Lorenzo di Niccolò di Martino, Saints Agnes and Dominic; Two Evangelists

Convent of San Salvi, near Florence; James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

These two panels and the related Saints Augustine and Lucy; Two Evangelists are all of a vertical wood grain and retain their original thickness of 2.2 (Saints Augustine and Lucy) or 2.4 (Saints Agnes and Dominic) centimeters. They all retain their original carved and pastiglia tympanum moldings, but these have been regilt, except for the tondo in each. The two pairs of panels have both been built into simulations of their original framing, all the vertical members of which are modern, as are both predellas. A modern batten screwed tightly across the bottom of each pair has provoked a minor split in all four panels, in each case rising some 20 centimeters from the bottom edge, roughly on center. Evidence of an original batten approximately 9 centimeters wide is preserved at the top of each panel, immediately below the tympanum, secured in each case by two nails, 79 centimeters from the bottom edge and situated so that they would be hidden by the applied spandrel moldings on the front of the panel. Saints Augustine and Dominic show evidence of applied spiral colonettes once affixed to their outer edges—left on Saint Augustine, right on Saint Dominic—whereas the lack of such evidence on the other six edges implies that the panels were separated from each other and from the missing central panel, either by corbels only or by freestanding colonettes.

Saints Augustine and Lucy were cleaned sometime after 1970 by Andrew Petryn, who also made a partial attempt to dismantle their frame, presumably in response to Charles Seymour, Jr.’s belief that both panels were covered by “a deeply ingrained grime layer . . . with considerable repainting over that.”¹ Saints Agnes and Dominic were not cleaned, despite having been judged to be “very similar as to condition.”² The latter pair are, in fact, in nearly flawless condition. The gold ground is beautifully preserved, other than a modern repair where the central corbel was once attached. The paint surface is also beautifully preserved, with the exception of minor flaking damage in the red book held by Saint Dominic. Saints Augustine and Lucy retain some brilliance of color in blues and greens, but the highlights have been forcefully removed from the left side of Lucy’s robe, and all the shadows in the flesh tones have been harshly abraded. Saint Augustine’s white gloves were “removed,” surviving only as forms outlined on a gesso preparatory layer, although the white of his miter and along the edge of his book are both intact. Glazes covering Saint Lucy’s jar and the orphrey on Saint Augustine’s cope are lost. The painted roundels in the tympana of the panels with Saints Lucy and Augustine have been severely abraded, whereas they are relatively well preserved in the other two. Two painted triangular shapes with incised outlines cropped at the right edge of Saint Lucy, 26 and 28 centimeters from the bottom edge, are undoubtedly fragments of the seat and cushion of a throne projecting from the missing central panel. Identical painted shapes are cropped at the left edge of Saint Agnes, 28 and 30 centimeters from the bottom edge.

Acquired by Yale from the James Jackson Jarves collection with a generic attribution to Orcagna, this pair of saints and the related Saints Augustine and Lucy; Two Evangelists were recognized by Osvald Sirén in 1908 as the work of Lorenzo di Niccolò,³ an attribution that has not since been questioned and that was demonstrated by Erling Skaug and Mojmír Frinta on the basis of punch tool marks in the decoration of their gold grounds.⁴ Clearly mature works by Lorenzo di Niccolò, the Yale panels were painted not earlier than the first decade of the fifteenth century and possibly toward the end of that decade. They demonstrate the powerful influence of Lorenzo Monaco’s early style on Lorenzo di Niccolò at this closing stage of the latter’s career. The figure of Saint Dominic is so near in type and handling to the figures in Lorenzo Monaco’s San Gaggio altarpiece, and to his contemporary manuscript illuminations, as to beg the question of the two artists’ possible collaboration at some point in their careers or of Lorenzo di Niccolò’s direct access to Lorenzo Monaco’s workshop drawings or pattern books. Skaug noted that Lorenzo Monaco’s Prato polyptych was tooled and decorated with Lorenzo di Niccolò’s punches and in his manner, possibly as a collaborative or subcontracted effort.⁵ The Prato polyptych is commonly dated close to the supposed year of Lorenzo di Niccolò’s death (1412), presumably only shortly after the execution of the Yale Saints. Although it cannot be documented, it is possible that, around this time, the two artists did indeed work together in some fashion.

In first publishing the correct attribution for Saints Agnes and Dominic and Saints Augustine and Lucy in 1908, Sirén noted that they were originally lateral panels of an altarpiece. He was unable to identify the missing central panel of the structure from which they came, nor has the scanty subsequent literature addressing the Yale Saints advanced any suggestions to recognize their missing companion among the known panels commonly attributed to Lorenzo di Niccolò. One painting closely related to them in style is a fragmentary Coronation of the Virgin in the Martello collection, Florence, which was, however, associated by Miklós Boskovits with lateral panels portraying Saints Eustace and James the Greater and Saints Anthony Abbot and Julian in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.⁶ If this reconstruction is correct, another candidate for the center panel of the Yale altarpiece might be the Virgin and Child Enthroned in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (fig. 1),⁷ which is related to the Yale Saints in style, format, and the decoration of its gold ground. It is also the only currently known painting of this subject by Lorenzo di Niccolò in which the edges of the seat and cushion of the Virgin’s throne are cropped at the edges of the panel in such a fashion that they might be imagined to have continued onto the surfaces of the contiguous panels in the altarpiece. The Copenhagen panel might, however, be marginally too large to have stood between the Yale panels. Currently, it measures 124.5 by 56.5 centimeters, even though it has been cut out of its original frame and lacks the pinnacles still intact in the Yale panels. The Copenhagen panel retains on its reverse evidence of a horizontal batten with a nail approximately 93 centimeters up from the bottom edge of the panel. Similar nails centered on a batten mark on the reverse of the Yale panels occur 79 centimeters from the bottom, suggesting that if they are to be reconstructed as parts of a single complex, the Yale panels have been cropped by some 14 centimeters at the bottom, which is possible but not demonstrable.

Russell Sturgis, Jr., reported an unsubstantiated provenance from the convent of San Salvi for the Jarves, now Yale, panels,⁸ but since San Salvi was used in the mid-nineteenth century as a depot for the collection of artistic property removed from suppressed churches and monasteries throughout the Florentine region, the notice sheds no meaningful light on the paintings’ origins. On the grounds of iconography alone, it would be reasonable to presume that the commission for the altarpiece of which the Yale panels formed part came from a female Dominican convent; while Saints Lucy and Agnes occupy positions of honor directly flanking the missing central image, Saints Dominic and Augustine are frequently paired in Dominican imagery, as the Dominican order followed the Augustinian Rule. If such a convent were in Florence, the most likely candidate would be the church and convent of Santa Lucia di Camporeggi in via di San Gallo. This church was founded, according to Walter Paatz, by Augustinian nuns dedicated to Saint Agnes and was later transferred to the possession of Dominican penitential tertiaries, who did not, however, occupy the property until 1441, at least three decades after Lorenzo di Niccolò’s altarpiece was finished.⁹ While the establishment of the Dominican mantellate or penitential tertiaries in Santa Lucia in 1441, at the insistence of the archbishop (later saint) Antonino, and their assignment for spiritual guidance to the brothers at San Marco is well documented, there is some confusion over the identity of the original occupants of the church. According to Giuseppe Richa, the congregation of Saint Agnes from Borgo San Lorenzo was not a community of Augustinian nuns but a loose reunion of female “hermits” or recluses who were organized and presented with the rule of Saint Augustine in the middle of the thirteenth century by the Dominican preacher Peter of Verona, later Saint Peter Martyr. In 1285 these penitential lay sisters petitioned the chapter of Florence Cathedral, in the absence of a sitting bishop, for permission to build a new oratory within the walls of Florence, and in 1286 they were granted the property in the parish of San Lorenzo, on which, after several years of unsuccessful litigation, they finally built the convent of Santa Lucia di Camporeggi, also known as Santa Lucia in via di San Gallo. By 1436 the congregation had dwindled to only two elderly sisters, and the premises of Santa Lucia were reassigned to the Carmelites, who, in turn, renounced their claim a mere four years later.¹⁰ Records are not known to exist proving Dominican spiritual oversight for the sisters of Saint Agnes, but given the legend of their founding and the fact that the remnants of the congregation were reassigned in 1436 to the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina delle Ruote (Santa Caterina al Mugnone), it seems likely that they were indeed Dominican and that the altarpiece in their church contained images of precisely the four saints portrayed in the Yale panels by Lorenzo di Niccolò. —LK

1. Seymour 1970, 50. ↩︎

2. Seymour 1970, 50. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1908c, 193. ↩︎

4. Skaug 1994, 1:275; and Frinta 1998, 211, 288, 500. ↩︎

5. Skaug 1994, 1:275. ↩︎

6. Inv. nos. 6595–96; Boskovits 1985b, 76–77. ↩︎

7. Olsen 1961, 69–70, pl. 5b. ↩︎

8. Sturgis 1868, 36. ↩︎

9. Paatz and Paatz 1940–54, 2:602. ↩︎

10. Richa 1759, 355–60. See also Benvenuti Papi 1987, 49. ↩︎