Probably Florentine School, ca. 1400, The Crucifixion with the Penitent Magdalen and Saints

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

The much worm-eaten panel retains its original thickness of 3 centimeters and most of its original gesso coating on the reverse. Large areas of brown paint on the reverse and along the left lateral edge may also be original; the right edge has been planed. A vertical split runs the full height of the panel along its center and is especially deteriorated at the top. The predella and tympanum moldings, carved of pine, are original. The tympanum was regilt in the nineteenth century. The predella, which presumably had been treated identically, was stripped to the wood in a harsh cleaning in 1967, leaving only a scraped gesso frieze and exposed nail heads. Lateral and crown moldings were also applied in the nineteenth century; these have been removed from the right half of the painting but retained on the left. A circular cavity in the tympanum, 7.5 centimeters in diameter, has original bolus and remnants of gilding around its deeply recessed rim. The cavity has been filled with a modern wooden plug.

The picture surface is severely abraded and very little of the original paint structure remains. The gold has been reduced to its dark red bolus underlayer except along its punched margin, directly above the arms of the Cross, and in the wings of the angels and the clouds beneath their feet, where it was once covered by pigmented glazes. The figures were selectively damaged by gouging and overcleaning in 1967, especially in their faces and through passages of red in the draperies, but large areas of blue, yellow, gray, and violet are delicately painted and are relatively well preserved. Except for His face, which has been obliterated, the figure of Christ is largely intact, despite the wide split that passes through His head, torso, and right thigh. The gray “ground” on which the Crucifixion is set is undisturbed.

This picture, which has lost most much of its original painted surface, was possibly conceived as an independent devotional panel or reliquary tabernacle. The deep, round cavity in center of the pinnacle, presently filled with a modern insert, may have enclosed a decorative element such as a verre églomisé roundel, but it could also have been an aperture for housing a relic, possibly of the Cross. Dominating the foreground of the composition—whose original layout is documented by early photography (fig. 1)—is the penitent Mary Magdalen, hugging the base of the Cross and painted on a larger scale than the rest of the figures. To the left of the Cross are the swooning Virgin supported by the two Marys, and Saint Anthony Abbot, identified by the small black pig at his feet. Partially visible behind them is the bust of an unidentified deacon saint, next to a soldier bearing a lance. To the right of the Cross is the mourning Saint John the Evangelist, flanked by two unidentified female saints. The one closest to the Evangelist holds a book in her left hand and what may be a long staff or sword in her right; the other carries a book and martyr’s palm. On horseback in the background are a lance-bearing bearded figure, possibly identifiable as Longinus, and a soldier holding a banner. Four angels hover in the air, two on either side of the Cross, collecting the blood from Christ’s wounds.

The Yale Crucifixion was catalogued by James Jackson Jarves as a work in the manner of Spinello Aretino. “The figures,” Jarves noted, “though long, are graceful, and the heads full of expression; the pallor of deathly grief being admirably rendered in the fainting women.”¹ It is impossible to ascertain whether by this date the painting had already undergone the modern retouchings that are clearly visible in the earliest surviving photographs of it, from 1901 and 1915 (see fig. 1). The panel was passed over as a work “of slight interest” by William Rankin, who made no comment regarding its attribution.² By 1916, Osvald Sirén was very specific about its compromised state in his entry for the Jarves catalogue: “The color scheme is bright with red, blue, yellow and gray tones, the ground is gilded, but the original effect is largely impaired by clumsy restorations. . . . As this picture now is little more than a ruin it is rather hazardous to give a definite attribution to it.”³ Barring these qualifications, Sirén nevertheless concluded that the closest point of reference for the image was to be found in Bernardo Daddi’s small-scale altarpieces for private devotion, and he labeled the work as “In the Manner of Bernardo Daddi.”

The reference to Daddi was accepted by Charles Seymour, Jr., who assigned the Yale Crucifixion to a follower of the artist.⁴ Federico Zeri, on the other hand, had already identified the panel as an early effort of Cenni di Francesco in a 1967 note on the back of a photograph in the Fototeca Zeri archives.⁵ The attribution, later published by Burton Fredericksen and Zeri, was accepted by Miklós Boskovits, who nevertheless inserted the panel among the painter’s later production, between 1400 and 1405.⁶ Richard Offner acknowledged the Cionesque connotations and filed the work with other images by the so-called Rohoncz Master (also known as Master of the Kahn Saint Catherine), now recognized as the early Cenni di Francesco.⁷ Cenni’s authorship of the Yale panel, but with Boskovits’s later dating, was accepted by Carl Strehlke in his unpublished checklist of paintings at Yale.

Perhaps the most useful assessment of the Crucifixion was that of Sirén, when he cautioned about the limitations imposed by the panel’s altered condition at the time of his writing. His warnings are no less valid at present, for although the subsequent modern intervention removed the old overpaints, it also left little of the original intact. Compositionally, the panel does appear to have less to do with Daddi’s Giottesque models than with those of Jacopo di Cione, whose Crucifixion in the National Gallery, London, is reflected in the proportions and pose of Saint John the Evangelist, in particular.⁸ The suggested affinities with Cenni’s production, however, are unconvincing. Careful examination of those areas that can be properly evaluated reflect a degree of subtlety in their execution that contrasts with Cenni’s generally hard drawing technique and schematic execution. Details in the Yale panel, such as the naturalistic, sensitive handling of the anatomy of the horse on the left or the carefully modulated tonal transitions still noticeable in the brilliant yellow robes, suggest a markedly more sophisticated, delicate sensibility. The figures, enveloped in soft folds of cloth that do not completely hide their form, eschew both the tubular rigidity of Cenni’s early production and the agitated angularity of his later works. Additionally, the rare passages that offer a glimpse of the artist’s handling of facial physiognomy, most noticeably the intimation of underlying bone structure in the heads of Saint Anthony Abbot and the Virgin, appear inconsistent with Cenni’s essentially flat, caricatural approach.

All of the above features of the Crucifixion suggest the hand of a not-unaccomplished personality, strongly influenced by the models of the Cione workshop and possibly active around the turn of the fourteenth century, if not slightly later. A precise attribution, however, remains elusive. A Florentine provenance seems likely, although certain technical features, such as the idiosyncratic pattern of the haloes, the trefoil arch enclosing the composition, the precious tooling pattern at the edges of the missing pilasters (fig. 2), and the dark red tone of the exposed bolus, are unusual in Florentine painting at this date. Equally puzzling is the use of pine for the engaged frame molding, which is more typical of Marchigian practice. —PP

1. Jarves 1860, 45, no. 31. ↩︎

2. Rankin 1895, 142. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1916a, 25, no. 7. ↩︎

4. Seymour 1970, 27, no. 10, fig. 10. ↩︎

5. Fototeca Zeri, Federico Zeri Foundation, Bologna, inv. no. 17951. ↩︎

6. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 51, 599; and Boskovits 1975b, 291. ↩︎

7. Offner and Maginnis 1981, 52. ↩︎

8. Inv. no. NG1468, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jacopo-di-cione-the-crucifixion. ↩︎