THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN ACTIVE IN FLORENCE AND SIENA CIRCA 1346-1369 THE CRUCIFIXION tempera on panel, gold ground, with leaves from an Italian 15th-century choirbook on vellum attached to the reverse 47 by 32.8 cm.; 18 1/2 by 13 in.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Arte lombarda dai Visconti agli Sforza, April -
June 1958, no. 47;
London, Victoria and Albert Museum, CINOA, International Art Treasures
Exhibition, 2 March - 29 April 1962, no. 17, exhibited on Agnew's stand;
Florence, Galleria dell'Accademia, Giovanni da Milano, Capolavori del
Gotico fra Lombardia e Toscana, 10 June - 2 November 2008, no. 17;
From 1999 until recently on loan to Christ Church Picture Gallery,
Oxford.
Literature
A. Marabottini, Giovanni da Milano, Florence 1950, pp. 35-37, 84,
reproduced plate 2;
F. Russoli, Arte Lombarda dai Visconti agli Sforza, Milan 1958, pp. 3,
20, 21, cat. no. 47, reproduced plate XXIII;
CINOA, International Art Treasures Exhibition, London 1962, p. 3,
reproduced plate 15;
L. Cavadini, in L'Ordine, 26 August 1979, p. 3, reproduced;
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Florentine School,
London 1963, vol. I, p. 89;
A. Marabottini, Rivista di Critica e Storia dell’arte, Anno XVI
1-2, Rome 1965, pp. 28, 30-31, reproduced fig. 3;
M. Boskovits, Giovanni da Milano, Florence 1966, p. 16, detail
reproduced p. 19;
A. Conti, "Quadri alluvionati 1333, 1557, 1966 (II)" in Paragone, Anno
XIX, no. 223/43, September 1968, p. 22, note 8;
M. Boskovits, "Notes sur Giovanni da Milano" in Revue de l'art, no. 11,
1971, pp. 55, 57;
Dizionario Enciclopedico Bolaffi dei Pittori e degli Incisori Italiani,
Turin 1974, vol. VI, p. 27;
L. Cavadini, in L'Ordine, 26 August 1979, p. 3, reproduced;
L. Cavadini (ed.), Giovanni da Milano, Valmorea 1980, pp. 27, 50;
C. Volpe, 'Il lungo percorso del "dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito"'
in F. Zeri (ed.), Storia dell’arte italiana, Turin 1983, vol. V,
p. 299, reproduced fig 224;
C. Travi, Pittura a Como e nel Canton Ticino dal Mille al Settecento,
Milan 1994, pp. 15, 264;
A. Tartuferi, in Da Ambrogio Lorenzetti a Sandro Botticelli, Moretti
Gallery, Florence 2003, p. 50;
D. Parenti, Giovanni da Milano, exhibition catalogue, Florence 2008, p.
196, under cat. no. 14; pp. 204-07, cat. no. 17, reproduced p. 205, and
a colour detail p. 207.
Provenance
Possibly the church of San Barnaba, Ospedale della Misericordia, Prato;
The Hon. Percy Scawen Wyndham, MP (1835-1911), Cloud House, East Knoyle,
Wiltshire;
By descent to his son, Colonel Guy Percy Wyndham, (1865-1941);
By descent to his son, Captain Guy Richard Charles Wyndham, MC
(1896-1948);
By whom sold, London, Sotheby’s, 29 June 1932, for 28 guineas (as
Sienese School);
Dr James Seymour Maynard, MD, London;
By order of whose Executrix sold, London, Christie’s, 22 January
1954, lot 63, where acquired by Agnew's on behalf of the grand-father of
the present owner for 1600 guineas;
By descent to the present owner.
Notes
A native of Lombardy, born in the town of Caversaccio near Como, it is
not clear why Giovanni styled himself as being from Milan. He spent most
of his career in Tuscany and in 1366 was granted Florentine citizenship,
though the first recorded evidence places him there by 1346 when he is
listed as a member of the colony of foreign painters living in Florence
as "Johannes Jacobi de Commo". Despite his origins as an outsider, his
success in Florence was significant, as demonstrated by the important
commissions he won in 1366, which included the great altar of the
Ognissanti, today in the Uffizi, and later that year he was called upon
to complete the frescoes in the Rinuccini Chapel in the sacristy of
Santa Croce in Florence.1
Typical of Giovanni’s style are the elegant forms of the present
Crucifixion and the relative absence of extravagant decoration found in
many of his contemporaries' work. Since the present panel was first
ascribed to the artist by Morabottini in 1950, the attribution has been
endorsed by all subsequent scholars. The naturalistic description of
Christ’s ribs and the suffering face of His stretched body
represent a freer and more personal interpretation of the Giottesque
models which had dominated Italian painting until that moment. The
realism of the Magdalene leaning her head against the Cross compounds
the intensity of her sorrow, as she reaches towards Christ's feet. Her
face is either turned away from us or is entirely covered by her
beautiful long fair hair, in much the same way as the Magdalene in his
metalpoint drawing of the Pietà in Berlin.2
Erling Skaug's study of the punchwork decoration in fourteenth-century
Tuscan painting has significantly contributed to our understanding of
Giovanni's career and movements and opened an entirely new window into
the working practices of his contemporaries.3 Analysis of a substantial
number of the tools used by Giovanni in Florence before 1347 suggests
that these were then transported to Siena and used between 1348-1362 by
such artists as Bartolomeo Bulgarini, Naddo Ceccarelli and Luca di Tommé,
among others, before disappearing from Sienese painting altogether, only
to return to Florence shortly thereafter. The very same tools are then
used from 1362-74 by Florence's leading artists such as the Orcagna
brothers, Giottino and Giovanni del Biondo. Skaug thus hypothesizes that
Giovanni da Milano was at the very core of the dissemination of ideas
and cross-currents between these two great artistic centres, in which
bands of artists must have collaborated and shared tools.
There has been much discussion over the dating of the panel, which has
most recently been dated circa 1355. Travi and Tartuferi (see Literature)
compared its chromatic intensity and informal yet elegant disposition of
the figures to the Archangel Michael from circa 1355 formerly with the
Moretti Gallery.4 Also datable to this early phase is the panel in the
Corsini Gallery in Rome.5 Commenting on the tension in the figures of
Christ and Mary Magdalene, Boskovits dated the work to after 1360 and
thus subsequent to the Saint Anthony in Williamstown and the Saint
Francis in the Louvre, before later revisiting his opinion and opting
for the mid 1350s, around the same time as the Corsini panel.6
It has also been proposed that the panel was not originally a
stand-alone work but the pinnacle of a polyptych. Gregori posited that
it originally belonged above the Williamstown-Paris-Pisa polyptych,
which she dates to 1355-63. Conti, Bellosi and Ragionieri, on the other
hand, proposed it once hung with the earlier Prato polyptych, generally
dated to 1355-60.7 Certainly there is a valid argument for advancing the
idea that the work once hung at the pinnacle of a polyptych: as it would
have been viewed from below the perspective has been adjusted so that
the Cross hangs low relative to figures. Cavadini, however, did propose
that it is a stand-alone work intended for private devotion, datable to
the 1360s. The way the figures all face to the left does suggest that it
may have hung in the right side of a greater whole, possibly as a
diptych.
PROVENANCE
The possible early provenance in the church of San Barnaba is mentioned
in the painting's entry in the Fondazione Zeri but is not substantiated.
The work is known to have been in the United Kingdom since at least the
mid-nineteenth century, its earliest recorded owner being Percy Wyndham
of Cloud House, Easy Knoyle in Wiltshire, who is listed in the 1932 sale
in these Rooms.
1. See Parenti, under Literature, pp. 220-227, cat. no. 22, reproduced
and p. 46, fig. 16 respectively.
2. See Parenti, op. cit., pp.214-17, cat. no. 20, reproduced in colour.
3. See E.S. Skaug, 'Siena, e non la Lombardia: Giovanni da Milano tra il
1346 e il 1363', in Parenti, under Literature, pp, 103-13.
4. Idem, pp. 196-97, cat. no. 14, reproduced in colour.
5. Idem, pp. 198-201, cat. no. 15, reproduced in colour.
6. Idem, pp. 190-195, cat. no. 13, reproduced in colour.
7. Idem, pp. 182-189, cat. no. 12, reproduced in colour.
