Florentine School, ca. 1230, The Crucifixion, One of Three Panels from a Tabernacle Wing

Convent of San Francesco, San Miniato al Tedesco, Pisa(?); James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

All three panels, of a vertical wood grain, have been cut to irregular rectangular shapes and thinned to depths ranging from 6 to 9 millimeters. The present panel, depicting the Crucifixion, ranges in height from 41.8 to 42.2 centimeters and in width from 36.1 to 36.4 centimeters. All three were cradled in the nineteenth century and recradled and waxed in 1915 by Hammond Smith. Regilding on the three panels was removed by Andrew Petryn in 1952–54 (the Crucifixion and The Deposition and 1956–58 (the Lamentation).

The paint surface of the three panels survives in varying states, the best preserved being that of the Crucifixion (fig. 1), which is remarkable for a painting of the thirteenth century. Damage in this panel is largely confined to a 2-centimeter-wide strip across the top of the composition, minor flaking losses along the edge of the blue Cross where it overlaps the gold ground, and minor isolated losses from abrasion. The vertical split through the center of the panel, which is continuous across all three scenes, has here provoked negligible paint loss, as have two knots in the wood of the panel support: one to the right of the Virgin’s hands and one to the right of Christ’s feet.

For more information, see the condition reports for the The Deposition and the Lamentation.

These three panels—depicting the Crucifixion, the Deposition, and the Lamentation—are among the earliest Italian paintings in any American collection. They were originally arranged vertically, one above the other, and formed the right wing of a large tabernacle triptych. In 1949 Edward Garrison recognized that a panel of the Virgin and Child Enthroned formerly in the convent of San Francesco at San Miniato al Tedesco, now in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (fig. 2), was the central element of the dismembered structure.¹ The association among the four panels, though questioned by Charles Seymour, Jr.,² was accepted by most subsequent authors and is confirmed by the close stylistic correspondences among the figures as well as by the presence of hinge marks on both sides of the Accademia Virgin. The dating of the entire complex, and the artistic milieu in which it was produced, however, have remained the subject of debate since Osvald Sirén first discussed the Yale fragments in 1915 and attributed them to the Lucchese painter Bonaventura Berlinghieri.³

Sirén’s attribution to Bonaventura Berlinghieri was first disputed by Richard Offner, who detected in the Yale scenes an individual style “too far removed from that of Berlinghieri to allow the closeness of association . . . too far removed, in fact, even to hold it within the district of their painter’s special activity, Lucca.”⁴ Offner contrasted the coarseness of execution and the “squarer and more emphatic” style of these works—which he characterized as Florentine—with the more polished, austere manner of Bonaventura’s signed and dated 1235 Saint Francis altarpiece at the church of San Francesco in Pescia—a work populated by thin, elongated figures whose measured gestures reflect none of the exaggerated emotional responses of the Yale Lamentation. At the same time, the author detected a relationship, mostly iconographic, among the Yale panels and works by the Lucchese follower of Bonaventura now known as the Master of the Oblate Cross, suggesting that our painter, while certainly not Lucchese, may have been influenced by Bonaventura’s models. While emphasizing the Florentine “workmanship” of the Yale panels, Offner nevertheless concluded that the artist lacked any “qualities so differentiated as to reveal his origins unequivocally,” and thus labeled the scenes as products of a “Tuscan Master” active around 1250.

Offner’s observations were reiterated by Seymour, but most scholars have continued to emphasize the perceived Lucchese components of the Yale scenes, advancing attributions to the Berlinghieri “school” or “circle,” albeit with considerable differences in dating. Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, who drew attention to the more conservative, Byzantine aspects of the composition in the Deposition and Lamentation, associated them with an earlier phase in the Berlinghieri workshop, before the Pescia altarpiece.⁵ According to Sandberg-Vavalà, their style more nearly approximated the manner of the older master Berlinghiero, as reflected in the signed Cross at the Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi, Lucca—a work placed by some scholars as early as the second decade of the thirteenth century.⁶ A significantly later chronology for the Yale panels—and the accompanying Accademia Virgin and Child—was proposed by Garrison, who assigned the partially reconstructed tabernacle to a provincial Lucchese follower of Berlinghiero, who was “influenced by Bonaventura Berlinghiero, Guido da Siena, and the Florentines” and active between 1270 and 1275.⁷ Angelo Tartuferi subsequently attributed the tabernacle to the circle of the Master of the Oblate Cross, with a date between 1250 and 1260.⁸ The author noted the iconographic relationship between the Yale Crucifixion and a diptych from the monastery of Santa Chiara in Lucca, now in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence (fig. 3)—a work first attributed to the Oblate Master by Garrison. Miklós Boskovits, on the other hand, echoed Sandberg-Vavalà’s conclusions and advanced a much earlier chronology for the panels, “in the middle of the 1220s or shortly thereafter,” preceding Bonaventura’s Pescia altarpiece.⁹ In Boskovits’s opinion, the anonymous painter was an artist in the Berlinghieri circle working from a prototype by Berlinghiero but reducing the more plastic vocabulary of that master to a “total two-dimensionality.”¹⁰ Although accepted by Carl Brandon Strehlke, such a precocious dating was questioned by Anne Derbes and Rebecca W. Corrie, who reiterated Tartuferi’s association of the Yale scenes with the work of the Master of the Oblate Cross.¹¹ Corrie’s arguments were based less on stylistic comparisons than on the iconographic relationship between the Yale Deposition and the corresponding scene in the Uffizi diptych, which shows the same figural arrangement and unusual Y-shaped cross. The relationship to the Uffizi diptych was also highlighted by Sara Bonini, who attributed the Accademia Virgin and Child and the accompanying Yale panels to an anonymous Lucchese painter active in the Berlinghieri workshop between 1240 and 1250.¹²

A comparison of the Accademia Virgin—a work universally attributed by early scholarship to the Florentine school—with the Virgin and Child in the Uffizi diptych highlights the stylistic and qualitative distinctions that separate these works from each other, notwithstanding their shared iconographic elements. Whereas the Uffizi Virgin is indebted to the vocabulary of Bonaventura Berlinghiero—leading some authors to attribute it to the master himself—the Accademia Virgin partakes of an altogether more conservative culture, reflected not only in the flat, schematic composition and rigidity of the figures but also in its close adherence to Byzantine formulas, like the half-length mourning angels in the corners and the type of the Christ Child, who is shown not as an infant but as a regal, miniature adult. In her analysis of the Accademia Virgin—conducted independently of the Yale panels—Luisa Marcucci convincingly rejected any association with the Berlinghieri workshop and singled out these archaisms as evidence of the painter’s debt to the early Florentine school and the Bigallo Master.¹³ For Marcucci, the image was representative of that particular provincial and “rustic” strain in Florentine painting that began with the Bigallo Master and culminated with the production of the Magdalen Master.¹⁴ At the same time, while emphasizing the derivations from the culture of the Bigallo Master—later also acknowledged but deemed irrelevant by Tartuferi—Marcucci followed Garrison in proposing a more advanced date for the Virgin, in the 1270s, based on its perceived dependence on the example of Coppo di Marcovaldo (documented 1260–76) and on a much-discussed Virgin and Child formerly in the Lenbach collection, Munich, now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.¹⁵ The iconographic links between the Cologne Virgin and the Accademia panel, however, are confined primarily to the crown on the head of both Virgins and the unusual, almost identical pattern that decorates their white veils. Otherwise, the Cologne painting is indebted to an altogether different prototype of the Virgin Hodegetria, in which the right hand of the Virgin is raised to indicate the Christ Child rather than supporting him. Stylistically, moreover, the Cologne panel reflects a distinctly more sophisticated approach, more clearly indebted to the Berlinghieri school.¹⁶

A more relevant iconographic comparison for the Accademia painting is the Virgin and Child from the church of San Jacopo a Cozzile, in the province of Pistoia, now in the Museo Civico, Pescia (fig. 4), which has been alternately viewed as Florentine or Lucchese. This image, although painted by a different hand, is an almost exact version of the Accademia panel, except for the black veil of the Virgin and the absence of the two crowns, suggesting a common derivation from the same, possibly Byzantine model. Marcucci dated this work after the Cologne Virgin, but more recent authors have correctly highlighted its adherence to the same conservative trends in early Florentine painting that underlie the execution of the Yale and Accademia panels. Boskovits, who placed the Cozzile Virgin in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, viewed it in parallel to the oeuvre of the Bigallo Master, as an example of a painter “even more resistant to influences foreign to the local figurative traditions.”¹⁷

The affinities between the Yale panels and the work of the Bigallo Master—in particular as reflected in a comparison with the Saint Zenobius dossal in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence (fig. 5), which is datable on circumstantial grounds between 1220 and 1230—provide a chronological framework for the execution of the dismembered tabernacle.¹⁸ Accordingly, the Yale paintings may be placed among the earliest-surviving commissions for a Franciscan establishment. Although it is not certain that the church of San Francesco in San Miniato al Tedesco, whose existence is first documented in 1276, was its intended destination, iconographic evidence seems to support a Franciscan provenance.¹⁹ As noted by scholars, the Y-shaped cross, which relates to Tree of Life imagery and Franciscan spirituality, appears most often in paintings produced for Franciscan communities in both Tuscany and Umbria.²⁰ In light of the dating of the present example, the often-cited claim that the motif is not found in Italian art before the middle of the thirteenth century should be reconsidered. —PP

1. Garrison 1949, 114, 239, nos. 291, 679. According to Marcucci 1958, the Accademia Virgin was transferred from the convent of San Francesco on August 14, 1873, and is first recorded in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, in 1886. It entered the Accademia in 1919. ↩︎

2. Seymour 1970, 18–22, no. 6. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1915, 273–77. ↩︎

4. Offner 1927a, 2, 9–11. ↩︎

5. Sandberg-Vavalà 1929, 558–59, 714. ↩︎

6. Sandberg-Vavalà 1929, 540, did not suggest a precise dating for the Lucca Cross but considered it to be the earliest in a series of works produced in the Berlinghieri workshop between 1220 and 1235. Garrison 1949, 187n476, on the other hand, dated the cross between 1210 and 1220. ↩︎

7. Garrison 1949, 239, no. 679. ↩︎

8. Tartuferi 1990, 17. ↩︎

9. Boskovits 1993a, 74. ↩︎

10. Boskovits 1993a, 76. ↩︎

11. Carl Brandon Strehlke, curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery; Derbes 1996, 190n52; and Rebecca W. Corrie, in Evans and Wixom 1997, 488–89. ↩︎

12. Sara Bonini, in Boskovits and Tartuferi 2003, 232–35. ↩︎

13. Marcucci 1958, 21, 37–39. ↩︎

14. For more on the Magdalen Master, see the entry on the Gallery’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Leonard and Peter and Scenes from the Life of Saint Peter. ↩︎

15. Inv. no. 319. See Oertel 1953, 10–42; and Garrison 1956, 303–12. ↩︎

16. The attribution of the Cologne Virgin, whose early provenance is unknown, has traditionally shifted between the Florentine and Lucchese schools, with various dates between the 1250s and 1260s. Boskovits 1993a, 74n146, followed Oertel 1953 and convincingly attributed it to the same artist responsible for a “Berlinghieresque” cross in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome. ↩︎

17. Boskovits 1993a, 94–95. Boskovits subsequently amended his opinion and attributed the panel to a “Berlinghieresque” painter; see Boskovits 2007, 144n15. ↩︎

18. For the dating of the Saint Zenobius dossal, see Boskovits 1993a, 90–91. ↩︎

19. The present church of San Francesco was not erected until around 1276, but there is some architectural evidence that it may have replaced an earlier, more modest structure, built sometime before 1260. A sixteenth-century engraving records the former presence in the church of a panel, now lost, showing Saint Francis and stories of his life and bearing the date 1228. Like the Accademia Virgin, however, this work may have been moved there from a different location. See, most recently, Salvetrini 2019, 23–25. ↩︎

20. Rebecca W. Corrie, in Evans and Wixom 1997, 489 (with previous bibliography). ↩︎