“Pseudo Dietisalvi di Speme,” The Crucifixion with the Penitent Magdalen

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Unidentified church near Siena; James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The panel was thinned and cradled in 1930 and cleaned in 1954. It is constructed of two horizontally grained boards. The top and vertical sides have been cropped. The barb along each of the inclined sides indicates that the painting originally had an engaged frame. Most of the paint layer and raised mordant gilding are in excellent condition. The gold background is also original and well preserved. There are three empty pastiglia wells in Christ’s halo, where stones or cut glass were once set.

This beautifully preserved panel, described as a “little masterpiece” by Richard Offner, was probably the pediment above a large altarpiece or reliquary cupboard.¹ Occupying the full height of the composition is the Crucified Christ, whose sharply curved body is set against a brilliant blue Cross inscribed with His name in Greek letters. The deep folds of His ochre loincloth are highlighted by delicate gold striations. Kneeling in adoration below the Cross, her arms wrapped around its base, is the diminutive figure of the penitent Mary Magdalen, clad in a scarlet robe also highlighted in gold. Arranged symmetrically around the Crucified Christ are two groups of figures whose size and placement follow the slope of the panel. Standing on the left is the full-length figure of the mourning Virgin followed by Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome, each shown in a different attitude of distress. On the opposite side is the mourning Saint John the Evangelist, behind whom is a lively group of soldiers in various dynamic poses. A centurion, shown with a Jewish headdress, directs attention toward the Cross in a gesture of declamation, proclaiming to his companions that “truly this was the son of God” (Matthew 27:54). Two of the soldiers behind him look up in awe, while a third recoils in fear.

The panel entered the Yale collection with an attribution to Giunta Pisano proposed by James Jackson Jarves, who stated that it “formerly filled the head of a doorway in a church near Siena, for which it was painted.”² Since then, modern scholarship has concurred in identifying the work as a product of the Sienese school in the third or final quarter of the thirteenth century, although the specific attribution has gone back and forth between Guido da Siena and “shop of Guido da Siena.” First published as a work of Guido by Osvald Sirén,³ it was assigned to the artist’s shop by virtually all subsequent scholarship, including in James Stubblebine’s monograph on the artist and in Charles Seymour’s catalogue of the Yale collection.⁴ In 1991, however, Luciano Bellosi proposed a radical revision of Guido’s corpus and reinstated the Yale panel among the artist’s autograph production.⁵ The attribution to Guido was accepted by Carl Strehlke in an unpublished checklist of the Italian paintings at Yale, whereas Daniela Bohde cited Laurence Kanter’s unpublished attribution to Dietisalvi di Speme.⁶

As was noted by Offner, who wrote that the Yale Crucifixion “involves all the difficulties . . . on which attributions to Guido repose,”⁷ any consideration of this image brings to the fore the problems inherent in the very definition of the artist’s personality, whose only signed work, the large Virgin and Child in the church of San Domenico, Siena, was extensively repainted in the fourteenth century by a Ducciesque hand. The date 1221 inscribed on the San Domenico Virgin, moreover, is now generally thought to refer to a specific event in the Dominican order rather than to the painting’s year of execution, upending the traditional view of Guido as the pioneering founder of the Sienese school. Most modern scholarship has been divided between those who use Guido’s name “to cover a formula rather than to confine a personality”⁸ and view these works as the product of a large, typically medieval workshop, made up of distinct personalities employing the same models, and those who have embraced the reassessment of the artist proposed by Bellosi. The latter argued that Guido was just one of several minor painters active in Siena in the 1270s and 1280s and distributed many of the works formerly gathered under his name among equally accomplished but lesser-known personalities, such as Dietisalvi di Speme, Rinaldo da Siena, and Guido di Graziano.

While Bellosi’s study was instrumental in expanding the panorama of Sienese duecento painting beyond Guido’s name, his reconstruction of the artist’s oeuvre is not entirely convincing. Significantly, of the thirteen works in Bellosi’s list, only one has been universally attributed to the same hand that painted the San Domenico Virgin: the dossal dated 1270 from the church of San Francesco in Colle Val d’Elsa, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, known as “Dossal no. 7.” This work, which is entirely consistent with the intact portions of the San Domenico Virgin—namely, the Redeemer and angels in the gable—was rightly viewed by Offner as fundamental for assessing Guido’s personality and anchoring his activity. Yet, among the remaining panels assigned by Bellosi to Guido, only a handful appear to reflect a sufficient proximity to that work to warrant the attribution. Others, including the Yale Crucifixion, seem to be the product of several distinct and independent personalities.⁹

It has often been remarked that, in contrast to the dry technique and tight, meticulous execution that characterizes Dossal no. 7, the Yale Crucifixion is distinguished by a markedly more pronounced chiaroscuro and rounding of forms as well as by a more fluid and denser application of paint. Whereas previous authors had interpreted these elements as indicative of a different hand, Bellosi, followed by Silvia Giorgi,¹⁰ presented them as evidence of Cimabue’s presumed impact on Guido’s later production. Both authors placed the Yale Crucifixion in the same advanced moment in Guido’s career as the Last Judgment from the church of the Misericordia in Grosseto (fig. 1), now in the Museo Archeologico e d’Arte della Maremma, Grosseto, another work otherwise attributed to the artist’s workshop. There is no question that the Yale Crucifixion and the Grosseto Last Judgment are the product of the same hand, as evidenced by a comparison between the standing angels around the seated Christ and the female figures in the Yale panel or between the heads of the small figures in the narrative scenes below Christ and those of the soldiers in the Crucifixion. Yet, it is difficult to explain the qualitative differences between these two works and Dossal no. 7 in terms of a coherent stylistic evolution, as suggested by Bellosi. The expressive liveliness of the figures, as much as the fluid modeling of the draperies and broader handling of the forms, appears incompatible with the rigid, abstract idiom of Guido’s dossal and denotes an altogether different artistic sensibility.

Both the Yale Crucifixion and the Grosseto Last Judgment seem to overlap, to varying degrees, with some of the production currently gathered—in the wake of Bellosi’s research—under the name of Guido’s contemporary Dietisalvi di Speme: the exterior scenes of the Saint Clare reliquary shutters and the Beato Andrea Gallerani reliquary shutters in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena¹¹; the frescoes in the crypt of Siena Cathedral¹²; and the series of panels from the Badia Ardenga formerly included in the Madonna del Voto altarpiece for the Duomo.¹³ This last commission was viewed by Bellosi as the result of a collaboration between Dietisalvi, author of the central panel with the Virgin and Child, and Guido, who supposedly acted in a subsidiary capacity and intervened in some of the narrative scenes in the Christological cycle.¹⁴ The division of hands proposed by Bellosi, however, is not persuasive nor is there evidence of Guido’s participation in any parts of this complex. As noted by Barbara John, the various panels reflect a single, unified pictorial vision,¹⁵ notwithstanding the possible intervention of assistants in the execution. Undoubtedly related to the Yale Crucifixion is the scene of the Flagellation now in the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Germany (fig. 2), where the stance and bodily proportions as well as the gesture of the flagellant on the left provide a virtually identical counterpart to the figure of the pointing centurion below the Cross.

Although these works betray the style of a distinct personality, the identification with Dietisalvi di Speme, an artist who seems to have specialized primarily in the decoration of biccherna covers, is problematic. According to documents, Dietisalvi was responsible for painting no fewer than twenty-nine biccherne in the period between 1259 and 1288, yet just four of them—dated 1264, 1267, 1270, and 1282—appear to be extant. The 1267 biccherna, however, depicts only the coat of arms of the provedditori, and the one painted in 1282 is possibly by a different artist. The coarse execution and minute scale of the figures in these small images, moreover, as already noted by Hayden Maginnis,¹⁶ make any comparisons with monumental painting tentative at best. Scholars such as Anna Maria Giusti and Ada Labriola, in fact, denied any relationship between the biccherne and “Guidesque” production, suggesting instead more persuasive comparisons with contemporary Sienese manuscript illumination.¹⁷

Recognizing some of the above issues, John preferred to attribute the Madonna del Voto altarpiece to a so-called Master of the Madonna del Voto. That pseudonym might be misleading, however, given previous gatherings under the same name of other images unrelated to the present grouping. For now, a tentative label of “Pseudo Dietisalvi di Speme” seems the most prudent way of isolating the hand of this painter from that of Guido da Siena and other anonymous contemporaries.

Based primarily on iconographic grounds, most authors have concurred in dating the Yale Crucifixion to the decade between 1270 and 1280. Curt Weigelt was the first author to point out that the unusual detail of the crouching soldier in the Yale panel derives from Nicola Pisano’s Crucifixion on the pulpit for Siena Cathedral, completed in 1268.¹⁸ The artist’s debt to Nicola Pisano has been emphasized by subsequent authors, who have also highlighted the influence of his relief in the depiction of the Crucified Christ with crossed legs and twisted feet held in place by one nail—a motif that traces its origin to northern European art rather than Byzantine representations and that also appears in the 1260 pulpit in Pisa.¹⁹ Less discussed, however, is the relationship between the Yale panel and the work of Giunta Pisano, whose influence is betrayed not only in the exaggerated arc of Christ’s elongated body²⁰ but also in the exquisitely rendered loincloth and the deep shadows that give expression to the suffering on Christ’s face. Not coincidentally, the closest painted precedent for this rendering of the Crucified Christ is the double-sided processional cross from the monastery of San Benedetto in San Paolo a Ripa d’Arno, now in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa (fig. 3), a work attributed to Giunta himself or otherwise assigned to a “closest Pisan follower,” baptized “Master of the Crucifix of San Paolo a Ripa d’Arno.”²¹ Generally dated around the middle of the thirteenth century or slightly later, the San Benedetto cross represents an iconographic unicum in Giuntesque production in its depiction of Christ’s crossed legs and feet, which mirrors the present work, suggesting that just such an image may have provided the model for our artist. The example of Giunta, whose lost crucifix for the Upper Church of Assisi provided the archetype for all subsequent representations of Saint Francis kneeling at the foot of the Cross,²¹ may also have inspired the motif—still rare in Italian painting at this date—of the penitent Magdalen embracing the Cross in the Yale Crucifixion. Other elements from the same structure, already dismembered by the time Jarves saw this fragment hanging above a doorway, are yet to be identified. —PP

1. Offner 1927a, 37. ↩︎

2. Jarves 1860, 42, no. 12. ↩︎

3. Sirén 1915, 277–79, fig. 1. ↩︎

4. Stubblebine 1964, 16, 91–92, 102, no. 18, fig. 52; and Seymour 1970, 13–15, no. 3. ↩︎

5. Bellosi 1991a, 7–8, 58, 67, fig. 8. ↩︎

6. Bohde 2019, 8n9, fig. 5. ↩︎

7. Offner 1927a, 37. ↩︎

8. Offner 1927a, 37. ↩︎

9. Above all, the present author agrees with most previous scholars in noting that the relationship between Dossal no. 7 and the more weakly executed Dossal no. 6 in the Siena Pinacoteca is purely iconographic. As noted by James Stubblebine, the latter was most likely painted by the same anonymous personality responsible for the Virgin and Child in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (inv. no. 435); see Stubblebine 1964, 16, 91–92, 102, no. 18, fig. 52. Equally unconvincing is Bellosi’s attribution to Guido of the Virgin and Child in the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. no. y1962-48, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/28816)—another panel generally referred to the artist’s workshop. ↩︎

10. Silvia Giorgi, in Bagnoli et al. 2003, 61. ↩︎

11. Inv. nos. 4–5. ↩︎

12. For the division of hands in these frescoes, attributed to a team of painters including Dietisalvi di Speme, see Bagnoli 2003, 107–47. ↩︎

13. The present author finds it difficult to regard the Galli Dunn Virgin and the San Bernardino Virgin as products of the same hand that painted the Madonna del Voto. These works appear to instead reflect the effort of three distinct and separate personalities. ↩︎

14. The Madonna del Voto altarpiece comprised twelve scenes from the life and Passion of Christ and was formerly in the Badia Ardenga, outside Siena; it is currently divided among the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena; the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, Germany; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Princeton University Art Museum, N.J.; the Museum Catherijneconvent, Utrecht, the Netherlands; and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The reconstruction of the original complex, based on research by Barbara John, Holger Manzke, and Jutta Penndorf (in John, Manzke, and Penndorf 2001) and by Caroline Villers and Astrid Lehner (in Villers and Lehner 2002), was questioned by Silvia Giorgi, in Bagnoli et al. 2003. However, it was later reconfirmed by Norman Muller based on unassailable technical evidence; see Muller 2004, 28–39. ↩︎

15. Barbara John, in John, Manzke, and Penndorf 2001, 107. ↩︎

16. Maginnis 2002, 472, 485n1. ↩︎

17. Anna Maria Giusti, in Chelazzi Dini 1982, 37–30, no. 1, asserted categorically that the 1270 biccherna bore “no relationship” to the “Guidesque current” that in those years was taking hold in Sienese painting and argued that it was stylistically linked instead to an earlier Romanesque tradition, still kept alive in Siena by local manuscript illuminators, such as those involved in the series of choir books decorated in 1271 for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi. Her observations were later expanded by Ada Labriola, in Labriola, De Benedictis, and Freuler 2002, 14, 256–58, who compared both the 1264 and 1270 biccherne to the work of the so-called Second Master of Santa Maria dei Servi. The only biccherna from the same decade that does, in fact, betray the hand of a distinct, accomplished personality also involved in large-scale production is the one executed in 1278 by Rinaldo da Siena (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, inv. no. M 580), first attributed to the artist by Giusti; see Giusti 1974, 275–78. ↩︎

18. Weigelt 1922, 15:284. ↩︎

19. Maria Laura Testi Cristiani noted the iconographic connection between this representation and the Crucifixions in the famous sketchbook (1225–35) of Villard de Honnecourt; see Testi Cristiani 1987, 248. ↩︎

20. Dean 2001, 18. ↩︎

21. Tartuferi 1991, 18–19, 74–76, no. 7. For the attribution to Giunta, first proposed by Peleo Bacci but rejected by Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, see, most recently, Lorenzo Carletti, in Burresi and Caleca 2005, 120–21, no. 12. ↩︎

22. It has been argued that the 1236 cross may also have contained an image of the penitent Saint Francis as well as Brother Elia; see Faranda 2011, 7–27. ↩︎