Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Stigmatization of Saint Francis

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

The panel, of a horizontal grain, has been thinned to a depth of 7 millimeters, cradled, and waxed. Two splits run the full length of the picture surface, 14.5 and 21 centimeters from the bottom edge, passing through the arms of both figures and directly above their heads, but neither has resulted in any appreciable paint loss. The composition retains a barb at the left and right edges and along the lower-left chamfered corner. The top edge seems to have been trimmed just within the barb, as the pattern of punched decoration in the gold ground there appears to be complete. The bottom edge may have been treated similarly, as the left chamfer also appears to be complete. Exposed wood along the top and bottom edges of the panel indicate that engaged wooden moldings were removed there. The lateral edges of the panel are instead covered with gesso, possibly indicating that the missing moldings dividing the scenes of the predella from each other were pastiglia rather than wood.

The gilding and paint surfaces are well preserved, having suffered chiefly from scattered pinpoint flaking losses and modest abrasion in the draperies of both figures and in the darker colors of the landscape at the lower center and upper right. The loss of dark glazes in Saint Francis’s robes has paradoxically made the shadowed folds of cloth appear brighter than the highlighted folds. Inpainting, dating from a cleaning of 1957–58, along scratches above and behind the seraph and Saint Francis, across the rock dividing Francis from Fra Bonaventura, and in Bonaventura’s torso has discolored, interrupting the visual continuity of the pictorial surface.

This painting depicts Saint Francis receiving the stigmata from a vision of a six-winged seraph in the guise of the Crucified Christ, an event recorded by Tommaso da Celano in his biography of the saint as occurring in 1224. Francis is shown kneeling in lost profile in a ravine in a mountainous landscape, with pine trees trailing back into the distance and the hermitage buildings of La Verna in the upper-left and -right corners. Fra Bonaventura, who according to Tommaso da Celano witnessed the event, is separated from Francis by an outcropping of rock at the left.

The earliest records of this painting in the collection of James Jackson Jarves ascribe it to Agnolo Gaddi. Osvald Sirén noted instead its similarity in style, if not in the refinement of its execution, to the early works of Lorenzo Monaco.¹ Miklós Boskovits included the Stigmatization of Saint Francis in his foundational studies of the work of Mariotto di Nardo,² identifying it as a fragment of a predella of which two other scenes, a Martydom of Saint Lawrence (fig. 1) and a Martyrdom of Saint Blaise (fig. 2) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, had already been attributed to Mariotto di Nardo by Richard Offner.³ While Charles Seymour, Jr., recorded Boskovits’s opinion, he preferred to catalogue the painting still as by a follower of Lorenzo Monaco but with a note that “the most recent thinking on this panel tends to remove it from the Lorenzo Monaco orbit and into that of the Gerini” (i.e., Lorenzo di Niccolò rather than Niccolò di Pietro).⁴ This “recent thinking,” not further clarified by Seymour, may be a reference to Bernard Berenson’s having listed the Rennes panels as the work of Lorenzo di Niccolò;⁵ no such attribution for the Yale Stigmatization of Saint Francis has ever been published, whereas the attribution to Mariotto di Nardo was subsequently accepted by Burton Fredericksen and Federico Zeri.⁶ Curiously, the Stigmatization of Saint Francis does not appear, under any attribution, in any of Berenson’s published lists of Florentine paintings.

Boskovits’s 1968 study of Mariotto di Nardo was intended not only to introduce to the scholarly literature a group of previously little-known paintings but also to reappraise the artist’s quality and his significance within the development of Late Gothic style in Florence. Boskovits accepted the proposal, first advanced by Mario Salmi and certainly correct, that Mariotto di Nardo must have been the unnamed “egregio pictore” with whom the young Lorenzo Ghiberti traveled to Pesaro in the summer of 1400 to work for Pandolfo Malatesta. The proposal rests first on the presence of a triptych by Mariotto, inscribed with the date 1400, still preserved in the Museo Civico at Pesaro and second on the evident stylistic affinity to Mariotto’s work of the stained-glass window of the Assumption of the Virgin in the facade of Florence Cathedral, installed in 1405, for which Ghiberti claimed credit in his Commentari.⁷ Where Salmi followed his argument by advancing a number of largely unpersuasive attributions to Ghiberti as a painter, Boskovits more tentatively proposed the possibility that a pair of predella panels—one showing the Nativity (fig. 3), in the Lanckoronski Collection at the Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków, Poland, and the other the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 4), in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio—might reflect the continuing collaboration of the two artists; both paintings clearly deploy Mariotto’s figure types while neither is possible to fit comfortably into his chronology. Both paintings are conspicuously superior in quality of handling and in compositional ingenuity to Mariotto’s standard output, and the Oberlin Adoration, with the Gothic sway of its figures’ poses and the windswept rhythms of their draperies, struck Boskovits as particularly close to Ghiberti’s early Annunciation relief on the north door of the Baptistery (see fig. 5).

Revisiting his earlier studies of Mariotto di Nardo in 1975, Boskovits added three more predella panels to the Oberlin and Lanckoronski paintings as works showing the possible collaboration of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Mariotto: the Yale Stigmatization of Saint Francis and the Rennes Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (see fig. 1) and Martyrdom of Saint Blaise (see fig. 2). The figure style in all five of these panels is closely related (the two Martyrdoms in Rennes have suffered from apotropaic vandalism: only the figures of the two saints remain fully legible), as is the greater complexity of the spatial structure relative to other works by Mariotto di Nardo. Although it was not suggested by Boskovits, it is possible that these panels may be fragments of a single predella from an unusually large altarpiece. All five are presented in rectangular picture fields with chamfered corners and with identical punch decoration of their margins. All have identically punched haloes, and all are closely related in height: the Oberlin and Lanckoronski panels, which have been cropped slightly at the top and possibly at the bottom, are 31.6 and 30.5 centimeters tall, respectively; the Yale panel, which has also been cropped, is 29.2 centimeters tall; and the Rennes panels are recorded as 32 centimeters (Saint Blaise) and 33 centimeters (Saint Lawrence) tall. Marvin Eisenberg, who first recognized the association of the Oberlin and Lanckoronski panels, correctly noted that the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi are subjects not usually found together in a single predella unless they form part of a larger narrative series depicting the Infancy of Christ.⁸

While it remains uncertain whether these five predella panels all belong together in the reconstruction of a single complex, it must be categorically affirmed that the Yale, Rennes, Oberlin, and Lanckoronski paintings are fundamentally unlike any other works by Mariotto di Nardo and relate suggestively to early compositional ideas by Lorenzo Ghiberti. In addition to the reflections of the Annunciation relief (fig. 5) on the north door of the Baptistery cited by Boskovits, Maria Skubiszewska compared the Oberlin panel (see fig. 4) to the Adoration relief (fig. 6) on the north doors,⁹ and the Yale Stigmatization can be said to be organized on loosely the same spatial and design principles as Ghiberti’s bronze competition relief of the Sacrifice of Isaac. The sophisticated lighting and projection into depth of the landscape in the Yale painting, its loose but accomplished and confident draftsmanship, the surpassing delicacy of its painted highlights, and the remarkable device of the wooden porches extending the roofline of both ecclesiastical structures in the background are easily worthy of comparison to the refinement of detail in any of the bronze reliefs on the north door. The date of the Sacrifice of Isaac is known (1401–2), but the chronology of Ghiberti’s work on the narrative reliefs of the north door cannot be established with any reliable precision. Surviving documentation permits little more than the supposition that the Annunciation and Adoration are not likely to have been designed, let alone modeled and cast, early enough for Mariotto di Nardo to have seen and been influenced by them before his style evolved into a noticeably more mature and drier idiom than is in evidence here. It is even less likely that Ghiberti might have based his own compositions on inventions by Mariotto di Nardo. Given that no documented paintings by Ghiberti—who claims to have mastered that medium—are known to survive, it may have been prudent for Boskovits to couch his discussion of Ghiberti working in Mariotto’s studio in tentative, qualified terms. Anneke de Vries has argued against the presumptive association of the two artists by observing that the inscription dating Mariotto’s Pesaro altarpiece to 1400 may be fragmentary, and the date, therefore, inaccurate, and that it may not have been intended originally for that Adriatic city.¹⁰ These contentions are themselves hypothetical and do not invalidate Boskovits’s theory, which rests only partially on the circumstantial evidence of the Pesaro triptych. The stylistic evidence of the Assumption window in the cathedral seems to be conclusive.

It is possible to propose an expansion of Boskovits’s premise by consideration of two large-scale works conventionally but implausibly ascribed to Mariotto di Nardo. One is the Coronation of the Virgin formerly at the Certosa di Galluzzo, now in the collection of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence (fig. 7).¹¹ The other comprises the fragmentary frescoes and sinopie in the chapel of Saint Jerome in San Michele Visdomini and the altarpiece persuasively linked to this chapel by de Vries: the Assumption triptych in the Oratorio di Fontelucente at Fiesole, dated 1398. The naturalism of the lion and audacious foreshortening of the figures or perspective of the buildings in the fresco sinopie have no parallel in any other work by Mariotto di Nardo, and it is difficult to see the spatial competence or even the figure types in the Fiesole altarpiece as in any way related to the flat, conventional figures in the Pesaro triptych or any other work firmly attributable to the artist. Similarly, the Accademia Coronation of the Virgin is strikingly unlike two other versions of the same subject by Mariotto to which it has been compared by Richard Fremantle and Angelo Tartuferi.¹² In the Accademia painting, the Virgin is not seated symbolically alongside Christ as an equal but kneels humbly before and in front of her Son, while Christ reaches forward in space to place the crown on His mother’s head. The convincing definition of space created by a cloud of engraved cherubim forming a shell behind the principal figures is beyond Mariotto’s capacities, and the projection of light from a single source, casting shadows in a single, consistent direction, is foreign to his practice. Presumably, consensus on an attribution with such potentially important consequences for the study of the subsequent history of quattrocento art in Florence will not be quick in developing. Proving that these paintings are not by Mariotto di Nardo does not demonstrate that they are by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Nevertheless, the question must be debated in its broader logical scope: that Ghiberti’s “career” as a painter may well have been casual when confronted with his accomplishments as a sculptor, but there is no reason to assume a priori that it was brief or in any way insubstantial. —LK

1. Sirén 1916a, 69, no. 25. ↩︎

2. Boskovits 1968b, 22, 27, 30n15. ↩︎

3. Offner 1933, 169n4. ↩︎

4. Seymour 1970, 165, no. 117. ↩︎

5. Berenson 1963, 1:123. ↩︎

6. Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 121, 599. ↩︎

7. Salmi 1955, 147–52; and Salmi 1956, 1:223–37. ↩︎

8. Eisenberg 1951, 9–16. The present author once suggested that they could have originated in the predella beneath the San Remigio Annunciation altarpiece by Mariotto di Nardo, now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, inv. no. 1890 n. 463, but that it is not possible to say whether that altarpiece—the present Gothicizing frame of which is modern—may originally have been completed by lateral panels of standing saints and, in the predella, with further scenes from the Infancy of Christ or with scenes from the legends of the saints, which might have appeared in such lateral panels. It now seems doubtful whether any of these panels may be associated with the San Remigio Annunciation. ↩︎

9. Skubiszewska and Kuczman 2010, 169. ↩︎

10. de Vries 2006, 1–24. ↩︎

11. Angelo Tartuferi, Hollberg, Tartuferi, and Parenti 2020, 237–39, no. 53. ↩︎

12. Fremantle 1975, 460; and Tartuferi, in Hollberg, Tartuferi, and Parenti 2020, 237–39, no. 53. ↩︎