Lot 60: Domenico di Michelino (Florence 1417?-1491)

Christ before Pontius Pilate tempera on panel, unframed 91/4 x 16 in. (23.7 x 40.7 cm.) PROVENANCE Victor Decock; sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 12 May 1948, lot 58, as Central Italian School, 15th Century. with Piero Corsini, New York, 1983. NOTES The artist, who as a youth was apprenticed to the ivory carver Michelino, whose name he took, was evidently strongly influenced by Fra Angelico. His only extant documented work, the fresco of Dante in the cathedral at Florence - painted to a design by Alessio Baldovinetti - dates from 1465, when the artist was about 48 years old, already an old man by the standards of the time. While the attribution to the young Domenico of a group of distinguished panels in the style of Fra Angelico (grouped round a panel in the Royal Collection and thus assigned to the Master of the Buckingham Palace Madonna) is controversial, a substantial number of other panels that demonstrate an affinity with Pesellino are presumed to represent the artist's activity from the mid-century. The present panel was first recognized as the work of Domenico di Michelino by Everett Fahy in 1983; from the predella of an as-yet unidentifiable altarpiece, it reveals an exceptional narrative sophistication. Christ stands in isolation, while Pilate is seen in the act of washing his hands and the elders hold out their arms in remorseless denunciation. The presentation is very different from that of the subject in the series of thirty-five Scenes from the Life of Christ that was painted under the aegis of Fra Angelico for the doors of the silver chest of the church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence. Now in the Museo di San Marco, that series depicts the elders and the soldiers dispassionately observing Christ's encounter with Pilate.