Provenance
Milan, Max Bondi
Milan, Galleria Lurati, sale 9-20 December 1929, n. 33
Venice, Palazzo Mocenigo a San Samuele, count Andrea di Robilant
Florence, Palazzo Feroni, Galleria Bellini, sale 22-27 May 1933, n. 120
Florence, Serristori

Literature
B. Berenson, Italian pictures of the renaissance. Florentine school, London, 1963, Vol. I, pag. 146
G. Dalli regoli, Il Maestro di San Miniato, Pisa, 1988, pag. 102, 238, no. 49, ill. 183

Fondazione Zeri
No. 106254

Fototeca E. Fahy
408169

Before a balustrade stand the profiles of the Virgin and Child. The Virgin, depicted half-length and standing, gently supports her son, inclining her head with a melancholy gaze; Christ, in turn, twists his torso to the left, raising one hand in a gesture of blessing, while with the other he tenderly caresses his mother. Behind them, beyond the balustrade, appear the figures of Saint John the Baptist, wearing a noble crimson mantle over his customary camel-hair garment and holding the staff surmounted by the cross, and Mary Magdalene, likewise draped in red and clasping the jar of ointment in one hand.

The scene depicted in this elegant panel, a refined testimony to the culture of Florentine workshops in the final decades of the fifteenth century1, is that of Mary’s premonition. The Virgin inclines her face in profound sorrow, made aware by prophecy of the future suffering that awaits her with the death of her son: a death evoked by the cross held by the young John, by the red garments of the Virgin herself and of the two saints, and by the very presence of Magdalene, the figure who will most closely share with Mary the anguish of Christ’s Crucifixion.

The painting, formerly in the collection of the banker Massimo Bondi2, was offered in 1929 at auction at the Galleria Lurati in Milan. In the sale catalogue it was attributed to the school of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with particular affinity to the manner of Bartolomeo di Giovanni. It was acquired by count Andrea Nicolis de Robilant, in whose collection, housed in Palazzo Mocenigo at San Samuele in Venice, then owned by the aristocrat, the painting was recorded on the occasion of another sale in May 1933, this time in Florence at the Galleria Bellini3. Bernard Berenson, who saw the painting in the collection of count Serristori, included it among the works of the Master of the San Miniato Altarpiece4: an artist whose initial corpus, consisting of only nine paintings, had been identified by Berenson himself in 1913, starting from the panel of the Madonna enthroned with Saints Sebastian, John the Baptist, Martin and Roch in the right transept of the church of Saints James and Lucy (now San Domenico) in San Miniato near Pisa5, and which was gradually expanded in the following decades through further attributions by the American scholar, by Géza de Fràncovich, Raimond van Marle, and other distinguished researchers6. It was Anna Maria Bernacchioni7, however, who, on the basis of solid arguments, proposed identifying the Master of San Miniato with Lorenzo di Giovanni di Nofri, a Florentine painter trained in the workshop of Neri di Bicci, who in his Ricordanze repeatedly praised his qualities8, and who is later documented as working in a studio near the Canto dei Servi, close to Piazza Santissima Annunziata.

As Federico Zeri observed in 1988, in his introduction to the volume on the artist by Gigetta Delli Regoli, the Master of San Miniato stands as a significant witness to those Florentine workshops that produced paintings “for private patrons and domestic settings”9.

The unusual coexistence here of the youthful John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, in a panel of pronounced devotional character, may allude to the names of the patron’s wife and son, for whom the painting may thus have functioned as a kind of family ex voto to the Virgin. Indeed, the activity of our master is marked by this type of composition, often limited to three or four clearly identifiable figures, or, more frequently, to the image of the Madonna and Child alone.Within this context, Gigetta Delli Regoli has isolated a number of works in which Verrocchiesque inspiration appears particularly evident10. In the painting under discussion, the profiles, modelled through chiaroscuro with a distinctly sculptural quality, find close parallels in the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Julian the Hospitaller, formerly in the Han Coray collection in Erlenbach11, in the Madonna of the Strossmayer Gallery in Zagreb12, and in the example now in the Andreas Pittas Collection13; by contrast, more overtly Botticellian traits characterize the panel in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam14, likewise cited by Delli Regoli as a comparison for the present work. In relation to these paintings, however, the panel examined here reveals an even greater command of expressive means on the part of the artist, a sign of a maturity now fully achieved15. It therefore seems plausible to place the work in the most successful phase of the painter’s career, in the 1480s, when he was able to synthesize, in an engaging and highly personal formula, the diverse stimuli derived from the models of the great masters, during one of the most fertile seasons of Florentine art and of Italian art as a whole.

1 On this subject, see the essays collected in the catalogue of the celebrated exhibition Maestri e botteghe. Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, edited by M. Gregori, A. Paolucci, and C. Acidini Luchinat, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 16 October 1992 – 10 January 1993, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan), 1992.

2 Vendita all’asta nello interesse della massa creditori del fallimento Max Bondi, Milan, Galleria Lurati, 9 December 1929, n. 33

3 Collezione del Palazzo dei Dogi Mocenigo di S. Samuele a Venezia di proprietà del Conte Andrea de Robilant, Florence, Galleria Bellini, 22-27 May 1933, n. 120

4 B. Berenson, Italian pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine school, London, 1963, I, p. 146

5 B. Berenson, Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings and Some Art Objects. Italian Paintings, Philadelphia, 1913, vol. I, pp. 23–24. On the San Miniato panel, see: A. Matteoli, Il “Maestro di San Miniato” e la sua tavola d’altare nella chiesa samminiatese dei P.P. Domenicani, in Bollettino dell’Accademia degli Euteleti, XVI, 27, 1951–1952, pp. 45–49

6 H. H. Kessler, The Master of S. Miniato, in The Burlington Magazine, XLVI, 1925, pp. 230–235; G. De Francovich, Appunti su alcuni minori pittori fiorentini della seconda metà del secolo XV, in Bollettino d’Arte, VI, 1926–27, pp. 529–547; B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1932, pp. 347–349; R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. XVI, The Hague, 1937, pp. 196–203

7 A. M. Bernacchioni, Le forme della tradizione: pittori tra continuità e innovazioni, in Maestri e botteghe, cit., 1992, pp. 171–180 (esp. pp. 178–179); ead., Il Maestro di San Miniato: Lorenzo di Giovanni, un “pittore di madonne” del Rinascimento fiorentino, in Museo Diocesano. Lascito Schubert, edited by P. Biscottini and N. Righi, Milan, 2014, pp. 40–47

8 Neri di Bicci, Le ricordanze, [1453-1475], by B. Santi, Pisa, 1976, pp. 244-245, 268-269

9 F. Zeri, in Il ‘Maestro di San Miniato’. Lo stato degli studi, i problemi, le risposte della filologia, by G. Dalli Regoli, Pisa, 1988, p. 13

10 G. Dalli Regoli, Il Maestro di San Miniato: anatomia di un’ipotesi, in Il ‘Maestro di San Miniato’ cit., 1988, pp. 17-115 (pp. 102-103)

11 R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools, cit., 1937, p. 198. The panel has recently appeared on the market with an extensive entry by Gaudenz Freuler: Koller, Gemälde Alter Meister, Zurich, 23 September 2022, no. 3005

12 V. Zlamalik, Strossmayerova Galerija starih majstora Jugoslavenske Akademije, Zagreb, 1982, pp. 62-63 n. 19

13 The Pittas Collection. Early Italian and Renaissance works, a cura di S. G. Casu, Firenze, 2018, II pp. 116-119

14 S. Castri, in ‘Il Maestro di San Miniato’ cit., 1988, pp. 231-232, n. 36

15 In the pose of the Virgin’s left hand, forming with the slender thumb and index finger a kind of “V,” Gigetta Dalli Regoli identifies a retrospective allusion to Masaccio’s Sant’Anna Metterza Altarpiece, then in the Florentine church of Sant’Ambrogio and now in the Galleria degli Uffizi: G. Dalli Regoli, The Master of San Miniato. The Madonna and Child, Trinity Fine Art, London, 2021