Nardo di Cione, Virgin and Child

Art market, Paris; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1925

As can be seen in early photographs (fig. 1), the panel was heavily overpainted when it was purchased in Paris by Maitland Griggs. It was cleaned by Andrew Petryn in 1960–61 and is now in ruinous condition. The Virgin’s face and left hand and the head and torso of the Christ Child are severely abraded, exposing a gray-green preparatory layer and vestiges of rose or white coloration from the original flesh tones. The Virgin’s right hand and arm and the portion of her dress that would have been visible through the opening of her blue cloak at her chest have been scraped down to the gesso preparation, as have the legs of the Christ Child and the blue of the Virgin’s cloak at her left shoulder. Gesso is also exposed along the exaggeratedly harsh cleaning of the open craquelure in the Virgin’s face. A large section of the paint surface has been scraped down to the wooden support, removing the gesso preparation and linen underlayer, from a horizontal line beginning at the Virgin’s knees extending nearly to her feet and in one section at the left extending to the lower edge of the panel. All of the paint left intact in the bottom half of the panel beneath this horizontal line is modern. The gold ground is modern leaf seemingly laid in over original bolus; the punch tooling, therefore, is also modern but may follow indications of the original patterns of punched decoration.

The panel support is 2.3 centimeters deep and shows no signs of having been thinned. It has been cut all around its perimeter, however, and no gesso barb is apparent at any edge. A vertical split in the center of the panel runs nearly two-thirds its length, from the top edge to a prominent knot right of center in the lower third. The wood grain around this knot is exaggeratedly irregular and is probably responsible, to some degree, for the paint loss in the lower part of the panel; there is no evidence of fire damage, as speculated by Charles Seymour, Jr.¹ Four nails aligned across the top of the panel approximately 52 to 54 centimeters from the bottom edge imply the removal of a horizontal batten at this height. Another nail 2.5 centimeters from the bottom edge at the left of the panel suggests that another batten may once have been installed across the bottom.

Notwithstanding its heavily repainted condition, Richard Offner, in a lecture delivered at Maitland Griggs’s home in 1925, had no difficulty in characterizing this painting as Orcagnesque, showing the influence of Nardo di Cione and Bernardo Daddi. Both artists were at that time recently recovered historical personalities, and Offner’s opinion was, in hindsight, remarkably precocious. The few subsequent notices the painting has garnered cluster either around Berenson’s association of it with Jacopo di Cione and his workshop² or Charles Seymour, Jr.’s recognition of it as generically by a follower of Orcagna.³ So prudent an evasion of commitment to a precise attribution might seem warranted by the severely deteriorated condition of the painting, but several indices of style suggest instead that this is the ruin of a once-noble composition by Nardo di Cione, not simply a typical commercial product of an anonymous Cionesque or Orcagnesque artist. The unusual bulk of the Virgin, isolated against the gold ground and elegantly framed by the punched border of the panel (to the extent that this might reflect the original decoration); the lively turn of the Child away from her and her own attentive gaze in His direction; the delicate and slowly turning line of the cloak as it descends from the Virgin’s head to her chest; and the soft and somewhat elongated features and shape of the Virgin’s face are all reminiscent of Nardo’s Virgins, above all in the center panel of the polyptych in the National Gallery, Prague,⁴ or the center panel of the Goldman triptych in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (fig. 2).⁵ The gilded crown on the Virgin’s brow is another feature commonly encountered in figures of the Virgin by Nardo di Cione.

Circumstantial confirmation of this attribution may be the identification of one of the punch tools used to decorate the border of the gold ground and both figures’ haloes, if these reliably replicate the original tooling of the panel: Erling Skaug’s no. 104, which belonged to Nardo di Cione and appears in at least one of his early paintings, the Saint Peter also in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (see Nardo di Cione, Saint Peter).⁶ Mojmír Frinta catalogued this punch as his no. Fda10cN, though he measured it incorrectly.⁷

Evidence of the possible attachment of battens across the back of the panel raises the question of its original format and purpose. As these were nailed in from the front, they were clearly original and not later additions. Independent devotional panels of this scale were usually braced by their heavy engaged frames secured across the grain of the supporting panel; they did not, therefore, need battens for additional structural rigidity. It is possible that this panel once served as the center of a small triptych or pentaptych rather than as an independent tabernacle. If so, it can only be speculated whether the composition once portrayed the Virgin full length, as in the Jones Virgin and Child now in the Minneapolis Museum of Art,⁸ or seated in majesty as in the Prague polyptych. In either case, the nail presently situated at the bottom edge of the panel would probably have secured a center batten, and a third batten would have spanned the now-missing bottom edge of the panel or panels. Whether the Virgin was originally a full-length or half-length figure, as in the Goldman triptych in Washington (see fig. 2), it is all but certain that the repainting of the damaged image to represent a Madonna of Humility is a complete fabrication. —LK

1. Seymour 1970, 32–33, no. 16. ↩︎

2. Berenson 1932a, 275; and Berenson 1963, 1:105. ↩︎

3. Seymour 1970, 32–33, no. 16. ↩︎

4. Offner 1960, pl. 5a. ↩︎

5. Inv. no. 1939.1.261; https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.204932.html. ↩︎

6. Skaug 1994, 2: no. 104. ↩︎

7. Another punch catalogued in this painting by Mojmír S. Frinta, which he did not think modern, would instead support a dating to Nardo di Cione’s late career, after 1365, but this punch does not actually appear anywhere on the surface of the painting; see Frinta 1998, no. Ad1f. ↩︎

8. Inv. no. 68.41.7, https://collections.artsmia.org/art/1679/standing-madonna-with-child-nardo-di-cione. ↩︎