Master of Saint Cecilia, Virgin and Child

Elia Volpi (1858–1938), Florence, by 1922; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, 1924

The panel, of a vertical grain, has been truncated across the top and thinned to a depth of 1.5 centimeters; all members of a cradle formerly applied to its reverse were removed in a treatment at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2003. A split approximately 5 centimeters from the left edge runs the full height of the panel, and two partial splits occur 19.5 centimeters from the right edge of the panel, rising from the bottom to the level of the Christ Child’s knees and along the center of the panel from the top to the area of the Virgin’s chin. The picture surface is irregularly shaved along all its edges, leaving a wide border of exposed gesso, linen, and bare wood. A layer of parchment superimposed on the linen and beneath the gesso layer has also been exposed along all sides. In its present state, the picture surface measures approximately 73 by 37 centimeters but may be estimated originally to have been at least 1.5 centimeters wider, based on the continuous pattern of punched and engraved decoration partially interrupted along its border.

Except for the draperies of both figures, the paint surface and gilding have been harshly abraded. The gold is preserved only where the gilder’s sheets overlapped, leaving a double thickness of leaf; the underlying bolus is otherwise visible throughout the gilded background. The hands of both figures and the Christ Child’s feet have been reduced to vague outlines of form with islands of flesh tone interrupted by green underpainting. Shadows modeling the two heads are lost, with the greatest damage apparent at the Child’s temples and right cheek. A bird(?) that the Child held in His left hand has been effaced, as has the Virgin’s white veil, leaving underdrawing plainly visible in both areas. The green lining of the Virgin’s mantle where it is turned back across her breast has decayed to a formless brown. The blue tones and all the modeling of folds in the Virgin’s and Child’s blue robes are exceptionally well preserved, having been covered by several layers of overpaint discovered and removed by Yvonne Szafran in the cleaning of 2003.

The Virgin is shown half length, turned in three-quarter profile to her left (the viewer’s right), supporting the Christ Child in the crook of her left arm. She wears a red dress, visible at her throat and sleeve, beneath a blue mantle with green lining. The Christ Child is wrapped in a heavy blue garment over a transparent tunic. He rests His right arm on the Virgin’s shoulder. He holds His empty left hand in His lap, but underdrawing visible in that area may suggest He was at one point intended to be shown holding a book or bird.

The attributional history of this painting is confusing but tends to vacillate within the orbit of three names associated with the early influence of Giotto on his Florentine contemporaries. In a letter to Maitland Griggs dated December 12, 1924, Raimond van Marle described the painting as more Giottesque than Cavallinesque, presumably in response to an unrecorded earlier association of the painting with Pietro Cavallini and the Roman school. He specifically related it to the work of the Master of Saint Cecilia, comparing it to the altarpiece in the Biblioteca Communale, Pescia,¹ painted by that early colleague of Giotto. In a lecture delivered the following year, on January 19, 1925, shortly after Griggs acquired the painting, Richard Offner also affirmed its Florentine origin but pointed out its many Roman or romanizing characteristics, including the types of the Virgin’s head and the Child’s face, and the purse of both figures’ lips. He concluded that it was painted by a follower of the Saint Cecilia Master with affinities to the Master of the Horne Triptych. Offner had occasion to revise this opinion, however, for when he first published the painting five years later he assigned it to Pacino di Bonaguida, with the observation that the “weight and solidity of the forms . . . are evolved beyond [Pacino’s] hitherto identified larger panels. . . . [They] indicate a tendency towards increased plasticity, and mark a distinct phase of the master.”² In his detailed comments on the painting, Offner noted that “the cleaning the picture has undergone, over-emphasizes the shadows a little,” perhaps by way of explaining its divergence from Pacino’s standard production.

Offner’s comments in 1930 were based on the restored state of the painting that is recorded in the photograph by Mortimer Offner published in the first edition of the Corpus (fig. 1). At that time, the gold ground of the panel had apparently been releafed and the lightly abraded flesh tones liberally reinforced, lending them a sharper, more linear appearance than they actually have. Offner must quickly have become aware that the appearance of the painting was misleading. It was lent by Griggs to the 1937 Mostra Giottesca in Florence not as a work by Pacino di Bonaguida but as by the Master of the Horne Triptych, presumably with Offner’s blessing. Offner unequivocally retracted his attribution to Pacino in 1956, owning that it had been a mistake (a rare admission for him) and reverting to his initial grouping of the painting with works by the Master of the Horne Triptych.³ He bolstered this reclassification with several physical observations, including the difference in height from which the two diagonals of the panel’s gable spring—an anomaly found in other works by the Horne Triptych Master—and the general similarity in shape, size, and the pattern of the engraved border decoration to that in two other panels he ascribed to the Horne Master, lateral panels from a polyptych showing half-length saints that he discovered in the chapter house of the monastery of San Jacopo in Acquaviva, Livorno.⁴ The latter panels, though damaged, are so closely related to the Griggs Virgin and Child that Offner did not hesitate to suggest that they might be reconstructed as parts of a single altarpiece.

A further complication in the same vein was introduced by Miklós Boskovits when he advanced the suggestion that the entire corpus of works attributed to the Master of the Horne Triptych should be recognized as a phase of the career of Pacino di Bonaguida.⁵ Boskovits later withdrew that proposal but noted that the “early Pacino at times comes so close to the Horne group that Offner himself had difficulty in deciding under which of the two to class the Griggs Madonna.” ⁶ For Boskovits, the attribution to Pacino for the Griggs panel, which he published in its post-1970 cleaned state (fig. 2), had been correct. The Master of the Horne Triptych, he claimed, may have been associated with Pacino at some point after 1303, but he was a more Giottesque artist and is probably to be recognized as the late career of the Saint Cecilia Master. He nevertheless tentatively accepted the grouping of the Griggs and Livorno panels as possibly fragments of a single altarpiece.

Recently, Yvonne Szafran and Christine Sciacca advanced the even more compelling suggestion that a previously unpublished half-length Saint Sylvester in the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (fig. 3) might instead be a companion panel to the Griggs Virgin and Child, based on the correspondence in the patterns of their border decoration.⁷ They accepted Boskovits’s attribution to Pacino for both the Griggs panel and the Saint Sylvester, noting that Mojmír Frinta had identified a punch tool appearing in the latter as belonging to Pacino. While it is true that Frinta classed the Saint Sylvester as a work by Pacino, he also identified the same punch tool in several paintings by the Saint Cecilia Master.⁸

It is clear from the sheer number of surviving paintings attributed to Pacino di Bonaguida that his career must have been long and that he must have operated a large and highly productive workshop. Consequently, a fairly wide range in quality and, to a certain extent, style is to be expected among his accepted paintings and illuminations. At no point, however, does he exhibit the capacity for or even the interest in rendering mass and volume as persuasively as is evident in the Griggs Virgin and Child or the Saint Sylvester (see fig. 3) from Santa Maria Novella. The strong contrasts in light and shade that enliven the folds of the draperies in the Griggs panel—all well preserved in their original form and not the result of reinforcement through restoration—are not encountered elsewhere in Pacino’s work but are typical of the Master of the Horne Triptych. The loose-fitting bulk of the Child’s blue garment, the gentle turns of the hem in the Virgin’s mantle, even the size and foreshortening of her hands or those of Saint Sylvester betray an artist far more interested than was Pacino in the innovative figural language of Giotto. Boskovits was certainly correct to withdraw his suggestion that the Horne Master might be Pacino. His subsequent proposal, on the other hand, that the Horne Master and the Master of Saint Cecilia might be identified with each other gains credence by comparing the eccentric patterns created by the drapery folds in the Griggs panel, especially those in the Christ Child’s garment, with the similar, if crisper, effects in earlier paintings by the Saint Cecilia Master. The Griggs Virgin and Child sits much more comfortably within the later trajectory of the career of the Saint Cecilia Master—it is even possible that it should be regarded as his last surviving effort—than it does within any phase of the career of Pacino di Bonaguida.

Determining when, chronologically, that last effort might have occurred is entirely a matter of conjecture. There is general consensus that the earliest works so far identified by the Saint Cecilia Master, including the majestic Contini Bonacossi Virgin and Child now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,⁹ or the three scenes from the legend of Saint Francis that he added to Giotto’s fresco series in the Upper Church at the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi, must have been painted in the late 1280s or perhaps early 1290s. Boskovits suggested that many of the paintings in the Master of the Horne Triptych group could be datable into the 1310s.¹⁰ Monica Bietti Favi published an intriguing argument for identifying the Saint Cecilia Master with the historical personality of Gaddo Gaddi, father of Taddeo Gaddi.¹¹ The argument hinges on a liberal interpretation of circumstantial evidence and so cannot be regarded as conclusive; indeed, it has not been widely embraced, but it is a tempting hypothesis that in the present state of our knowledge should not be entirely discounted and, as Boskovits later argued at greater length, has a plausible likelihood of being correct.¹² Gaddo di Zanobi Gaddi matriculated in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali in 1312 and is documented to have been still active as a painter in 1328 and still alive in 1333. If he was indeed responsible for all the paintings now attributed to the Saint Cecilia Master and the Master of the Horne Triptych, it would not be at all unreasonable to imagine a date for the Griggs Virgin and Child after 1320, possibly close to 1330. —LK

1. Inv. no. 10. ↩︎

2. Offner 1930b, 221. ↩︎

3. Offner 1956a, xiii n17. ↩︎

4. Offner 1956a, pl. 35. ↩︎

5. Boskovits 1975b, 11. ↩︎

6. Boskovits 1984, 49n168. ↩︎

7. Christine Sciacca and Yvonne Szafran, in Sciacca 2012, 386–90. ↩︎

8. Frinta 1998, 145. The Griggs Virgin and Child is not included in Frinta’s list. Following its radical cleaning in 1970, it is no longer possible to identify with certainty the punch used to ornament the haloes and borders in this panel, though it is plausible to assume that it corresponds to the punch used on the Saint Sylvester. Judging from photographs, no punch tools appear to have been employed on the Livorno panels. ↩︎

9. Inv. no. 2000.35, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108G2D. ↩︎

10. Boskovits 1984, 17. ↩︎

11. Bietti Favi 1983, 49–52. ↩︎

12. Boskovits 2003, 57–70. ↩︎