Lot 33: BERNARDO DADDI ACTIVE IN FLORENCE CIRCA 1320 TO 1348

BERNARDO DADDI ACTIVE IN FLORENCE CIRCA 1320 TO 1348

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

SAINT BENEDICT, HALF LENGTH, HOLDING A STAFF AND A BOOK;
A YOUNG APOSTLE, HALF LENGTH, HOLDING A BOOK

measurements note
the first: 53.5 by 43 cm.; 21 1/8 by 17 in. the second: 53.7 by 43 cm.; 21 1/8 by 17 in.

a pair, both oil on panel, gold ground, fragments

Quantity: 2

PROVENANCE

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 8 December 1971, lot 57 (the latter identified as Saint John the Evangelist), for £6,000 to Mrs. Alice Low-Beer;
Thence by family descent to her grand-daughters.

LITERATURE

M. Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. The Fourteenth Century. The Painters of the Miniaturist Tendency, Section III, Volume IX, Florence 1984, p. 360, reproduced plate CLXXXVI a and b;
R. Offner, ed. M. Boskovits & E. Nerli Lusanna, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. The Fourteenth Century. The Works of Bernardo Daddi, Section III, Volume III, Florence 1989, p. 81 (erroneously listed as lot 46 in the 1971 sale and as in the Falcao collection, Lisbon).

NOTE

The former has traditionally been identified as Saint Benedict, though Boskovits points out that the white cloak might also suggest an identification as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (though he is more commonly represented without a beard or with a short dark one). The latter saint remains unidentified, despite its identification in 1971 as Saint John the Evangelist. Boskovits (see Literature) suggests that these are fragmentary panels from an altarpiece and that they might have flanked The Virgin and Child today in Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (see Boskovits, op. cit., 1984, p. 259, reproduced plate CLXXXV).