107. Giambellini, 131. Giglioli, Eduardo, 125. Giorgione, 106. Giottesque, 30, 39, 52, 53, 56, 64, 67. Giptio. $12 2213 4.117.510 120 net he a te Oy 40, 42, 49, 53, 56, 57, 60, 107, 131. Giotto, Pupil of, 31. Giotto, School of, 6. Giovanni del Biondo, 92, 125. Giovanni da Milano, 79, 107, 112, 113, 118, 119, FoO 1I2T st z4 nize, Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli, 80. Giovanni dal Ponte, 23, 41. Guido da Siena, 107. Horne, Herbert, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 41, 42, 113, 115, 116, 117. (Also see Flor. Coll. Horne). “Tl Biadaiuolo,” the Illuminator of, 17. Jacopo del Casentino, 10, 23-42, 94. Jacopo di Cione, 88, 89, 90, 91. Jahrbuch der Koniglichen Preussischen Kunst- samml. (See Prussian Jahrbuch). Khvoshinsky e Salmi, 29, 39, 125. Kunstchronik, 26. Lasinio, 91. Leonardo, 98. Libro dell’ Estimo, 24. Lorenzetti, The, 2, 39, 71, 78, 108. Lippo Memmi, 27, 34. Lorenzo d’ Alessandro, 57. Lorenzo Monaco, 2, 79, 80, 90. Lorenzo di Niccold, 30, 91, 92, 93. Luca di Tommé, 28. Maestro del Codice di S. Giorgio, 20, Magliabechiano, I] Codice, 42. Margaritone, 57. Mariotto di Nardo, 94. Maso, 17, 56, 81. Master of the Fogg Pieta, 49-57. Master, The S. Cecilia, 1, 11, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 31, 40, 42. Master, The Rinuccini, 2, 109-126. Master of the St. Nicholas Chapel, Assisi, 56. Matteo di Giovanni, 78, 81. Meister des Rinuccini Altars, 125. Milanesi, Gaetano, 3, 20, 41, 57, 79, 81. Morey, Prof. Chas., 21. Monatshefte fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 20, 64. Nardo di Cione, 2, 56, 89, 97-108, 109, 111, 112, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124. Niccolé di Tommaso, 2, 109-126. Niccold di Pietro Gerini, 26, 41, 83-95. Nicola, Giacomo De, 42. Offner, Richard, 80, 90, 107. Orcagna, 2, 17, 47, 56, 88, 89, 97, 98, 100, IOI, 102, 103, 105, 107, 118, 122, 123, 124. “Orcagna, Compagno dell’,” 107. Pacino di Bonaguida, 3-21, 27, 30. “Pacino di Bonaguida, Predecessor of,” 21. Pietro Lorenzetti, 30, 37, 64. Pietro Nelli, 93. Prussian Jahrbuch, 20, 21. Quattrocento, The, 62. Rankin, William, 80, 107. Rassegna d’ arte, 41. Rivista d’ arte, 24, 26, 41, 42, 92, 95. Rossi e Lasinio, 95. Sacchetti, 65, 118. Salazar, L., 125. Salmi, M., 30, 33. Sano di Pietro, 125. Sassetta, 81. Schlosser, Julius von, 107. Schmarsow, August, 80. Schubring, Paul, 81. Simone Martini, 27, 37, 64, 78, 104. Sirén, Osvald, 21, 24, 27, 30, 41, 42, 57, 64, 65, 80, 86, 90, 91, 97, 100, 107, 122, 125. Spinello Aretino, 67, 69, 71, 72, 92, 123. Stechow, 80. Suida, Wilhelm, 20, 21, 26, 31, 42, 107, 120, T2201 7e TG, Supino, B., 80, 95. Taddeo Gaddi, 17, 20, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39, 41, 59-65, 68, 69, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 118. Taddeo di Bartolo, 57. Tambo di Serraglio, 20. Térey, Gabriel de, 41. Testi, Laudedeo, 80, 81. Thieme-Becker, 64, 65, 91. Thode, Henry, 20, 21. Toesca, Pietro, 41, 125. Tolomei, 125. Tommaso del Mazza, 93. Traini, 80. Trecento, The, 5, 7, 42, 85. Turino Vanni, the Second, 80. Van Marle, Raymond, 20, 21, 31, 42, 64, 80, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 107, 108, 122, 125. Vasari, Giorgio, 20, 23, 24, 26, 38, 39, 41, 42, 57, 64, 65, 80, 92, 93, 107, 125, 126. Venturi, Adolfo, 20, 21, 41, 49, 64, 81, 107, 122, 125, 126. Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst, 81. UN DE XSORPURISACES ALTENBURG Gallery, 80. AREZZO Cathedral, 41. Compagnia Vecchia di S. Giovanni, 41. Duomo Vecchio, 41. Episcopal Palace, 41. Gallery, 41 (see Pinacoteca). L’Ospedale, Sala dell’Amministrazione, 28. Pieve, The, 39, 41. Pinacoteca, 41. S. Agostino, 41. S. Domenico, 41. S. Francesco, 94. ASSISI S. Chiara, 20. S. Francesco (Lower Church), 56. S. Francesco (Upper Church), 21, 41, 57. AVIGNON Musée Calvet, 84, 86, 91. BALTIMORE Walters Gallery, 113, 117. BERLIN Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, 25, 26, 27, 39, 45, 46, 60, 64. Fig. 2, A Daddesque Predella. BOLOGNA Pinacoteca, 20. Servi, Church of S. Maria de’, 42. BOSTON Museum of Fine Arts, 13, 67, 70, 73, 74, 77; 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 91. Fig. 7, S. P. 2, 13, Antonio Veneziano. Fig. 1, S. P. 2, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. Coomaraswamy, Dr. Ananda, 94. Gardner Museum, Fenway Court, 89, 91. Fig. 7, S. P. 7, Niccolé di Pietro Gerini. BRAUNSCHWEIG Gemildegalerie, 94. BROOKLYN, N. Y. Babbott, Frank L., Coll., 64. BRUSSELS Museum, 33. BUDAPEST Museum of Fine Arts, 21, 41. CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND Fitzwilliam Museum, 15, 94. CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Fogg Art Museum, 49, 52, 54, 55, 80. Fig. 7, S. P. 1, 8, 10, Master of the Fogg Pieta. Porter, A. Kingsley, Coll., 86, 91. CASTELFIORENTINO S. Verdiana, 64. CHICAGO Ryerson Collection, 85, 86, 87, 92. Fig. 5, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. CHIUSDINO Municipio, 81. COPENHAGEN Staten’s Museum, 45, 46. Fig. 1, A Daddesque Predella. DIJON Musée, 64. EASTNOR CASTLE, ENGLAND Lord Somers, Coll., 29. EMPOLI Collegiata, 92. ENGLEWOOD, N. J. Platt Collection, 78. FIESOLE Bandini, Museo, 11, 42, 64, 93, 100. Fig. 14, Pacino di Bonaguida. S. P. 3, Nardo di Cione. S. Primerana, 91. FIGLINE Collegiata, 50, 51, 56. S. P. 4, 6, Master of the Fogg Pieta. Duomo (see Collegiata). FLORENCE Academy, 3, 9, 15, 20, 29, 37, 38, 59, 62, 84, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 100, 112, 113, 117, 122, 123, 124. Trg 2. -G504,05, Op 7p Oe cas 45.52.05 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, Pacino di Bonaguida. Fig. 5, S. P. 6, Jacopo del Casentino. Fig. 2, S. P. 3, 7, Taddeo Gaddi. Fig. 3, S. P. 1, 6, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. Fig. 3, S. P. 6, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. Fig. 17, 19. 8S. P. 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, Rmuc- cini Master. Accademia delle Belle Arti (see Academy, Florence). Acton, Arthur, Coll., 92, 94. S. P. 10, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini. Aretina, Via, Tabernacle, 93. Badia, Cappella Giochi e Bastari, 99, 101. Bargello, 93, 94. Berenson, Bernard, Coll., 100, 106. Bigallo, Sala del Consiglio, 90, 91, 93. Cocomero, Via di, 41. Horne, Fondazione, 11, 18, 20, 28, 29, 30, 32, RONTI3, TIS 11O. ir Fig. 12, Pacino di Bonaguida. Fig. 4, S. P. 9, 11, Jacopo del Casentino. Fig. 5, 6, 7, S. P. 4, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. Laurentian Library, 11. Loeser, Charles, Coll., 7, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37; 73, 75, 78, 79, 91. Fig. 10, Pacino di Bonaguida. Fig. 3, S. P. 1, 2, 13, Jacopo del Casentino. Fig. 8, 9, S. P. 9, Antonio Veneziano. Palazzo dell’Arte della lana, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 65, 94. Fig. 2, S. P. 5, 7, 12, Jacopo del Casentino. Perkins, F. Mason, Coll., 20, 51, 55. Fig. 5, Master of the Fogg Pieta. S. Ambrogio, 93. S. Croce, 7, 20, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 67, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 100. Fig. 1, 2, 8, 9, S. P. 2, 5, 7, 9, Master of the Fogg Pieta. S. P. 8, 9, Taddeo Gaddi. Fig. 2, S. P. 9, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. Fig 15, S2-Piit,03, 11; 12,137 Niceald ‘di Tommaso, etc. Baroncelli Chapel, 60, 62, 63. Castellani Chapel, go. Giugni Chapel, 57. Medici Chapel, 57, 64, 67. Peruzzi Chapel, 57. E:x-Refectory, 20. Rinuccini Chapel, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124. Fig. 14, 16, S. P. 7, 10, Niccolé di Tom- maso, etc. Fig. 13, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. S. Felice, 7, 93. S. Felicita, 6, 9, 60, 92, 93, 94. Fig. 9, S. P. 10, Pacino di Bonaguida. S. P. 5, Taddeo Gaddi. S. Giorgio, 21, 42. S. Giuseppe, Tabernacle near, 41. S. Marco, 7. S. Maria Novella, 2, 47, 65, 89, 97, 99, 109, 122) 140 S. P. 4, 5, 7, 8, Nardo di Cione. Rucellai Chapel, 2, 65. Strozzi Chapel, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 122,123. -¢24. Fig. 5, 6, 7, A Daddesque Predella. Fig. 10, Nardo di Cione. S. Miniato, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 63, 65, 91, 118. Fig. 9, 10, 11, 12, S. P. 8, Jacopo del Casen- tino. S. P. 11, Taddeo Gaddi. S. Simone, 21, 93. Ognissanti (Church of the), 7, 39, 56, 90, IOI, 106. Or S. Michele, 41, 60, 93, 108, 120. Fig. 6, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini. Serristori Coll., 42. Uffizi Gallery, 18, 21, 25, 28, 31, 32, 41, 42, 56, 60, 61, 78, 93, 94. Fig. 6, S. P. 3, Jacopo del Casentino. Fig. 10, The Master of the Fogg Pieta. Fig. 4, S. P. 1, Taddeo Gaddi. Fig. 12, Niccolé di Tommaso, etc. Zecca Vecchia, 90. Market, The Florentine, 33, 94. Fig. 13, Pacino di Bonaguida. FRANKFORT a M. Rudolph Bauer Coll., 100. Stadel Institut, 34. GALUZZO Certosa, Chiesa Antica, 92. GENEVA Villa Ariana, 28, 31. GOTTINGEN University Museum, 27, 30, 33, 53, 74. S. P. 10, Jacopo del Casentino. Fig. 10, S. P. 8, Antonio Veneziano. HANNOVER Kestner Museum, 68, 70, 71, 78. Fig. 4, 8, S. P. 10, 14, Antonio Veneziano. IMPRUNETA Pieve, 93. LASTRA a SIGNA (See Florence). Coll. of F. Mason Perkins. LIVERPOOL Gallery, 78. LONDON Butler, Charles, Coll., 28. Crawford, Lord, Coll., 94. Kerr-Lawson, Coll., 91. S. P. 4, Taddeo Gaddi. National Gallery, 41, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 100, 102, 103, 105, 107. Fig. 6, S. P. 2, 10, Nardo di Cione. Victoria and Albert Museum, 100. a Pe LUCCA Private Collection, 29. LYONS Musée, 94. MAISONS-LAFITTE Gould, Frank, Coll., 64. MAGNALE Church, 92. MENSOLA, PONTE a S. Martino, 60, 61, 64. MILAN Cagnola, Don Guido, Coll., 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41. Fig. 1, Jacopo del Casentino. Trivulzio, Prince, Library of, 14. MINNEAPOLIS Jones, Herschel V., Coll., 100, 102, 103, 107. Fig. 7, Nardo di Cione. MONTICI S. Margherita, 18, 21, 42. MUNICH Alte Pinakothek, 94, 100. Fig. 3, Nardo di Cione. Dealer, 90, 94. Nemes, Marczell von, Coll., 15. NAPLES Museum, 78. S. Antonio Abbate, 116, 117. Fig. 10, 11, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. NEW HAVEN Yale University, Jarves Collection, 80, 90, 92, 93, 100, IOI, 103, 107, 125. Fig. 4, 5, S. P. 9, 10, Nardo di Cione. NEW YORK Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives, New York, 1917, 90, 91. Barnard Cloisters, 101. Fig. 8, Nardo di Cione. Goldman, Henry, Coll., 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105. Fig. 1, S. P. 6, Nardo di Cione. Griggs, Maitland F., Coll., 31, 113, 114, 115, 117. Fig. 4, S. P. 2, 9, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. Hamilton, Carl, The Former Collection of, go. Historical Society, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104. Fig. 2, S. P. 1, Nardo di Cione. Hurd, Richard M., Coll., 67, 68, 69, 74, 77, 79. Fig. 2, 12, Antonio Veneziano. Lehman Collection, 45, 46, 47, 64. Fig. 3, A Daddesque Predella. Mackay, Clarence, Coll., 81. Metropolitan Mus. of Art, 108. Morgan, J. Pierpont, Library, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 27: Fig. 15, 16, S. P. 11, 15, Pacino di Bona- guida. Straus, Jesse I., Coll., 8, 12, 18. Fig. 11, S. P. 1, 2, 9, Pacino di Bonaguida. NUOVOLI Torre degli Agli, 80. Fig. 1, Antonio Veneziano. ORVIETO Servi (Church of the), 42. OXFORD Christ Church Library, 91, 92. PADUA Arena Chapel, 7, 53, 57. PALERMO S. Niccolé Reale, 74, 75, 76, 80. Fig. 13, 15, Antonio Veneziano. PARMA Gallery, 94. PARIS Louvre, 25, 93. Mori Collection, 21. Market, The, 31. Montor, Artaud de, Coll., 80, 107. PAVIA Galleria Malaspina, 33. PERUGIA Private Collection, 79. PHILADELPHIA Johnson Collection, 90, 114, 115, 117, 125. Fig. 9, Niccolé di Tommaso. Pennsylvania Museum, 94. PIAN DI MUGNONE S. Maria Maddalena, Convento di, 18. PISA Camposanto, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 79, 80, 87, 90. Fig. 3, S. P. 6, Taddeo Gaddi. IDS, a, TL, TMA, We), eh, Lek ey Binder Ge Blige Hd Antonio Veneziano. Cathedral, 80. Museo Civico, 26, 41. S. Francesco, 64, 86, 91. S. P. 8, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. S. Tommaso, Convento di, 69, 78. Fig. 6, S. P. 5, Antonio Veneziano. PISTOIA Convento del T., 113, 114, 115, 117, 125. Figs 1) 2, 5.. Po 1,4, Ss Woo, LO, iceo! di Tommaso. Casa Tonini (See Convento del T.). S. Francesco, Chapter Hall, 59, 125. S. Giovanni Fuoricivitas, 60, 61, 63. S. P. 9, Taddeo Gaddi. POPPI Castello, 64, 87. PRATO Cathedral, 125. Palazzo Communale. Fig. 4, A Daddesque Predella. S. Francesco, 84, 85, 91, 93. S. P. 3, 5, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. PRATOVECCHIO Church, 24, 38, 39. PRINCETON, N. J. Marquand, Late Professor Allan, Coll., 30, 37. Fig. 7, Jacopo del Casentino. QUIETE, LA Conservatorio delle Montalve, 94. RENNES Musée Archeologique, 52. ROME Capitoline Museum, 93. Market, The, 8. Paolini Collection, 33, 37, 38, 40. S. P. 14, Jacopo del Casentino. Pinacoteca Vaticana, 29, 43, 93, 94, 114, 115, TIT 7 aabe Fig. 8, Niccold di Tommaso, etc. St. Peter’s, 30. Sistine Chapel, 62. ROVEZZANO S. Michele, 42. 142 ROSE San Lorenzo, 59, 60, 61. Fig. 1, Taddeo Gaddi. RUBALLA S. Giorgio, 90. S. P. 2, Taddeo Gaddi. SCARPERIA Madonna di Piazza, 31, 32, 33, 37. SETTIMO Badia, 21. SIENA Academy, 104. Cathedral, 79. S. Francesco, 78. SOUTHAMPTON, L. I. Parrish Museum, 94. STRASSBURG Museum, 64. S. GIMIGNANO Gallery, 30. VIENNA Bondy, Oscar, Coll., 30, 31, 32, 33, 34- Fig. 13, S. P. 4, Jacopo del Casentino. Tucher Collection, 107. VINCIGLIATA S. Lorenzo, 92. Fig. 4, Niccold di Pietro Gerini. WORCESTER, MASS. Museum of Fine Arts, 50, 52, 54, 56. Fig. 3, 4, S. P. 3, Master of the Fogg Pieta. Gentner, Philip, Coll., 61, 63. C% new, Piste Fig. 5, S. P. 10, Taddeo Gaddi. Smith, Frank, Coll., 14, 15. Fig. 17, Pacino di Bonaguida. ADDENDA To The Shop of Pacino di Bonaguida, to note 22: A discussion of the S. Giorgio Virgin appeared for the first time in the Burlington Magazine for 1927, L, 91-104. Mr. Berenson (in the Bollettino d’arte, 1926, 383, n. 8) sees an Umbro-Riminese hand in the Morgan [lluminations, and the Tree of Life; and chiefly, I venture to think, in the Cavallinesque characters in both, proper to a whole group of Florentine paintings of the early Tre- cento. Whatever Mr. Berenson may mean by such classification, there is nothing either in Umbria or Rimini to correspond to the above works in style. To Jacopo del Casentino: This master should be credited with a Virgin and Child at Pozzo- latico (a village south of Florence) independently identified by Mr. F. Mason Perkins. To note 17 of Jacopo del Casentino: I am pleased to see that Mr. Berenson in the Stadel-Jahrbuch V, 19 (Notes on Tuscan Painters of the Trecento in the Stadel-Institut), agrees with my reintegration of Jacopo. To A Daddesque Predella: I have since the writing of this essay come to agree with Mr. Beren- son’s joining of the Lehman part of the predella to a Madonna in the same collection, to a triptych formerly in Mr. Carl Hamilton’s collec- tion, and to a St. Anthony at Fabriano (see Bolletino d’arte, Jan., 1922). His attribution of these to Nuzi, however, I regard impossible. To The Master of the Fogg Pieta: A small (m. .26 x .235) half-length figure of the Baptist in the col- lection of Sig. Gnecco in Genoa, should be joined to the sum of works already attributed here to this painter. If its present shape may be trusted, it once stood in a course of pinnacles over a polyptych. 143 Sep eade + TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE COPIES OF THIS VOLUME PRINTED FOR FREDERIC FAIR- CHILD SHERMAN DURING MARCH MCMXXVII ‘ { « y GETTY CENTEF CENTER LIB LIBRARY | Ce 14 : J rr ; , us. : c cae Oy - 7 ar : Sb ee i wa thay a9 a - Live s 7 roe & ory s - , 7 & Sits cas inlay eA t a agtik, 7 ws . Ay LAR” a} be 4 i sh ie hig aE iit aces Med pee ae) tas ps (gto > ye . j aty 4 eh Qe: Ea x : : ae h aes Fh | hy i Te ee eT 5 Salad bi ¢ es j # ae 4 ig min OR ye ent y ee he 6 ij ek % ; fF oa ite s , ‘ f F K Ms i H ‘ . . . . A * r-¢ * \ ty lint : a y y 4 ‘ ‘ 4 { ir ° # j * oF \) >