For more on this painting, see Nardo di Cione, Saint John the Evangelist.
Probably Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence, until 1808; Wildenstein and Co., by January 1952 until at least September 19531; private collection; sale, Sotheby’s, London, December 8, 1971, lot 57; Alice Loew-Beer (née Gottlieb, 1889–1979), Epsom, London, and by descent to her granddaughters; sale, Sotheby’s, London, December 7, 2005, lot 33; Richard L. Feigen (1930–2021), New York, 2005
The panel has been cut on all four sides but retains its original thickness of 3 centimeters and exhibits a slight convex warp. It is comprised of three horizontal planks with joins approximately 20 centimeters from the bottom and 16 centimeters from the top; the joins have opened in the front, resulting in modest paint loss along their length at the level of the saint’s upper lip and just above the top corner of his book. A 2-centimeter-wide strip of gesso and repaint covers scattered losses along the left and top edges, and smaller irregular losses are scattered along the right and bottom edges. Two nails driven into the panel approximately on center, originally attaching a vertical batten to the back, have resulted in paint losses 21.5 centimeters from the bottom edge of the panel and 10.5 centimeters from the top edge, at the level of the saint’s left eye. The gold background has been overpainted in oils to represent dark green foliage, but bolus and remnants of original gilding are preserved beneath this layer. Punch tool impressions are still apparent through the repainted background at the upper-left corner. The gilding of the halo is largely intact, and the paint surface is exceptionally well preserved aside from abrasions to the saint’s forehead and temple, in the area of his right cheek, and at the bottom of his beard. The painting was cleaned and restored by Irma Passeri in 2008–10.
Published References
Offner, Richard. A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century. Sec. 3, vol. 9, The Painters of the Miniaturist Tendency. Ed. Miklós Boskovits. Florence: Giunti, 1984., 360, pl. 186a; Offner, Richard. A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century. Sec. 3, vol. 3, The Works of Bernardo Daddi. Ed. Miklós Boskovits. Florence: Giunti, 1989., 81; Skaug, Erling S. Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting, with Particular Consideration to Florence, c. 1330–1430. 2 vols. Oslo: International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works—Nordic Group, 1994., 1:101n112, 110; Passeri, Irma. “Un trittico smembrato di Bernardo Daddi.” Kermes: La rivista del restauro 73 (January–March 2009): 5–7., 5–7; Laurence Kanter, in Kanter, Laurence, and John Marciari. Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection. Exh. cat. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2010., 7–11, no. 3b; Gordon, Dillian. “The Paintings from the Early to the Late Gothic Period.” In Santa Maria degli Angeli a Firenze: Da monastero camaldolese a Biblioteca Umanistica, ed. Cristina De Benedictis, Carla Milloschi, and Guido Tigler, 188–225. Florence: Nardini, 2022., 190–91, 220n7
Notes
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According to annotations on the reverse of two photographs in the Fototeca Berenson at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence. ↩︎