Niccolò di Tommaso, Saint James the Greater

With Henry Harris, London, by 1920; with Durlacher Brothers, New York; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1925

The panel support has been thinned to 5 millimeters, completed with a 3-millimeter-wide strip of new wood across the top, and cradled. The gold ground, bolus, and original gesso outside the silhouette of the figure and its halo have been scraped away, and the extensive worm tunneling in the exposed panel has been coarsely filled with rose-toned putty. Putty has also been applied as a silhouette around the painted surface, and the exposed wood outside this silhouette has been covered with a brownish-gray canvas. The paint surface of the figure itself and the gilding of the halo are exceptionally well preserved, apart from moderate abrasions in the blue robe and putty-filled losses along a vertical split running through the saint’s right arm.

One of Christ’s twelve apostles, Saint James the Greater, brother of Saint John the Evangelist, is identifiable by the book he holds in his left hand and the pilgrim staff in his right. He wears a rose-colored tunic and a blue robe with a lining painted in a pattern of curls executed in a light-green glaze(?), oxidized to a dark brown, suspended in a now-transparent medium, possibly intended to simulate a damask or silk. The panel has been squared off at the top and cut to its present size probably from a full-length format, as is suggested by the cropping of the straps of James’s pilgrim’s purse, wrapped around his staff. The work has lost its original gold ground, other than in the saint’s halo. When the painting entered Maitland Griggs’s collection, the background had been overpainted black.¹ This was removed during cleaning in 1960, and the bizarre decision was made to substitute a linen background, cut out around the figure and glued to the panel surface, as David Arnheim explained, “in harmony with the medieval practice of placing a linen facing between the panel and the gesso coating. The neutral color and texture of the present background has enhanced the quality of the 14th century figure.”² Linen interlayers in fourteenth-century panel paintings were never intended to be visible and, if exposed, would never have projected in higher relief than the painted surfaces alongside them, as in the present case. The only real effect of introducing this alien color and texture to the picture surround is to give the false impression that the painting has been transferred from panel to canvas and severely damaged, neither of which is true.

Exhibited in 1920 as a work by Giovanni da Milano, the Griggs Saint James was recognized by Richard Offner as a typical work by Niccolò di Tommaso and published by him in 1925 as especially close to the artist’s frescoes in the Convento del Tau, Pistoia.³ Offner’s poetic description of the painting evocatively captured the essence of Niccolò’s qualities as an artist: “The type and bearing of the figure are of an inveterate aristocracy. There is a slow, vertical swing in the movement that suggests a stalking gait, which conforms to the dreamy absorption of the head.” To this should be added the remarkable originality of technique with which the artist decorated the lining of Saint James’s cloak and the accomplished draftsmanship, indicated by the confident red strokes outlining the figure’s hands and ears or directing the mordant gilt decoration of the hems of his garments. Offner justified his ascription to Niccolò by enumerating points of exact correspondence with figures in the Tau frescoes. Curiously, although Raimond van Marle, who mistakenly identified the figure as Christ rather than Saint James, accepted Offner’s attribution of the Griggs panel to Niccolò di Tommaso, he rejected the reason for doing so by refusing to accept the Tau frescoes as works by Niccolò.⁴ No other scholar has questioned Offner’s attribution, either of the Tau frescoes or of the Griggs Saint James. Erling Skaug introduced sphragiological evidence to argue for dating the Griggs painting prior to 1365.⁵ No companion panels or other fragments of the altarpiece from which the Saint James was removed have been identified.

Saint James the Greater was patron of the city of Pistoia, the site of much of Niccolò di Tommaso’s activity in the later part of his career. Niccolò’s frescoes at the Antonine convent (Convento del Tau), once thought to be early works, are now recognized to have been in progress as late as 1372.⁶ In that same year, he received payments for repairing an altarpiece in the cathedral of Pistoia and for painting the high altarpiece of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, replacing a work made scarcely two decades earlier by Taddeo Gaddi.⁷ In publishing the documents for this last commission, Andrew Ladis advanced the hypothesis that a painting formerly with Albrighi in Florence, an altarpiece lateral featuring figures of Saints Anthony Abbot and James, might be a surviving fragment of the San Giovanni Fuorcivitas altarpiece. Skaug more persuasively argued that the Albrighi painting may be part of a Roman commission for a chapel consecrated in 1373 in the house in Piazza Farnese where Saint Bridget of Sweden died.⁸ The evidence of the Albrighi painting, whether it can be dated 1372 or 1373–75, and the signed Saint Anthony Abbot altarpiece, dated 1371, in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, suggest however that Niccolò’s work on the Tau frescoes must have been begun well before these dates and extended over a considerable period of time. The hard and compact geometries of the late panel paintings, apparent also in the designs of two altarpieces for which he was responsible in Florence in 1372—commissioned for the Zecca and for San Pier Maggiore, both painted in partnership with Jacopo di Cione⁹—have little in common with the open, looping forms that dominate the Tau frescoes. These instead, as Offner recognized, are all but interchangeable with the soft modeling and low-relief volumes of the Griggs Saint James, which can be shown to predate 1365.¹⁰ The eventual recovery of other panels that might have come from the same dismembered work could possibly confirm or even specify a Pistoiese provenance for the Saint James and broaden our understanding of the artist’s long-standing relationship with that city. —LK

1. Offner 1924b, 27, fig. 4. ↩︎

2. David Arnheim, in Seymour et al. 1972, 48. ↩︎

3. Offner 1924b, 31. ↩︎

4. van Marle 1925, 5:478. ↩︎

5. Skaug 1994, 1:165. ↩︎

6. Gai 1970, 75–94. ↩︎

7. Ladis 1989, 2–16. ↩︎

8. Skaug 2004a, 289–321. ↩︎

9. See Ladis 1989, 6. Most scholars identify the “Niccolao” or “Niccolaio” mentioned in documents for these paintings as Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. Ladis prefers an identification with Niccolò di Tommaso on anagraphic grounds, and this identification is indisputably correct on stylistic grounds as well. ↩︎

10. Skaug 1994, 1:165. ↩︎