Lippo d’Andrea, Saints Elizabeth of Hungary and Anthony of Padua

Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1925

The panel, of a vertical wood grain and 2.0 centimeters thick, was left uncleaned in the 1962–63 cleaning that the related Saints Louis of Toulouse and Clare panel underwent and survives in nearly perfect condition: the hands, faces, and haloes are virtually unabraded, and the draperies and background are marred only by minor scattered losses from nicks and scratches. Only two nail scars are visible at the bottom of the panel and five at the top. The bottom and right edge (from the front) are intact, except that the flange extension that would have rested atop the corresponding flange of the other shutter when closed is missing. The marbleized painting on the reverse of the panel (fig. 1) is much less well preserved than in its companion but more of the bottom hinge remains: two lengths of iron, 7 and 8 centimeters long. The top hinge is missing. Like its companion panel, the outer edge of the panel, in this case the left edge viewed from the front, has been trimmed by approximately 14 millimeters.

When first acquired by Maitland Griggs, these two panels were described by Richard Offner as “Gerinesque.”¹ In correspondence from 1925 preserved in the object files at the Yale University Art Gallery, Raimond van Marle attributed them to Lorenzo di Niccolò, and in correspondence from 1932, Bernard Berenson gave them to Lorenzo di Bicci. Charles Seymour, Jr., included them in his catalogue of the Gallery’s collection as “Florentine School ca. 1380,” without further discussion.² They were first correctly identified by Luciano Bellosi (verbal opinion) in 1987 as by the artist then known as the Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese and have since been classified under the various names associated with that group of paintings, principally Ventura di Moro and Lippo d’Andrea. It was not until 2009 that they appeared in a published source under their correct attribution and, furthermore, were correctly identified as wings of a tabernacle triptych rather than lateral panels of an altarpiece.³ The relatively modest thickness of the panels (2 centimeters), which is original; the original marbleized surface on their reverses; and the presence of iron strap hinges make this identification a certainty. It is therefore reasonable to presume that the truncated top edges of the panels were completed by half-arched or right-triangular gables. In comparable tabernacle triptychs, these almost invariably portray the Annunciatory Angel and the Virgin Annunciate, but at least one instance is known—two triptych wings by Lippo d’Andrea formerly in San Nicolò, Caprigliola—where the Stigmatization of Saint Francis is included in this position.⁴ Either possibility is conceivable in the present instance since these panels feature exclusively Franciscan saints.

Following a convention of Tuscan triptychs in this period, the central panel over which the Griggs panels once folded—which may be estimated to have measured about 56 centimeters in width and perhaps 90 to 96 centimeters in height—undoubtedly contained a representation of the Virgin and Child Enthroned, possibly attended by angels and perhaps by two additional saints. The presence in the wings of four of the principal saints of the Franciscan order—Clare, patron of the second order of Saint Francis; Louis of Toulouse and Elizabeth of Hungary, patrons of the third order of Saint Francis; and Anthony of Padua, the Thaumaturge—but not of Saint Francis himself argues that the latter was almost certainly included in the company of the Virgin and Child in the missing central panel. He would probably have been paired there with an onomastic saint, indicating either the name of the institution for which the tabernacle was commissioned or the patron who financed it. Although this panel has not yet been identified, an example of its format may be gleaned from a Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist, Francis, and Two Angels by Lippo d’Andrea offered for sale at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2017.⁵ This panel, cut to an irregular shape in modern times, is of an appropriate size—98.2 by 57.7 centimeters—to have stood between the Griggs shutters and, like them, is painted with a blue background. However, notwithstanding its damaged and heavily restored state, it was correctly recognized by Linda Pisani as a late work by the artist and was, additionally, probably executed with extensive studio assistance, in both respects unlike the Griggs panels.

The style and exceptional quality of the Griggs panels, especially of the relatively undamaged Saints Elizabeth of Hungary and Anthony of Padua, place them among the finest paintings produced by Lippo d’Andrea in his early career. They clearly predate the Angiolini altarpiece of 1430 at the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, with its more sophisticated attention to the representation of surface textures, spatial structures, and directed lighting.⁶ While the painted architecture within which the Griggs saints are contained is meant to convey a notional sense of projection in depth, the illusion is not carefully calibrated nor fully rational: the left panel is seen from the left while the right panel is seen from the right; the placement of the saints’ feet on the pavement indicates that the inner pair are standing further back than the outer pair, but the relation of their heads to the arches above is entirely ambiguous; and the schematic highlights and shadows in the draperies do not suggest a single light source. The broader, more generalized forms of the Griggs saints find their closest parallels in the frescoes of the legend of Saint Bernardo degli Uberti at the Castello di Vincigliata, documented as having been commissioned in 1398, and even more precisely in the frescoed Passion scenes in the Nerli Chapel at the church of the Carmine in Florence, purportedly of 1402.⁷ By 1408, the date of the frescoed scenes from the legend of Saint Cecilia in the sacristy at the Carmine, Lippo d’Andrea evinces his interest in the contemporary example of Lorenzo Monaco, an interest conspicuously absent from the Griggs panels.

The placement of Saints Clare and Elizabeth of Hungary in positions of honor closest to the central Virgin and Child implies that the tabernacle was commissioned for a Clarissan convent or a community of female members of the third order of Saint Francis. Although no object matching its description is recorded in early guides to Florence, several possibilities are at least hypothetically possible, including: Santi Girolamo e Francesco alla Costa in the Costa San Giorgio, consecrated in 1377 for the sisters of the third order of Saint Francis; the Clarissan convent of Santi Jacopo e Lorenzo in via Ghibellina, founded in 1333; or the Ospedale di San Paolo, which was managed by Franciscan tertiaries and for which the Accademia altarpiece by Lippo d’Andrea may have been painted.⁸ A large inventory number, “29,” painted in black on the reverse of Saints Elizabeth of Hungary and Anthony of Padua (see fig. 1) may ultimately provide a further clue to the panels’ provenance, though it has not yet yielded a concrete identification with property from the suppressed religious institutions in Florence during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. —LK

1. Lecture notes recorded in the Frick Art Reference Library, New York; and Offner and Maginnis 1981, 76 (as “school of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini”). ↩︎

2. Seymour 1970, 33, 35, nos. 18–19. ↩︎

3. See Katherine Smith Abbott, in Smith Abbott et al. 2009, 84–87, nos. 6a–b. ↩︎

4. Parenti 2006, 70, fig. 6. ↩︎

5. Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, January 26, 2017, lot 110. ↩︎

6. Inv. no. Dep. n. 18; Daniela Parenti, in Hollberg, Tartuferi, and Parenti 2020, 89–95. ↩︎

7. On these works, see Pisani 2001, 1–36. ↩︎

8. Parenti 2014, 66–79. ↩︎