Giuntesque Painter, Saint Mary Magdalen

upper right, punched in gold ground, MAG

Paul Chalfin (1874–1959), New York; French and Company, New York, by 1955; Professor George W. Weber, Jr. (died 1990), New Jersey, 1955

The panel, of a horizontal grain exhibiting a pronounced convex warp, has been cut on all sides and thinned to a depth of 8.5 millimeters. Two large splits run on a slight diagonal the full width of the panel, one through the Magdalen’s throat and one below her hands. A smaller split runs from the right edge of the panel into the Magdalen’s ointment jar. The reverse of the panel had been painted ocher and coated with glue(?), probably in the nineteenth century. Two vertical battens formerly glued to this surface were removed in an undocumented modern restoration and the splits reinforced from behind by the insertion of balsa wedges.

The paint and gilded surfaces are very little abraded but are both interrupted by large flaking losses or scraping, the gilding more so than the paint. The saint’s halo and the gold ground, including the inscription engraved and filled with small ring punches, are better preserved on the right half of the panel. The left half has been scraped down to the gesso and in large areas to the canvas underlayer. The paint, by contrast, including the mordant gilt chrysogony, is largely intact except along the three splits, around the profile of the ointment jar and the saint’s left hand, and across the lower 3 centimeters of the panel. The upper-left and -right corners have been scraped down to the wood to create the impression of an arched-top picture field. There is nothing to indicate whether this was original or is a modern intervention.

This small panel, considerably thinned and cut on all sides, is probably a fragment from a gabled low dossal with three-quarter-length figures of the Virgin or Christ flanked by saints, on the model of surviving duecento examples in Pisa and Siena. The direction of the Magdalen’s gaze and relatively small size of the panel suggest that it most likely stood to the right of the central image and toward the end of the original structure. Despite damage to the painted surface along the horizontal cracks and bottom edge of the panel, and notwithstanding the losses in the gold ground resulting from past restorations—visible in a comparison with old photographs (fig. 1)—one can still appreciate the painting’s high quality of execution and refined decorative effects. Lending a precious, otherworldly quality to the image is the brilliant scarlet cloak highlighted with delicate gold striations that envelops the saint, covering her light blue tunic and maphorion. She holds a thin gold cross in her right hand; in her left is the Magdalen’s traditional attribute, an ointment jar, rendered with an elaborately punched design tooled in the gold leaf. The oversize halo is similarly decorated with an alternating pattern of large flowers and leaves defined by rows of small punched dots. The same technique of overlapping dots is used to spell the first three letters of the saint’s name, MAG, against the gold ground above her left shoulder.

The attributional history of the Yale Magdalen, here discussed for the first time, is confined exclusively to expert opinions recorded in the museum files. A 1969 letter from Rutgers University professor George Weber, who owned the painting before it entered Yale’s collection, states that it formerly belonged to Paul Chalfin, a New York painter and interior designer known primarily for his work on the pseudo-Renaissance villa of Vizcaya in Florida (1912–16).¹ Weber records that he purchased the panel in 1955, when he was a student of Richard Offner’s, who, upon examining the work, was reportedly “very enthusiastic about it . . . and suggested that it was Pisan, ca. 1265–1275.” Catalogued as Sienese or Pisan, around 1290, when it entered the Yale collection, the panel was subsequently assigned more generically to the “Tuscan School, late 1200s” by Carl Strehlke in an unpublished checklist of the Italian paintings at Yale. In 2004, in correspondence to the Gallery, Margherita Romagnoli reiterated the Pisan attribution and proposed a date between 1260 and 1270.² Romagnoli also cited Miklós Boskovits’s opinion of the painting as a Sienese product closely related to the Madonna dei Mantellini from the church of San Niccolò al Carmine in Siena (fig. 2). The latter is traditionally inserted in the production of the so-called Master of Saints Cosmas and Damian, a name first assigned by Edward Garrison to a group of Giuntesque painters of Madonnas, primarily active in Pisa from about 1265 to 1285.³ Most recently, Laurence Kanter labeled the Yale Magdalen as a work of the Master of Saints Cosmas and Damian, datable to around 1270, although leaving open to question the Pisan or Sienese origin of the master.

Any examination of the Yale Magdalen must begin with a consideration of its unique qualities vis-à-vis the serial nature of those images traditionally gathered under the name of Master of Saints Cosmas and Damian. As pointed out by Walter Angelelli in a fundamental study on the transmissions of models in the workshop of this artist, technical and stylistic evidence suggest the use of multiple templates (patroni) that ensured the painter’s strict adherence to the same prototype, resulting in works that are virtually interchangeable not only in compositional structure but also in individual details, such as the folds of skin and cloth.⁴ The approach is particularly evident in the exact correspondences between the Virgin from the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Pisa—the painter’s eponymous work (fig. 3)—and the Madonna dei Mantellini from the church of the Carmine (see fig. 2) or the Virgin and Child in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.⁵ The same technique is also discernible in the two panels located in the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia, La Spezia,⁶ and the Acton Collection, Florence, both of which are based on a different version of the same model. In contrast to the mechanical rendering and hard-edged graphic quality of this group of images, the Yale Magdalen is distinguished by a more naturalistic approach and subtle rendering of physiognomic features, whereby the structure of the face reads as an organic whole rather than as a collection of separate, abstract elements: the outlines of the face do not form a perfectly shaped oval but curve out gently around the cheeks and back in toward the pointed chin; the pink and white highlights that accent the individual features and mark the folds of skin are less linear and do not end as abruptly but are applied in quick, confident brushstrokes that blend into the surrounding area; the whites around the pupils are indicated by a few irregular strokes of paint rather than by a precise pattern of semicircular filaments; and the deep shadows around the eyes and in the cleft below the nose and between the mouth and chin read less as geometric patterns than as calibrated passages from one feature to the next. These qualities denote a distinct and more accomplished personality, one that appears to be less influenced by Florentine Coppesque examples than was the Master of Saints Cosmas and Damian and more directly dependent on the byzantinizing vocabulary of Giunta Pisano.

Certain archaisms in the Yale Magdalen, like the shape of the cheekbones highlighted by the triangle-shaped flush, point to a generation of painters preceding the Master of Saints Cosmas and Damian and perhaps contemporary to Giunta. Yet, within the sparse panorama of Giuntesque painting around the middle of the thirteenth century, it is difficult to find an exact equivalent for the level of sophistication of the present work. The extent of Giunta’s own production beyond the three signed crosses in Assisi, Bologna, and Pisa, moreover, remains a subject of debate among scholars, rendering comparisons with other paintings variously assigned to his hand tentative at best. In some crucial aspects, such as in the shape and modeling of the facial features and application of white highlights or in the attention to decorative details incised in the gold ground, the Yale Magdalen parallels, to some degree, the Saint Francis dossal in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa—a work attributed in the past to a close follower of Giunta but now generally given to the artist himself. Although Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi placed the execution of the Pisa Saint Francis as early as before 1235, a dating in the 1250s proposed by other scholars seems more persuasive.⁷ —PP

1. On Chalfin’s relations with some of the most prominent Italian art dealers and collectors, see Gennari Santori 2017, 205–26. ↩︎

2. Margherita Romagnoli, April 27, 2004, curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. ↩︎

3. Garrison 1949, 29, 60–61, 65, 77. Luciano Bellosi’s identification of this artist with Gilio di Pietro, the author of a 1258 biccherna in the Archivio di Stato, Siena, is not convincing and has not been unanimously embraced by scholars; see Bellosi 1998, 36. ↩︎

4. Angelelli 2002, 688–98. ↩︎

5. Inv. no. 1926.41, https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/231795?position=11. ↩︎

6. Inv. no. 105. ↩︎

7. See Lorenzo Carletti, in Burresi and Caleca 2005, 122–23, no. 13 (with previous bibliography). ↩︎