Attributed to Giovanni del Biondo, Scene from the Legend of Saint John Gualbert

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

The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain, has been thinned to 1.6 centimeters but has not been cradled. A 1.5-centimeter strip of wood has been added to the right edge of the panel and a 3-centimeter strip has been added along the bottom. Later frame moldings, 2.8 centimeters wide at the left and right sides and 3 centimeters wide at the top and bottom, have been applied to the front and are now stripped of gilding and gesso to reveal the wood surface. These are old—they are applied with cut nails and exhibit some worm damage—but not original. A nail in the panel 5.5 centimeters from the top edge and 20 centimeters from the left edge may have secured a vertical batten or attached the panel to a box structure. The right edge of the panel (where it abuts the added strip) is distressed and may be original; two long, cut nails attaching the capping strip at this edge are old. The left edge has been cut and is not covered by a capping strip. Fragments of wood with a vertical grain glued to the back may indicate that the panel was cut from its original context for reuse in a different one, possibly occasioning the addition of the present engaged moldings on all four sides.

All the gilding on the panel, except the horse’s raised hoof, is new and presumably dates from the time that the frame moldings were applied to the surface. The punch tooling is all modern or possibly reinforced over vague impressions of original tooling that might have been preserved in the gesso beneath. The paint surface is severely abraded, and all the pigments have been leached by solvents. Larger gouging losses are scattered throughout John Gualbert’s vermillion cape, the ear flaps of his helmet, his retainer’s helmet, and the face of his kneeling enemy. Ironically, the saint’s knife and belt, the armor and weapons of the kneeling knight, and much of the linear definition of the architectural details is decently preserved, while broader, flat areas of color in the left half of the painting (especially around the doorway) and along the floor of the church have been extensively interrupted. The two center bifore in the architectural background have been redrawn with a fine line. Engraved lines above the altar table at right suggest that an altarpiece or backing may once have been painted there, but no remnant of such a structure survives. The black horse is reinforced and the profile of its neck enlarged by at least 1 centimeter covering the new gold. Its vermillion trappings are fairly well preserved but were once enlivened with mordant gilt decoration that survives only in small fragments.

The panel was cleaned and restored in 1915 by Hammond Smith, who noted the total loss of the two helmets and the face of the kneeling figure, all of which he repainted. A second cleaning by Andrew Petryn in 1963–68 stripped the gilding from the frame moldings and left the painting in the state in which it is presently encountered.

Saint John Gualbert (Giovanni Gualberto, died July 12, 1073, canonized 1193) was the founder the Vallombrosan order, a branch of the Benedictine reform movement that attracted an extensive and influential following throughout Tuscany, including four prestigious communities in Florence: at San Pancrazio, Santa Trinita, San Miniato al Monte, and San Salvi. Born into a noble Florentine family at the end of the tenth century, Giovanni Gualberto embarked on an eremitic life against his family’s wishes, following the episode of his spiritual conversion as it is portrayed in two conflated scenes on this panel. Riding into Florence with a group of friends, Giovanni was urged by them to vengeance when they encountered a knight who had killed his brother. The knight begged forgiveness on his knees, his arms crossed before him, and Giovanni forgave and embraced him. Later, entering the church of San Miniato al Monte, a crucifix over the altar miraculously nodded to Giovanni and spoke to him in recognition of his act of charity. In the Yale painting, Giovanni is dressed in red, with a red cap and cape both lined with ermine, a dagger at his belt. He presents his enemy, dressed in blue and kneeling before the altar in San Miniato, his sword, shield, dagger, and helmet strewn on the ground at his feet. Both figures beseech the crucifix over the altar, which leans noticeably toward them. At left, a retainer leads Giovanni’s horse past the door of the church, he, too, regarding the miraculous crucifix with rapt attention.

The general outlines of this composition correspond to two well-known fourteenth-century versions of the subject. The first of these occurs at the top left of an altarpiece triptych by Giovanni del Biondo now in the Bardi di Vernio Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence (fig. 1), but that was apparently painted for the church of San Giovanni Evangelista fuori Porta Faenza, a Florentine monastery of Vallombrosan nuns.¹ Larger and more nearly square in format than the compressed horizontality of the Yale scene, this version incorporates a more coherent sense of space and much greater detail in its architectural setting, including rendering the cross with the conventional carpentry of a trecento painted crucifix. In the Yale scene, by contrast, the cross seems to float above the altar more like a mystical vision than a physical encounter, although this may be a mistaken impression caused by the painting’s deteriorated condition: engraved lines above the altar table and below the crucifix may indicate that a dossal was once included there, atop which the crucifix rested. Details of the saint’s attire are more specific in the Yale panel than in the Santa Croce altarpiece, although his pose is less energetic. His retainer leading a horse is also portrayed with finer detail in his dress, as well as in the horse’s harness, and he seems to be an active participant or witness of the miracle, whereas in the altarpiece, he is little more than a genre figure. The second version of the subject, a vertical panel, probably a small altarpiece, by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 2), follows closely the model of the scene in the San Giovanni Evangelista altarpiece, onto which it grafts details in common with the Yale panel. These include the red dress of Saint John Gualbert, his stately demeanor, and the greater involvement of the retainer in the scene.

The probable relationship of the Yale panel to either or both of these images is confused by its severely compromised condition, on the one hand, and by the natural constrictions of its format, on the other. Its horizontal proportions are typical of predella panels, and the condition of its wood support strongly suggests that it may originally have stood on the far-right end of a more extensive narrative predella beneath an altarpiece polyptych. In such a context, given that this scene is drawn from the beginning of John Gualbert’s life, it is likely that the other panels of the predella portrayed events in the lives of different saints. The apparently early date at which the panel was enlarged, reframed, and regilt might argue that it was removed from this hypothetical predella and revised for use possibly as a single scene incorporated among the lower framing elements of a large votive image. That no image of Saint John Gualbert of this type and plausibly related to the Yale panel survives is of little consequence if this alteration took place after the fourteenth century.²

The severe abrasion and even more severe “restoration” to which the Yale panel has been subjected continues to prevent confident recognition of its authorship. Catalogued by James Jackson Jarves as by Jacopo del Casentino, its spatial organization led Osvald Sirén to assign it an early fifteenth-century date rather than early fourteenth century.³ Sirén accordingly proposed an attribution for it to Giovanni dal Ponte, an artist who had until then been confused anagraphically with Jacopo del Casentino. The panel is recorded in passing under the name of Giovanni dal Ponte by Adolfo Venturi, Raimond van Marle, and Lionello Venturi,⁴ whereas Bernard Berenson and Burton Frederickson and Federico Zeri recognized that it was in fact a late fourteenth- rather than early fifteenth-century painting, attributing it to Agnolo Gaddi or a follower.⁵ Miklós Boskovits assigned it to Niccolò Gerini and advanced its dating to ca. 1375–80, but comparison to Gerini’s narrative paintings of this or any other period in his career does not bear out that attribution.⁶ Erling Skaug claimed that the distinctive punch decoration of the gold ground in the Yale panel points unmistakably to the workshop of Giovanni del Biondo.⁷ He did not realize, and no available cataloguing at the Yale University Art Gallery made clear, that this gilding and punch tooling are modern. Nevertheless, it may not be coincidental that all three punches appearing in the panel are relatively close variants of tools used by Giovanni del Biondo, differing modestly in size but not in design and provoking no damage to the drying gesso and bolus typical of original punch strikes.⁸

While Skaug did not propose a fixed chronology for Giovanni del Biondo’s work in general or for the Yale panel in particular, he accepted Boskovits’s estimation of its probable date (though not its attribution) at the beginning of the last quarter of the fourteenth century. If the Yale painting is by Giovanni del Biondo, Skaug’s research would suggest that it could only have been executed before ca. 1363/65 or after ca. 1375, whereas the altarpiece from San Giovanni Evangelista fuori Porta Faenza (see fig. 1) could only have been painted during the decade between about 1365 and 1375. Niccolò Gerini’s altarpiece in the Metropolitan Museum (see fig. 2) was almost certainly painted closer to the end of the fourteenth century. It could be argued that the Yale panel, the only one of the three not to show the miraculous Crucifix in the form of a painted thirteenth-century Cross, predates the other two, but it is far more likely that the greater resemblance of costume and spatial setting to the late work by Niccolò Gerini suggests a date closer to the end of Giovanni del Biondo’s career, ca. 1390. —LK

1. Offner and Steinweg 1967, 11–16, pl. 1. ↩︎

2. Several comparable works by Giovanni del Biondo are known, including a Saint Jerome in the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Germany, inv. no. 22; a Saint Paul in the collection of Stockholm University, inv. no. 220; a Saint John the Evangelist in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, inv. no. 1890 n. 444; and, most relevant to the present case, a Saint Zenobius that retains its predella in the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. Neither the Saint Jerome (Offner and Steinweg 1967, pl. 13) nor the Saint Paul (Offner and Steinweg 1967, pl. 12) retain their original frames or predellas. For the Saint John the Evangelist, see Daniela Parenti, in Boskovits and Parenti 2010, 50–55. The predella of this painting, added to it by Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni, is painted on a panel with a horizontal grain, as is the predella of a similar painting showing Saint Martin by Lorenzo di Bicci (Offner and Steinweg 1967, 69–73). For the Saint Zenobius by Giovanni del Biondo, see Offner and Steinweg 1969, pl. 22. A fourteenth-century image of Saint John Gualbert of this format is preserved in the presbytery of San Miniato al Monte; see Padoa Rizzo 2002, 56–57. Possibly datable to 1354, it includes a predella with three rudimentary scenes: the murder of John Gualbert’s brother; John Gualbert forgiving his brother’s assassin; and the miraculous encounter with the crucifix. The style of this painting is not immediately recognizable, and the compositions of the predella scenes seem to have had no discernable influence on either Giovanni del Biondo or Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1909a, 325, pl. 1, no. 3. ↩︎

4. Venturi 1901–40, 7, pt. 1:27; van Marle 1927, 86; Venturi 1931, pl. 144; and Venturi 1933, pl. 137. ↩︎

5. Berenson 1932a, 214; Berenson 1963, 1:68; and Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 76, 599. ↩︎

6. Boskovits 1975b, 411. ↩︎

7. Skaug 1994, 1:202–3. ↩︎

8. Frinta 1998, 57, no. Ada4a; 230, no. Fda36; 482, no. L40a. ↩︎