Pietro Nelli, Mourning Virgin, Fragment of a Crucifix

Art market, Perugia; Dan Fellows Platt (1873–1937), Englewood, N.J., 1911; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, 1923

The panel, of a horizontal grain, has been thinned to a depth of 6 millimeters and cradled. Engaged moldings at the upper left and right have been removed, leaving slightly excavated, arched channels along the edge of the gilded area and exposed wood outside of these. The upper-right corner has been cut and repaired with a wedge-shaped insert measuring approximately 9 by 2 centimeters. The left and right edges of the composition have been cut by an indeterminate amount, probably more on the left than on the right judging by the asymmetry of the upper molding channels. A vague indication of a barb along the lower edge may indicate that the composition is nearly complete along the bottom, although it is difficult to determine with certainty whether it was planned from the beginning to be a straight horizontal border or to mirror the reverse arches of the top edge. The paint surface and the gold ground have been harshly abraded throughout. Damage is especially evident in the Virgin’s red dress and through numerous layers of repaint in her blue cloak. A split in the panel running on a slight diagonal, 14 centimeters from the top edge at the left and 17 centimeters at the right, has resulted in less paint loss than has the harsh cleaning of the surface. A knot in the panel support is visible through the paint layers in the area of the Virgin’s right forearm. Three mordant-gilt stars on her shoulders and hood may not be original.

The severely abraded condition of this panel makes positive identification of its authorship difficult. It has been ignored or treated glancingly in much of the otherwise extensive literature concerned with early Italian paintings at Yale. It came into the possession of Maitland Griggs accompanied by a manuscript opinion from F. Mason Perkins—presumably formulated for its previous owner, Dan Fellows Platt, much of whose collection was purchased through or with the advice of Perkins—associating it with the style of Bernardo Daddi and identifying it as the left terminal of a painted crucifix. In verbal communication in 1927, Richard Offner said of it only that it was Florentine and probably painted ca. 1360. Charles Seymour, Jr., pushed its dating forward to ca. 1375 but did not clarify its stylistic character beyond agreeing that it was Florentine.¹ Seymour did propose that it may have been a fragment of a Pietà or Lamentation group rather than the terminal of a painted cross. Burton Fredericksen and Federico Zeri inventoried the painting merely as Florentine, fourteenth century.² Erling Skaug catalogued it among the works of Lorenzo di Niccolò, based on the presence of one punch mark (his no. 568) regularly used by that artist but also appearing in the work of at least five other painters.³ Carl Strehlke, in a manuscript checklist of Italian paintings at Yale compiled between 1998 and 2000, assigned it to a follower of Agnolo Gaddi and dated it to the 1380s.

One overlooked index of authorship still faintly visible on this panel is the use of a particular punch tool in the decoration of the Virgin’s halo. The halo comprises two concentric rings of simple dot strikes paired with rings of small asterisk punches, the frieze between them filled with an engraved lozenge motif again delineated by running lines of small asterisk strikes. Within each lozenge, however, is a floret-shaped punch that, in its present eroded state, was misidentified by Skaug as no. 568 in his catalogue of Florentine punch tools of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries but which must instead be the closely similar no. 567.⁴ Skaug traces the initial appearance of this punch in works by Bernardo Daddi emerging from that artist’s studio in the final years of his career, around 1348, and its subsequent migration to the studio of Daddi’s pupil Puccio di Simone, who used it extensively on paintings datable to the 1350s and early 1360s. A Daddesque component, already recognized nearly a century ago, is clearly visible in what remains of the Yale painting but not one strong enough to merit an attribution directly to that master. Puccio di Simone, a gifted but short-lived painter, is easily recognizable by his highly idiosyncratic figure style, which is also unrelated to the present work. It appears, however, that at or around the time of Puccio’s death in 1362, this punch tool was inherited by the Florentine painter Pietro Nelli, an artist whose pictorial output is still not fully defined but who does show strong points of contact with the Yale Mourning Virgin.

Pietro Nelli’s name first appears in documents in 1374. He enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali only in 1382, but his collaboration with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in painting the high altarpiece for the collegiate church of Santa Maria at Impruneta in 1375 implies that his artistic career began considerably earlier. Both Luciano Bellosi and Miklós Boskovits, who were responsible for the initial reconstructions of his oeuvre, speculate that he must have begun painting close to 1360, a supposition borne out by the circumstances of the transfer of punch tools to Nelli from Puccio di Simone.⁵ Accordingly, Nelli’s early work is defined as those paintings revealing the persistence of influence from Bernardo Daddi, whereas his later career is presumed to have been markedly influenced by the example of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. Skaug presented evidence supporting this schematization: that Nelli’s early works are also distinguished by the use of a subset of Daddi’s punches coupled with the use of small ring and asterisk punches, precisely the combination of tools present in the Yale Mourning Virgin. These largely disappear from his mature production. There is thus a strong presumption that the larger complex of which the Yale painting is a fragment is likely to have been painted sometime in the decade of the 1360s.

Two painted crosses survive for which Pietro Nelli may be said to have been responsible. One of these, in the Cappella Castellani in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, is dated 1380 and was executed in collaboration with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. The lateral terminals of this cross are intact. The other cross, in the church of San Pietro a Ripoli at Bagno a Ripoli, is preserved in a more compromised state. It has been cut along the profile of the Christ figure to a sagomato format; its terminals are missing; and irregular damages along all its edges make it impossible to reconstruct its full, original shape.⁶ This painting has been dated to the 1380s by Boskovits,⁷ but it is also possible to argue for an earlier date. No other fragments that might have originated with the Yale Mourning Virgin are known. —LK

1. Seymour 1970, 33, no. 17. ↩︎

2. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 600. ↩︎

3. Skaug 1994, 1:276. ↩︎

4. Skaug 1994, 2: no. 567. This punch is catalogued by Mojmir S. Frinta (Frinta 1998, 499) as no. La59b, which he conflated with Skaug’s no. 566. ↩︎

5. Bellosi 1973, 179–94; and Boskovits 1975b, 60–61. ↩︎

6. Photographs of the obverse and reverse reproduced in Lisner 1970, pls. 1–2, clearly indicate the construction of a conventional painted crucifix. ↩︎

7. Boskovits 1975b, 418, pl. 101. ↩︎