Lot 30: Francesco di Neri da Volterra (active Pisa 1343-c. 1374)

A Bishop Saint
tempera and gold on shaped panel
43 3/8 x 15 3/8 in. (110.2 x 39 cm.)

Milan, Palazzo Serbelloni, Antologia di dipinti di cinque secoli, 5-30 May 1971, cat. pp. 5-6.

Dizionario enciclipedico Bolaffi dei pittori, Turin, 1974, vol. 5, p. 119, fig. 143.

Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 29 November, 1968, lot 24, as 'Florentine School c. 1370', 1,155 gns. to Leger.

PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF EDWIN L. WEISL, JR.

This remarkably preserved panel is clearly a left-hand element from an altarpiece. The Bishop Saint stands, looking to the right, holding the crozier of his office and wearing a richly ornamented cope joined at the neck by a clasp of what appears to be verre eglomisé on which is depicted a Madonna and Child and two adoring angels. The saint carries a book whose outline is delineated by the folds of his vestements.

Francesco di Neri, though born in Volterra, is first documented working on a painting for S. Michele in Borgo, Pisa in 1343. However his artistic education almost certainly took place in Florence, possibly in the workshop of Bernardo Daddi, whose penchant for sumptuous surface detail is a hallmark of Francesco's work. In 1352 di Neri painted an altarpiece for the church of S. Agostino in S. Gimignano, now lost, leaving as the only surviving signed work the central part of what was once a triptych, now in the Galleria Estense, Modena. Hailed as a great work of the mid trecento by Roberto Longhi, this panel was linked to a Saint John the Baptist in a private collection in Florence and his reconstruction spurred the reappraisal of a painter now recognized as 'the true caposcuola of Pisan painting in the second half of the fourteenth century'. Miklòs Boskovits added the present painting to the corpus of Francesco di Neri, recognizing this Bishop Saint as an important new discovery at the time of its exhibition in Milan in 1971, when he dated it to 1365-70. Although painted on a large scale with a true sense of volume and modeled with the dense chiaroscuro that distinguishes Francesco's mature works, this panel also displays the virtuoso depiction of brocade and the goldsmith's attention to fine detail that one finds in his much smaller works, such as the shutters of a triptych with two Benedictine saints in the Museo Nazionale, Pisa.