Jacopo di Cione, Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saints Mary Magdalen, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist

James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The panel support retains its original thickness of ca. 2.5 centimeters. A gesso coating on the back that may be original has been overpainted brown and is impregnated with wax. The frame moldings above the spring of the arch are original, except for a 2.5-centimeter extension at the apex. The acanthus decoration around the arch has been regilt, and the background blue has been repainted. The bottom leaves of the acanthus have been remodeled where they were truncated at the sides, and the top-center leaves have been replaced by a modern fleur-de-lis form. The lateral and base moldings of the frame appear to be modern. The outer edges of the panel have been trimmed, irregularly but only slightly along the profile of the arch, more dramatically at the sides where the composition is cropped by the added frame moldings. It is possible that 2 centimeters or more are missing at the left and right. The bottom of the panel does not appear to have been cut: the predella in its present form is modern but occupies an area that must originally have been reserved for that purpose. The paint surface is severely abraded, resulting in evenly scattered flaking losses throughout. These are most extensive in the head and chest of the Baptist and in the draperies of God the Father on the left side of the composition. The gold ground is abraded but original.

This painting is an early example of an image that would become increasingly popular in Florentine art over the final decades of the fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century. It envisions the theological abstraction of the Holy Trinity as a representation of God the Father, crowned and seated in majesty, supporting a vision of Christ on the Cross before Him with a dove, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, flying between the two figures. In the present panel, the Crucifix is anchored in a summary indication of the hill of Golgotha, with the mourning Virgin and Saint Mary Magdalen seated at either side in the notional foreground. Behind them, shown as if seated further back in space than God the Father, are Saint John the Baptist on the left and Saint John the Evangelist on the right. While the Virgin and the Evangelist are standard attendants in devotional representations of the Crucifixion, and the Virgin and the Baptist are commonly paired in images of the Deesis or Last Judgment, the Magdalen is very rarely portrayed with the prominence accorded to her in this instance. She frequently appears in scenes of the Crucifixion but most often in a full narrative context, embracing the foot of the Cross, with Roman soldiers, Pharisees, and mourning holy figures around her. Her inclusion here in the place usually reserved for Saint John the Evangelist may refer directly or indirectly to the original patron of the painting. Any more concrete evidence for the identity of such a patron was lost when the lateral members of the panel’s original frame, possibly including coats of arms in pilaster bases alongside the predella, were cut away.

Aside from a generic ascription by James Jackson Jarves to Puccio Capanna, a Giottesque master then known by literary reputation but not by works of art, this painting has always been associated with the name of Jacopo di Cione or with an artist in his immediate circle.¹ Osvald Sirén at first considered it by an artist related to Niccolò di Pietro Gerini collaborating with Jacopo di Cione,² later recognizing it as exclusively Cionesque in style.³ He was followed in this assessment by Richard Offner (as circle of Jacopo di Cione),⁴ Millard Meiss (as Cionesque),⁵ Charles Seymour, Jr. (as a late follower of Jacopo di Cione),⁶ and Federico Zeri (as school or shop of Jacopo di Cione).⁷ Bernard Berenson revived the idea of a collaboration between Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini,⁸ while Miklós Boskovits accepted an attribution directly to Jacopo di Cione as a late work, probably of the 1390s.⁹ In Hayden Maginnis’s posthumous publication of Offner’s lists of Florentine fourteenth-century painters, the Yale panel was included as by a so-called Master of the Academy Crucifixion, an artist close to Jacopo di Cione, many of whose works had been reassigned directly to Jacopo by Boskovits.¹⁰

Attributions to Jacopo di Cione, ranging from the severely limited group initially accepted by Offner to the broadly inclusive group proposed by Boskovits, are all conditioned upon the fact that documents associating his name with surviving works without exception specify collaborations with other artists. Most frequently named among the latter has been Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, hence a probable explanation for Berenson’s insistence on viewing the Yale panel as a collaboration between Gerini and Jacopo di Cione. However, while Jacopo di Cione did collaborate with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in the 1380s, the widely accepted presumption that Gerini might be the “Niccolaio dipintore” mentioned alongside Jacopo in documents of 1370–71 relating to the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece is not supported by visual evidence. It appears instead that Jacopo’s collaborator on that altarpiece—the main panels of which are now in the National Gallery, London¹¹—may have been Niccolò di Tommaso. Isolating his contribution as the designer of the complex and possibly as executant of some of the saints and scenes at the left of the complete structure leaves a painter who closely resembles in every significant detail the artist of the Yale Trinity, probably working at approximately the same date in the early 1370s. The same painter was correctly identified by curators and conservators at the National Gallery as responsible for significant passages in the Camaldolese altarpiece of the Crucifixion, also in their collection.¹² That collaborative work, executed alongside the Master of the Ashmolean Predella, must be slightly earlier than the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece and may even contain evidence of planning or drawing by Jacopo di Cione’s elder brother, Andrea di Cione, called Orcagna, before his death in 1368.

Erling Skaug adduced the evidence of a punch tool (his no. 501) used in decorating the halo of God the Father in the Yale Trinity as an argument for dating the painting after 1375.¹³ This punch appears originally to have been owned by Nardo di Cione and subsequently to have passed into the ownership of Giovanni del Biondo, in a number of whose paintings it is recorded.¹⁴ It was used occasionally by Giovanni del Biondo before Nardo’s death in 1366 and again with some regularity after 1375 but only rarely during the decade between those dates, when Giovanni del Biondo by preference shared the gilding and punching of his panels with a compagnia of other artists. The logic, however, of assuming that Jacopo di Cione had access to this tool only after 1375 seems to follow an a priori acceptance of the late date proposed by Boskovits, not the internal logic of punch-tool sharing, which might instead be better supported by a date between 1366 and 1375. The second half of that decade range better accommodates stylistic comparison to other approximately datable works by Jacopo di Cione. —LK

1. Jarves 1860, 44, no. 20; Brown 1871, 15, no. 27; Sturgis 1868, 37, no. 27; Rankin 1895, 141; and Rankin 1905, 8, no. 27. ↩︎

2. Sirén 1914b, 336. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1916a, 45–46, no. 18, fig. 18. ↩︎

4. Offner 1927a, 17–18. ↩︎

5. Meiss 1951, 34n83. ↩︎

6. Seymour 1970, 48, no. 30. ↩︎

7. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 101, 599. ↩︎

8. Berenson 1932a, 274; and Berenson 1963, 1:105. ↩︎

9. Boskovits 1975b, 327. ↩︎

10. Offner and Maginnis 1981, 29. ↩︎

11. Inv. nos. NG569.1–.3 and NG570–78, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-di-cione-and-workshop-the-coronation-of-the-virgin-central-main-tier-panel#painting-group-info. For discussion of the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece, see Bomford et al. 1989, 156–89. ↩︎

12. Inv. no. NG1468, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-di-cione-the-crucifixion; Bomford et al. 1989, 140–55. ↩︎

13. Skaug 1994, 1:195. ↩︎

14. This tool is catalogued by Mojmír Frinta in Frinta 1998, 510, as no. La94, without reference to its appearance in the Yale Trinity. Frinta’s list of works using this punch, which is incorrectly measured as 9 millimeters in diameter (the correct measurement is 10 millimeters), is conflated with that of one or more other tools, including his no. La104a. ↩︎