Jacopo del Casentino, Virgin and Child

Dan Fellows Platt (1873–1937), Englewood, N.J., by 1911; Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1925

The panel support, which retains its original thickness, was cut sometime prior to 1911 to a truncated gable and arched bottom and then incorporated into a larger surround to simulate the size and shape of the center panel of a polyptych. These additions were partially exposed during a cleaning in 1965–67, which confusingly preserved part of the framing pilaster and new spandrels on the left side, thereby commemorating the commercial falsification of the painting without clarifying any of its original qualities. The painted and gilt surfaces have been severely abraded, especially the flesh tones and the rose of the Virgin’s mantle, broad passages of which have been reduced to their gesso preparation. A square patch of paint in the area of the Virgin’s right eye stands proud of the surface: this patch covers a plug from the central of three batten nails aligned at this height, arguing that the panel was in fact originally conceived as the center of a polyptych. Two vertical splits in the panel further interrupt the continuity of the paint surface, one extending down from the top edge of the panel, passing between the Virgin’s cowl and the Christ Child’s cheek and ending at the level of the Child’s shoulder, the other reaching up from the bottom of the panel through the Virgin’s right elbow. Complete paint losses along the bottom edge of the panel have exposed alternating areas of linen and bare wood.

This once-noble painting had been so heavily overpainted at the time it entered Maitland Griggs’s collection (fig. 1) that Richard Offner was able to comment only that it was “not in a condition to permit a secure judgment regarding authorship further than to say that it was certainly painted in the shop of Jacopo del Casentino . . . the design and the mass have a dignity due doubtless to the master himself.”¹ This dignity was all but annihilated by the unconscionable severity of the cleaning to which it was subjected between 1965 and 1967, reducing the picture to its present state. It was at that time discovered to be a fragment, described by Charles Seymour, Jr., as “cut into an irregular shape and encased in modern wood and a modern frame.”² The frame may well be “modern,” but the wood of which it is made and in which the fragmentary original panel is encased is old, and the shape of the fragment is not irregular. Its curved bottom and gabled top recall the shapes to which four laterals of an altarpiece by the Master of the Capella Medici Polyptych were reduced in order to be incorporated as pinnacles in a composite altarpiece now situated on the high altar at Santa Croce in Florence.³ Perhaps the present painting was similarly repurposed at some point in its history and then rebuilt into a more conventional form to satisfy the demands of the art market at the end of the nineteenth century or in the first decade of the twentieth century, before entering the collection of Dan Fellows Platt. It can only be speculated whether the added wood now encasing the panel was derived from the carpentry framework of either the painting’s original structure or of its hypothetical second incarnation.

Offner and Seymour, in their brief comments about the painting, implied a date for it early in Jacopo del Casentino’s career, a position that cannot be maintained today. Erling Skaug has shown unequivocally that the punch tools employed in decorating the haloes and the system of their arrangement indicate a date at the extreme end of Jacopo’s career, not earlier than 1342 and possibly as late as his putative death in 1349.⁴ Closely related in style and gravitas are the four half-length saints in the Van Gelder collection at Uccle, near Brussels,⁵ a related half-length Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France,⁶ and the Virgin and Child in Santi Stefano e Caterina in Pozzolatico, near Impruneta.⁷ As the Van Gelder saints have been cut slightly to their present shapes and dimensions (90 × 39 cm each), it is difficult to judge whether they might once have been associated with either the Griggs or Pozzolatico panels in a single altarpiece, though considerations of style and quality alone would make either possibility credible. The Avignon Saint Thomas Aquinas cannot have been associated with the Pozzolatico panel due to the differences in their arched formats. Though the simple ogival shape of the Saint Thomas Aquinas also does not conform to the trilobe profile of the Griggs panel, it is nevertheless not impossible that they might once have come from the same structure. —LK

1. Offner 1927b, 31. ↩︎

2. Seymour 1970, 46. ↩︎

3. Boskovits 1987a, 362–67. ↩︎

4. Skaug 1994, 1:122. ↩︎

5. Boskovits 1987a, 528–29. ↩︎

6. Inv. no. 20164; Laclotte and Moench 2005, 116, no. 112. ↩︎

7. Boskovits 1987a, 482–83. ↩︎