Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, Pilaster Fragment with Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Elia Volpi (1858–1938), Florence, by 1930; Edward Hutton (1875–1969), London, 1932

The panel support, 8.9 centimeters thick, comprises a main block 12.5 centimeters wide and a 1.9-centimeter extension nailed and glued to it on the left. A vertical split rises through the main block for its full height approximately 5 centimeters from its right edge. The top edge of the panel is a clean cut and shows evidence of the possibility of a missing capping strip molding; the bottom edge has been unevenly sawn through from more than one angle, suggesting that the pilaster fragment was roughly removed from its original structure at this point. The added board along the left edge has been stripped of all gesso and gilding; the right edge of the main block preserves sections of a band of gilding that originally extended approximately 5 centimeters from the front face of the block, with discolored gesso drips and some bolus below that. The gilding overall, including remnants in the chamfered right front edge of the block, is well preserved, although it is rubbed at the high points of the pastiglia decoration, exposing the underlying bolus. Large losses at the top and bottom of the panel and smaller losses along its vertical edges have exposed layers of gesso, linen, or wood. The paint surface (confined to the figure of Saint Catherine) is in an excellent state of preservation, although it is currently covered by an unevenly discolored varnish.

This little-known fragment, which preserves its original thickness, was sawn from the pilaster of an unidentified altarpiece. Traces of gilding and paint on the right face of the narrow block of wood indicate that it stood to the left of the main structure. The painted surface, still largely intact, shows Saint Catherine of Alexandria holding a book and martyr’s palm; she is identified by her traditional attributes of a crown and a wheel, partially visible at her feet. The saint is dressed in a pale blue tunic and a brilliant orange cloak lined in gold and stands on an illusionistically depicted stone or marble platform against a gold background. Enclosing her figure is a Gothic niche of raised pastiglia with spiral colonettes—now visible only on the lower right—supporting a trefoil arch. Above and below the image are two equal quadrants with an elaborate acanthus-leaf motif in pastiglia against a stippled gold ground. The undercut, partially beveled edges of the block (fig. 1) and remains of gesso strips at the top and bottom of the fragment could suggest the architectural subdivision of the original pilaster into two or more tiers of saints. The extent of the decorated surface between saints, however, would be unusual for a monumental complex and may imply a more modest structure with perhaps just one saint on each side.

Notable for its delicate handling and preciously decorated surfaces, the Yale Saint Catherine is first mentioned in a letter dated December 5, 1930, and addressed by Edward Hutton in London to the New York collector Robert Lehman, who had recently established a joint account with Hutton for the purchase of works of art.¹ The subject of the letter was Hutton’s proposed acquisition for immediate resale of the present fragment, then owned by the Florentine art dealer Elia Volpi. The proposition was apparently turned down by Lehman since Hutton bought the painting from Volpi in 1932 and later (in 1953) donated it to the Yale University Art Gallery as part of a financial arrangement with Maitland Lee Griggs, son of the collector Maitland Fuller Griggs. In his 1930 letter to Lehman, Hutton had attributed the Saint Catherine to either Sassetta or Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, highlighting its exceptional quality and state of preservation. The work went seemingly unnoticed in scholarly publications, however, until it was included by Bernard Berenson in his 1963 compilation of Rossello’s oeuvre.² The attribution was reiterated by Charles Seymour, Jr., followed by Federico Zeri and Carol Talbert Peters.³ As in other instances in Rossello’s production, however, the dating of the fragment has been inconsistent. Whereas Seymour catalogued the image as a late effort, between 1430 and 1440, Talbert Peters compared it to Rossello’s triptych in the Museo della Collegiata, Empoli, and assigned both works to a very precocious phase in the artist’s development, preceding his earliest documented picture, the Saint Blaise in Florence Cathedral, completed around 1408.⁴

While Talbert Peters’s assessment is not questioned in the only two mentions of the Yale fragment postdating her study,⁵ her comparisons with the Saint Blaise and the Empoli altarpiece are unpersuasive. The hard, incisive drawing technique and austere quality that distinguishes both of those images, still reminiscent of fourteenth-century models, is at odds with the naive charm and sensitive treatment of the present figure. Compared to the representation of the same saint in the Empoli triptych, the Yale Saint Catherine is distinguished by rounder, softer proportions and by a more nuanced approach in the handling of individual features that is consistent with those works usually gathered around the next fixed points in the artist’s chronology, following the Saint Blaise: the Coronation of the Virgin in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, datable on the basis of a fragmentary inscription to around 1424–25; and the illuminations in a gradual dated 1429 in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Prato.⁶ The doll-like features of the Yale Saint Catherine and the concern for exquisite decorative details, as well as the luminous palette, recall, in particular, the vivacious figures painted by the artist in a predella panel with the Nativity and Adoration of the Magi (fig. 2) in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, most recently dated to around 1425 but possibly slightly later.⁷ Formerly located in the church of Sant’Egidio in Poggio di Croce, near Preci (Umbria), the predella belonged to an unidentified altarpiece, of which no other elements are known. Although the format of the scenes suggests, perhaps, a more modern kind of structure than the one that included the Yale Saint Catherine, the Perugia predella is distinguished by the same tooling of the haloes and similar treatment of the gold ground between the images, alternating stippled surfaces with almost identical leaf motifs and patterns of incised lines. The stylistic correspondences point to a near-contemporary date of execution for both works, between the middle and end of the third decade of the fifteenth century, when the artist appears to have been intimately familiar with the models of Lorenzo Monaco. Among other paintings from the same period that also seem closely related to the Yale Saint Catherine are the remains of a dismembered triptych comprising a Virgin and Child formerly in the collection of Carl Moll, Vienna (present location unknown), and a lateral with Saints Peter and Bartholomew now in the Museo Diocesano, Pistoia.⁸ The loss of the Pistoia panel’s outer framing elements makes it impossible to determine whether the present work might have been included in the same complex; the remains of the original pastiglia decoration in the pinnacle above the saints does not correspond exactly to that of the Yale pilaster. —PP

1. A copy of the letter is preserved in the curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and in the Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Papers, box L-2, folder 9. From the wording of the letter, it appears that Lehman first suggested a joint account in 1929; see also Robert Lehman Papers, box 17, folder 10. ↩︎

2. Berenson 1963, 1:193 ↩︎

3. Seymour 1970, 174–75, no. 126, fig. 126; Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 601; and Talbert Peters 1981, 40–41, 51, 241–42, no. 14, pl. 3. ↩︎

4. Seymour’s suggestion (based on a purported conversation with Ugo Procacci) that the fragment might be part of an altarpiece in the Galleria dell’Accademia from the high altar of Santa Maria Novella is puzzling. Neither of the two altarpieces by Rossello now in the Accademia come from Santa Maria Novella nor have they ever been associated with that church. ↩︎

5. Edelstein 1998; and Alice Chiostrini, in Hollberg, Tartuferi, and Parenti 2020, 204. ↩︎

6. Inv. no. 1890 n. 8460; and MS D, no. 5, respectively. On these works, see, most recently, Michela Palmeri, in Hollberg, Tartuferi, and Parenti 2020, 207–17, nos. 46–47 (with previous bibliography); and Sara Giacomelli, in Natali, Neri Lusanna, and Tartuferi 2012, 280–83, nos. 91–92. ↩︎

7. See Garibaldi 2015, 332–34, no. 123 (with previous bibliography). ↩︎

8. Inv. no. 105. The ex-Moll Madonna last appeared on the art market in 1974; sale, Sotheby’s, London, July 10, 1974, lot 8. According to notes in the Fototeca Zeri, Foundation Federico Zeri, Bologna, inv. no. 10547, by February 1978 it was reportedly with the Colnaghi firm in London. The Pistoia panel was recognized as part of the same structure by Giacomo Guazzini; see Guazzini 2015, 10, 12, pl. 1. ↩︎