Lot 110: Andrea di Bartolo Cini (Siena 1358/64-1428)

The Angel of the Annunciation; and The Virgin Annunciate: pinnacles from an altarpiece on gold ground panel, marouflaged 20 x 101/4 in. (50.7 x 26 cm.); and 20 x 103/4 in. (50.7 x 27.3 cm.) two (2) EXHIBITION Zrich, Kunsthaus, no. 26 (according to label on reverse). NOTES Andrea di Bartolo was the son of Bartolo di Fredi Cini (d. 1410), the most forceful of the painters of Siena in the latter half of the trecento. A pupil of his father, he clearly worked as his assistant in the 1380s and his first documented commission, of 1389, was for work on an altarpiece in association with him and with Luca di Tomm‚. Andrea worked independently from circa 1390, refining a style in which the influence of his father was increasingly balanced by that of Spinello Aretino and his fellow Sienese artists, Martino di Bartolommeo and Taddeo di Bartolo. These panels were evidently the outer pinnacles of a polyptych and date from relatively early in the artist's career, perhaps from before 1400, like the stylistically comparable Madonna with Saints Philip and James at Siena (Pinacoteca Nazionale, no. 219). The action of the Angel's hand and the Madonna's right hand is very similar to that in the Annunciation at Buonconvento, also a relatively early work. The iconography of the Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin is often understandably confused with that of the Annunciation. A celebrated Sienese example is Ambrogio Lorenzetti's great panel from the Sala del Consistoro of the Palazzo Publico at Siena, now in the Pinacoteca, a picture of which Andrea must have been aware and which is indeed, in some respects, followed in his Buonconvento Annunciation. In this case the fact that the angel holds a palm rather than a lily and the implied age - and experience - of the Virgin may allude to the rarer subject, which is found in the circle of Spinello Aretino and of which the most celebrated example is the fresco in the cycle in the choir of S. Francesco at Arezzo by Piero della Francesca.