Lot 57: Lippo di Benivieni (Florence, active 1290-1320)

Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist on gold ground panel, made up above 11 7/8 x 5 1/8 in. (30.5 x 13 cm.) PROVENANCE By descent to the late husband of the present owner, Kent. NOTES We are grateful to Everett Fahy for the attribution, given on the basis of photographs. He points out that the artist's 'style is remarkably independent within the context of early fourteenth-century Florentine painting. He did not follow Giotto's robust style, but was instead influenced by the poetic works of Cimabue and Duccio, particularly the latter's Rucellai Madonna of 1285'. He compares this panel, which is probably the shutter of a tabernacle, with Lippo's tabernacle formerly at Carate Brianza (see M. Boskovits, The Painters of the Miniaturist Tendency, 1984, pl. 57). Professor Mikl¢s Boskovits, to whom we are very grateful, suggests on the basis of a photograph that this picture is by the Master of the Dominican Effigies, an artist working in the circle of Bernardo Daddi. He dates the picture to the second half of the 1330s or possibly a little later.