Lot 101: PROPERTY OF HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND/ SPNEA. PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT THE COLLECTIONS ACQUISITIONS FUND.

PROPERTY OF HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND/ SPNEA. PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT THE COLLECTIONS ACQUISITIONS FUND. SANO DI PIETRO SIENA 1405-1481 MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS ANTHONY ABBOTT AND BERNARDINO OF SIENA, SURROUNDED BY ANGELS

embossed 'AVE * GRATIA * PLENA * D ST. JEROME'

oil on gold ground panel

PROVENANCE

Charles Eliot Norton, Shady Hill, Cambridge, by descent to his daughter,
Miss Elizabeth Gaskell Norton, by descent to her niece,
Susan Norton, by whom bequeathed to,
Historic New England/SPNEA.
CATALOGUE NOTE

Sano di Pietro, whose real name was Ansono di Pietro di Mencio is an artist on whose life, unusually for 15th century artists, we have an abundance of documentary facts. He was born in 1406 in Siena, where he remained for his entire life, and in 1428 he was registered as a painter in the Guild. A large number of his major commissions up to and during the 1440s are recorded and in 1445, the year after Saint Bernardino died, Sano di Pietro was commissioned to paint a portrait of the saint for the confraternity of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a fine portrait head of the saint formerly in the Palmieri Nuti collection, Siena, may provide us with some point of reference for this commission; see R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, New York 1970, vol. IX, p. 488, fig. 309).

It is presumably during the latter half of the 1440s and particularly around 1450, the year in which Saint Bernardino was canonized, that Sano di Pietro was commissioned to paint numerous images of the patron saint of Siena. These historical events explain the large number of small devotional panels depicting the Madonna and Child flanked by Saint Bernardino and usually one other saint, of which this is a particularly fine example. The cult of Saint Bernardino was encouraged both within and outside of the city of Siena; remains of the saint were distributed as relics and miracles apparently performed by the saint were not only the subject of writings but also of paintings - see, for example, Sano di Pietro's two commemorative paintings in the Cathedral of Siena depicting Saint Bernardino Preaching in the Campo and Saint Bernardino Preaching before the Church of San Francesco (C. Strehlke, Art and Culture in Renaissance Siena 1420-1550, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988, p. 41).

The sunken cheeks of Saint Bernardino and the physiognomic resemblance among the various representations of the saint, are explained by the fact that Sano di Pietro apparently used a wax mask, taken of the saint's head at the moment of his death, to ensure an accurate likeness (a cast of the mask was at one time preserved at the museum of Aquila). In this painting, Sano di Pietro has superimposed the angels' heads, wreathed with garlands of flowers, in a way that defies spatial dimension but provides the Madonna and Child with a sort of aureola of angels, entirely typical of Sano di Pietro's small devotional panels (compare, for example, that formerly in the Van Gelder collection, Brussels, exhibited in the city at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1922; later with Colnaghi's, London, Autumn 1986 and a very similar panel was sold in these rooms, Sotheby's, London, December 17, 1998, lot 56).

The present work belonged to the renowned art historian, Charles Eliot Norton, the first Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University and the influential mentor for a generation of art historians. Norton was born to a wealthy Boston family with strong intellectual interests. His father, Andrews Norton (1786-1853), was a Unitarian theologian and professor of sacred literature at Harvard. Charles attended Harvard University, graduating in 1846. After college he toured India and Europe, particularly England between 1849-51. Norton returned to America to focus on writing and literature. He edited the North American Review between 1864-8 and co-founded The Nation in 1865. His articles at this time demonstrated both a knowledge in art history and archaeology as well as literature. In 1859 he published his Notes of Study and Travel in Italy largely an art-historical travelogue of that country. He was appointed by Harvard University President, and first cousin, Charles W. Eliot to be the first lecturer of Fine Arts at Harvard in 1873. A dynamic lecturer, though little interested in scholarship, Norton influenced some of the greatest American art historians of the next generation including Bernard Berenson, Edward Forbes and Paul. J. Sachs amongst others. Classical interests were always important to Norton; he founded the Archaeological Institute of America, whose first local society was in Boston, in 1879 and, a short while later, founded the American Academy in Rome. As a man of letters, Norton maintained a correspondence with many of the later 19th-century authors, including Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

23 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.; 59.7 by 44.4 cm.