Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla, Saint Lucilla, One of Two Panels from an Altarpiece

on base of frame, SCA LUCILLA

Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, Arezzo(?); Lombardi-Baldi collection, Florence, by 1845; Robert Nevin, Rome; sale, Galleria Sangiorgi, Rome, April 22–27, 1907, lot 34; Dr. Hans Wendland, Lugano, Switzerland, by 1926; Edward Hutton (1875–1969), London, 1930–37; sold to Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York

The Saint Lucilla and the related Saint Flora from the same altarpiece are executed on panels of a vertical grain varying in thickness from 3.5 to 4 centimeters, and each comprises a single large plank with a smaller triangular addition nailed and glued to it. In the Saint Flora, this addition tapers from 4.5 centimeters wide at the bottom to 2.5 centimeters wide at the top and is attached to the left side (viewed from the front) of the main plank. In the Saint Lucilla, the addition measures 4 centimeters wide at the top and extends 69 centimeters down the right side of the main plank. The spandrel moldings on both panels are 12 millimeters thick and of a horizontal wood grain, with 13-millimeter-thick capping moldings added at the top. The predella across the bottom of both panels is 2.5 centimeters thick. The predella and spandrels on the Saint Lucilla were removed and reattached with modern screws by Gianni Marussich in 1998; those on the Saint Flora are undisturbed. The reverse of Saint Flora shows discoloration from the attachment of a 12-centimeter batten, which was secured by two nails driven into the panel, back to front, 49 centimeters from the bottom edge and positioned at 5 centimeters and 28.8 centimeters from the left edge. Traces of a corresponding batten are not preserved on the reverse of the Saint Lucilla, which does, however, retain a single nail 50 centimeters from the bottom edge and 2 centimeters from the left edge.

Both Saint Flora and Saint Lucilla were aggressively cleaned by Andrew Petryn in 1966–67, exaggerating preexisting abrasion and leaving losses exposed. These were addressed in a treatment by Patricia Sherwin Garland in 1998, who touched out all the losses along the raised edges of the craquelure as well as larger losses resulting from knots or splits. In the Saint Flora, two large knots in the panel broke the surface of the gilding above the saint’s right shoulder and of the paint around her right hand. The left capital is repaired, the lettering of the saint’s name has been reinforced, and the predella moldings have been repaired and overgilt. Losses in the saint’s cheek and left shoulder have also been filled and repainted. In the Saint Lucilla, a split through the saint’s face has been retouched, as have minor losses in the saint’s left arm and to the right of her halo. Three large knots visible in the back of this panel have not disturbed the paint surface. Gilding losses in the frame have been repaired, except for the bottom molding, which is a repair made from old wood and has been left as it was in 1967, stripped of all surface ornament. The painted spandrels of both panels are in beautiful condition.

This panel and the related one also in Yale’s collection (see Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla, Saint Flora) portray the early Christian martyr saints Flora and Lucilla, dressed in the nun’s habit of the Benedictine Order and identified by inscriptions at the base of their frames. Decorating the upper corners of both panels are roundels with half-length figures of angels. Judging by the frames and the position of the angels, the saints were originally the laterals of a dismembered altarpiece, possibly a triptych, with Saint Flora on the left and Lucilla on the right. The two images are first recorded in 1845 in the collection of the Florentine dealers Francesco Lombardi and Ugo Baldi, who listed them as works of Buonamico Buffalmacco.¹ They subsequently appeared together in the 1907 sale of the Robert Nevin collection in Rome, where they were attributed to the Umbro-Sienese school around 1300. In 1930—by which time the Saint Flora was in the Maitland Griggs collection, New York, and the Saint Lucilla in the Edward Hutton collection, London—Richard Offner recognized that a panel with the Virgin and Child in the Charles Loeser collection, Florence (fig. 1), significantly reduced from its original dimensions, was the central element of the original structure.² Based on the depiction of the two Yale Saints as Benedictine nuns, Offner proposed that the altarpiece had been commissioned for the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla in Arezzo—a suggestion later confirmed by the early provenance of the Loeser Virgin from an Aretine collection.³ “But for the very un-Florentine feature of the plain round molding,” Offner classified the three panels as typically Florentine, stating that, although Giottesque in design, the drawing and other formal details belonged “exclusively to the Pacinesque following of the Saint Cecilia Master.”⁴ He went on to refine this assessment by drawing a clear distinction between the artist of these panels, whom he identified as an “Associate of Pacino di Bonaguida,” and Pacino himself: “Although this master resembles Pacino in conventions of type and feeling, the analogies would seem to be due to common origin and close association rather than to formative influence. The Associate of Pacino is more archaistic, and inclines to amplify the scale of his figures, a tendency which Pacino reverses in his known works.”⁵ These qualities, perhaps indicative of an older personality, led Offner to situate what he called the “Griggs-Loeser-Hutton Polyptych” before Pacino’s production in his Corpus of Florentine Painting.

Offner’s assessment of the Loeser and Yale panels was reflected in the 1937 catalogue of the Mostra giottesca, where the paintings were exhibited together for the first time as “Manner of Pacino di Bonaguida,” a label subsequently revised by Giulia Brunetti to “Master Close to Pacino.”⁶ In 1968, in a seminal article on Aretine painting, Pier Paolo Donati expanded on Offner’s analysis by emphasizing the superior quality of these images vis-à-vis Pacino’s work and situating the anonymous painter, christened “Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla,” within a specifically Aretine Giottesque school of painting of the first decades of the trecento.⁷ Donati enlarged the artist’s oeuvre by attributing to the same hand a fresco of the Man of Sorrows in the church of San Domenico, Arezzo, and a predella scene with the Voyage of Mary Magdalen in a private collection and thus defined the outlines of a consciously archaizing personality strongly influenced by Giotto’s earliest examples, who was perhaps a slightly older contemporary of Gregorio and Donato d’Arezzo. According to Donati, the Yale/Loeser altarpiece was the most accomplished of the artist’s efforts and slightly predated Gregorio and Donato’s first known work, the dated 1315 triptych in the Collegiata di Santo Stefano, Bracciano (Rome). The dignified presence of the Yale and Loeser figures, Donati pointed out, was indicative of the artist’s debt to Giotto’s Badia Polyptych, while revealing an equal awareness of the more archaic culture of the Virgin and Child of San Giorgio alla Costa and the frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi.

Donati’s arguments were only partially accepted by Mario Salmi, who reasserted the affinity between the Yale/Loeser fragments and the style of Pacino and wrote that the anonymous painter, if indeed Aretine by birth, would seem “at least to have completed his formation in Florence.”⁸ The Florentine and Pacinesque components were also emphasized by Charles Seymour, Jr., who catalogued the Yale pictures as “Florentine School (style of Pacino di Bonaguida?),” with a tentative date around 1310, but added that the cleaning of the Yale panels in 1966–67 had purportedly made it “apparent” that they were executed by different hands.⁹ Of the two, the Saint Flora seemed to him closer to the style of Pacino’s workshop but even nearer to the Saint Cecilia Master (see Master of Saint Cecilia, Virgin and Child). Other authors, however, followed Donati in highlighting the Giottesque elements of the anonymous master’s idiom. Carlo Ragghianti referred to the Yale/Loeser complex as evidence of the influence of “Giotto’s style around 1300” on Florentine painting of the first decade of the fourteenth century,¹⁰ while Arno Preiser attributed the Yale Saints to a “follower of Giotto,” around 1310.¹¹ Luciano Bellosi, who accepted Donati’s conclusions, cited the Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla as proof of the far-reaching impact of the Assisi frescoes.¹²

In his 1987 edition of the Corpus, Miklós Boskovits dismissed the possibility of the involvement of two different artists in the execution of the Yale panels and identified the same hand in a heavily repainted Virgin and Child formerly on the art market in London.¹³ While preserving the label “Associate of Pacino,” Boskovits acknowledged Donati’s study in his introduction to that volume and referred to the author of these works as a painter “probably from Arezzo.”¹⁴ Except for the removal from this artist’s oeuvre of the Voyage of Mary Magdalen predella panel—recognized by Boskovits as a work of Gregorio and Donato d’Arezzo¹⁵—subsequent scholars have unanimously embraced Donati’s profile of the Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla as a rare but key figure in the development of early fourteenth-century painting in Arezzo. Most recently, Roberto Bartalini extended the artist’s activity into the third decade of the fourteenth century and added to his work a fresco of the Crucifixion in the church of San Domenico, Arezzo, proposing that this image, heavily influenced by Pietro Lorenzetti, represented a further evolution of the master’s style in response to the Sienese painter’s presence in Cortona and Arezzo.¹⁶

Today, the Giottesque qualities that characterized the original complex are perhaps more evident in the Loeser Virgin and Child (see fig. 1) than in the Yale Saints, whose appearance is the result of multiple campaigns of zealous restoration. As noted by past authors, the single most important point of reference for the Loeser Virgin, whose “majesty of design” and “sense of bulk” were already highlighted by Offner in 1927,¹⁷ is Giotto’s early work in Assisi. Specific comparisons for the Virgin, as well as for the Yale figures, however, are to be found less in the frescoes of the Upper Church, to which they were compared by Donati, than in the later efforts of Giotto and his workshop in the Lower Church, datable on circumstantial evidence within the first decade of the fourteenth century.¹⁸ That the author of the present panels may have been intimately familiar with Giotto’s vocabulary at this moment, rather than merely inspired by it, is suggested by the possible identification of his hand among the various collaborators involved in the decoration of the Magdalen Chapel—an enterprise viewed by most modern scholarship as primarily the result of multiple assistants working under the master’s direction.¹⁹ Several of the subsidiary figures, like the female saints painted on the chapel’s north wall and on the intrados of the south wall (figs. 2–3), reflect, in fact, a virtually identical, idiosyncratic approach to Giottesque models, characterized by a powerful monumentality combined with a coarser, more vernacular interpretation of individual features and forms—as in the rendering of the clawlike hands and excessively long thumbs. The Loeser Virgin, in particular, whose unusual orange- and saffron-colored dress and inner cloak echo the palette of the frescoes, seems sister to the tambourine-playing figure in the Magdalen Chapel identified by an inscription as Miriam (fig. 4).

The anonymous artist’s possible activity in Assisi would account for the unusual design and decoration of the framing elements around the Yale panels. In her proposed reconstruction of the original structure, envisioned as a gabled pentaptych, Monika Cämmerer-George, followed by Donati, traced its origin to Sienese Ducciesque prototypes and the example of the Badia Polyptych.²⁰ Yet, none of those works include the most distinctive feature of the present panels: the medallions with half-length angels painted in the spandrels between the arches. This innovative decorative solution harks back directly to the frescoed altarpiece with the Virgin and Child between Saints Nicholas and Francis in the Saint Nicholas Chapel at Assisi (fig. 5), whose compositional relationship to the Yale Saints has been overlooked by scholars. The pronounced similarities between the architectural structure of the painted triptych and the framing elements of the Yale panels—whose shape mirrors that of the arches enclosing the Assisi saints—strongly suggest that the image in Assisi may have served as direct inspiration for the design of the dismembered altarpiece.

The precise circumstances that led to the commission of this important work, probably intended for the high altar of the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, cannot be ascertained. Given the links between the various Benedictine communities in Tuscany and elsewhere, however, one cannot exclude the possibility that Giotto’s own earlier activity for the Florentine Badia may have played a role in the choice of a painter from one of his workshops in Assisi. Notwithstanding efforts to link the altarpiece to local artistic production, it represents a unicum within the developments of Aretine painting of the first decades of the fourteenth century. Although attributed to the same hand, what little remains of the Man of Sorrows fresco in the church of San Domenico reflects a blander personality, less insistently Giottesque in its aspirations, while the intensely expressive Crucifixion on the same walls, even allowing for a considerable lapse in time in execution, seems too far removed from the austerity of the present images. Likewise, the Virgin and Child formerly on the art market, listed by Boskovits as the only other work by this master, appears to have more in common with the production of Gregorio and Donato d’Arezzo.²¹ If it seems convenient for now to preserve the sobriquet “Master of Saints Flora and Lucilla” in reference to the author of the Yale and Loeser panels, it is with the understanding that, rather than being representative of an archaizing tendency in Aretine Giottesque painting, the personality of this artist is inextricably tied to the cantiere of the Lower Church in Assisi. —PP

1. The collection was located on the second floor of a building (no. 1696bis) in Piazza dei Pinti. According to the English amateur artist, dealer, and collector William Blundell Spence, author of an “anonymous” insider’s guide to Florence with “hints for picture buyers,” Ugo Baldi was considered “the first restorer in Florence of paintings in distemper” and had a studio on the lungarno, near the Palazzo Corsini; Spence 1847, 37. ↩︎

2. Offner 1930b, 215–20; and Boskovits 1987a, 73–81. ↩︎

3. Boskovits 1987a, 73, 76. ↩︎

4. Offner 1930b, 215; and Boskovits 1987a, 73. ↩︎

5. Offner 1930a, 6n1; and Boskovits 1987a, 73n1. ↩︎

6. Mostra giottesca 1937, 50, nos. 135–36; and Giulia Brunetti, in Sinibaldi and Brunetti 1943, 416–19, nos. 130–32. ↩︎

7. Donati 1968, 12–15. ↩︎

8. Salmi 1971, 80, 91n17. ↩︎

9. Seymour 1970, 29–32, nos. 13–14. ↩︎

10. Ragghianti 1969, 72. ↩︎

11. Preiser 1973, 204. ↩︎

12. Bellosi 1985b, 146n76. ↩︎

13. Sale, Christie’s, London, May, 21, 1971, lot 183; Boskovits 1987a, 554–55, add. pl. 1. ↩︎

14. Boskovits 1987a, 11. ↩︎

15. Boskovits 1984, 20–21n41. ↩︎

16. Bartalini 2005, 16–18. ↩︎

17. Offner 1927b, 7. ↩︎

18. The Saint Nicholas Chapel, founded by Cardinal Napoleone Orsini to house the tomb of his brother Gian Gaetano Orsini, was probably built after the death of the latter in 1294 and its decoration completed by 1306, when it was already being officiated. The frescoes of the later Magdalen Chapel, commissioned by Teobaldo Pontano, bishop of Assisi, are usually dated after Giotto’s Paduan sojourn and in relation to a notarial act of January 4, 1309, in which the painter Palmerino di Guido, then a resident of Assisi, is recorded as returning a loan underwritten by himself and Giotto. For a summary of the literature, see Boskovits 2000, 82–86; and, more recently, Romano 2010, 584–96; and Cooper 2013, 29–47. ↩︎

19. While the 1309 document (see note 18, above) is generally regarded as evidence of Giotto’s intermittent presence in Assisi, the consensus is that he only intervened sporadically in the decoration of the Magdalen Chapel. The number and identification of the other personalities involved in the enterprise, however, remain a subject of much debate. Serena Romano has argued for a sophisticated business model that allowed Giotto to supervise from afar the activity of perhaps temporary local workshops engaged by him in the completion of his projects; see Romano 2010, 593. On the subject of Giotto’s workshop or workshops, see, most recently, Tartuferi 2017. ↩︎

20. Cämmerer-George 1966, 74–76. ↩︎

21. While cautiously accepting Bokovits’s attribution, Isabella Droandi (in Droandi 2002) correctly pointed out the especially close relationship between the ex–art market painting and a Virgin and Child by Gregorio and Donato in the church of the Santissima Trinita, Viterbo. The face and hands of the Viterbo Virgin, Droandi pointedly noted, could be “almost superimposed” (“sembrano quasi sovrapponibili”) over the ex–art market Virgin. ↩︎