Lot 2: Filippino Lippi (Prato 1457-1504 Florence)

Filippino Lippi (Prato 1457-1504 Florence)
Christ on the Cross
oil and gold on panel
12¼ x 9¼ in. (31.2 x 23.5 cm.)

New York, World's Fair, Masterpieces of Art, New York, May - October 1939, no. 217 (note by W.R. Valentiner).

A. Briganti, 'Un'opera inedita di Filippino Lippi', in Miscellanea di storia dell'arte in onore di Igino Benvenuto Supino, Florence, 1933, pp. 481-482.
A. Scharf, Filippino Lippi, Vienna, 1935, pp. 57, 107, no. 27b. A. Scharf, Filippino Lippi, Vienna, 1950, pp. 33, 35, under no. 97.
L. Berti and U. Baldini, Filippino Lippi, Florence, 1957, p. 98, no. 11.
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine School, London, 1963, I, p. 108.
J. Nelson, The Later Works of Filippino Lippi from his Roman Sojourn to his Death (c.1489-1504), PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1992, p. 312.
P. Zambrano and J. Katz Nelson, Filippino Lippi, Milan, 2004,
p. 599, no. 55.2, fig. 55.2, as 'by Filippino or a close collaborator'.

Dr. Fritz Rothmann, Berlin, by 1928.
with Vitale Bloch, Zantpoort and Berlin.
Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, Florence.
Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, New York, by 1933 and by whom gifted to the
Denver Art Museum, 1955.

Items Sold to Benefit the Denver Art Museum Acquisitions Fund

This small panel is one of three versions of this composition by Filippino Lippi. The other two (England, private collection; and New Haven, Yale University Art Museum) are close in size but are more compromised in condition. In them Lippi repeats the figure of Christ from the central panel of his Valori altarpiece (previously Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, destroyed). The altarpiece The Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint Francis; Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene was commissioned by Niccolò Valori circa 1498-1500 for a family chapel in San Procolo, Florence. The altarpiece was removed, dismembered and sold under Napoleon in 1808; the central panel was acquired by the Museum in Berlin in 1821, where it was later destroyed.

Jonathan Katz Nelson considers these small paintings to be autograph, independent works by the artist and close collaborators, not merely a series of reduced studio versions of the altarpiece.

We are grateful to Everett Fahy for confirming the attribution to Filippino Lippi, on the basis of photographs (private communication,
30 October 2009).