Master of Panzano (with Luca di Tommè?), Virgin and Child with Saints Ansanus and Victor

Maitland Fuller Griggs (1872–1943), New York, by 1924¹

The panel, 2.4 centimeters thick and of a vertical wood grain, has been neither thinned nor cradled, but it has been cropped along its bottom edge by perhaps as much as 17 centimeters. Three parallel, scribed lines on the back of the panel, 37, 39.5, and 42 centimeters from the top edge, indicate the placement of a batten that once connected it to some adjacent structure(s); three cut iron nails are still in place along the center of these lines. Three similar nails are embedded in the panel, 4 centimeters from the top edge, and a scribed line 2.5 centimeters above them undoubtedly indicates the top edge of a similar batten. Splits in the panel in the lower-left corner (lower right when viewed from the back) have been repaired from behind with a gesso patch, obviously applied when the battens were still in place. These splits are visible on the front of the panel but have resulted in minimal associated paint loss. The original engaged frame, of a maximum thickness of 1.6 centimeters, is preserved along three sides of the painting, though it has disengaged along the top due to the warp of the panel support.

The paint surface is unevenly preserved. It is in exceptionally good condition in most of the hands, draperies, and above all in the brocaded cloth of honor behind the Virgin, executed in a refined sgraffito technique with applied shadows in a green (now brown) oil glaze to indicate lines of tension where it is pulled taut by the angels. The faces of all the figures and the blue of the Virgin’s mantle were severely abraded in a 1958 cleaning; precleaning photographs do not reveal obvious layers of overpaint that needed to be removed from these areas (fig. 1). Two candle burns—one in the area of the Virgin’s left knee and Saint Ansanus’s right elbow and the other primarily in the frame to the right of Saint Ansanus—have provoked losses of pigment or gilding, and scattered losses occur along the lower 3 centimeters of the composition, where a modern frame was applied after the panel was cropped. Removal of this frame in 1958 revealed much of the paint and gilded surface beneath it to be intact. It was decided at that point to simulate the missing extent of original panel by the addition of an unpainted panel—of polished walnut and applied walnut moldings—of a profile similar to the original engaged moldings.

The earliest known references to this painting, expertises from Osvald Sirén (in August 1923) and Tancred Borenius (in October 1923),² concur in ascribing it to Luca di Tommè, an attribution endorsed by Richard Offner and Bernard Berenson in 1925 and repeated without exception in all published citations of it.³ Opinions have varied only in identifying the saint at the lower left of the composition as either Galganus or Victor, both patron saints of Siena whose attribute is a sword. Galganus, however, was not a martyr, whereas Victor is commonly portrayed holding both the palm of martyrdom and a spray of olive, as he does here. The saint at the lower right is unequivocally Ansanus, another of the patron saints of Siena.

The few authors who have demurred at an attribution to Luca di Tommè for the Yale panel have gone only as far as admitting the possibility of workshop intervention in its execution.⁴ This observation may be broadened and, at the same time, made more specific by noting that a small nucleus of works included in authoritative catalogues of Luca di Tommè’s production may be grouped with the Yale panel as apparently the work of a single hand operating either within the senior artist’s studio or in close dependence on his models. These include a half-length Virgin and Child in San Bartolomeo a Pescina, near Seggiano⁵; a half-length Virgin and Child with a roundel of the Blessing Redeemer in its pinnacle that was with Moretti Fine Art, London, in 2017 (fig. 2)⁶; a half-length Saint Michael with a roundel showing Saint Peter in its pinnacle in the Acton Collection at Villa La Pietra, Florence, reasonably supposed to be a lateral panel from the same polyptych as the latter work⁷; and a polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist, Michael, Peter, and Catherine of Alexandria, all portrayed in full length, in the Museo Communale at Lucignano.⁸ Connections among these panels are self-evident, as is their divergence from Luca di Tommè’s more assertive, crisper modeling of volumes; his more assured and lively drawing of contours; and his more expressive, brooding figure types. This second artist borrows a number of Luca di Tommè’s trademark mannerisms, such as the exaggerated turn of heads on shoulders, but has a tendency to make them flatter, less representational, and more decorative. He evinces a brighter and less nuanced color sense, a more insistent attraction to surface patterns, and a tendency to apply softer contrasts of light and shadow, along with much more simplified contours outlining his figures. In the case of the Yale panel, this artist may have been working alongside Luca di Tommè or over his drawings, as the incised profiles of the figures are more angular and much more rapid and assured than those apparent in other works within this group—more like those in autograph paintings by Luca—while the unusual cropping of the figures at the sides of the composition is an affectation typical of Luca but of few other painters at any point in the fourteenth century.

This collaborator/follower of Luca di Tommè may be identified with an artist who has long been recognized as having emerged from the orbit of that painter, the artist known conventionally as the Master of Panzano. First isolated as an independent personality by Berenson, who named the painter after a triptych in the Pieve di San Leolino at Panzano in the Chianti showing the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine with Saints Peter and Paul,⁹ the Master of Panzano was recognized by Sherwood Fehm to have owed much if not all of his artistic formation to Luca di Tommè.¹⁰ The general observations of these and other writers were synthesized in a more detailed study by Denise Boucher de Lapparent, who added a number of previously unknown works to the painter’s oeuvre and pointed out his debt to other contemporary Sienese masters, particularly Bartolo di Fredi and Niccolò di Buonaccorso.¹¹ Connections between the group of panels listed above and the easily recognized style of the Master of Panzano in his mature works are both plentiful and substantive, well beyond a resemblance of simple influence. The Lucignano altarpiece and the Moretti and Acton fragments of an altarpiece are particularly close in style and may simply be early independent commissions to the Master of Panzano rather than delegated work from Luca di Tommè. The eccentricities common to works by the Master of Panzano are more subdued in the Yale panel, but even there it is possible to recognize the same bony, tapering fingers of the Virgin and the saints, the flat projection of the feet of the Christ Child, or the close-set eyes and pursed mouths of all the figures, as appear in any number of paintings by the Panzano Master. Particularly close are a pair of triptych wings in the Pinacoteca Vaticana representing Saints Anthony Abbot, Francis, Paul, and Nicholas of Bari,¹² and a similar pair in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art, representing Saints James the Greater, Anthony Abbot, Francis, and Ansanus (fig. 3). Conspicuously unlike any other painting by the Panzano Master is the technically expert use in the Yale panel of tooled gold leaf to indicate the hems and collars of the draperies of all the figures, a procedure that seems to have required the local application of small strips of gold rather than a more traditional overall gilding and sgraffito execution. It is likely that this refined detail may have been due to Luca di Tommè’s direct intervention in some stage of the panel’s genesis.

In her discussion of the San Diego triptych wings, Pia Palladino pointed out that the grisaille figures of Saints Anthony Abbot and Christopher painted on their reverses seem to be by a different artist, probably Niccolò di Buonaccorso.¹³ The same observation could be extended to a triptych by the Panzano Master in the Hearst Collection at San Simeon, where the figures of Saints Anthony Abbot and Catherine of Alexandria on the wings appear to be the work of Niccolò di Buonaccorso. The repeated evidence of contact between these two painters led Palladino to advance the tentative but highly intriguing suggestion that the Master of Panzano might be identifiable with the artist Paolo di Buonaccorso di Pace, presumably a brother of Niccolò di Buonaccorso, who is named in a document of 1374 as an assistant of Luca di Tommè’s.¹⁴ Although based on circumstantial evidence, this suggestion is entirely plausible. If it were possible to demonstrate the identification, it could provide a useful terminus a quo for dating the Yale panel around 1374, a date that is, in any event, not contradicted by any other stylistic evidence.

The original format and function of the Yale panel remain difficult to define. Its proportions and subject are typical of the center panel of folding triptychs, although, in this case, such a triptych would be considerably larger than usual, and both the evidence of battens having been secured across its back and the absence of any signs of hinges along its sides make such a proposition doubtful. Furthermore, the sides of the panel show no evidence of having been in prolonged contact with other wooden surfaces, so the purpose of the battens is unclear unless they were intended to secure the panel in place within a large frame or architectural structure, such as a marble tabernacle. The possibility that the panel had indeed been enclosed within a larger marble frame could explain several anomalies. Among these is the fact that the engaged moldings, which are original and unaltered, are incomplete in profile: they ought to extend further in width or wrap around the outer edges of the panel support, unless they were intended as transitional moldings to a larger profile outside them. Also, the selection of Saints Ansanus and Victor to accompany the Virgin and Child implies a civic rather than private commission, and if such a commission had been placed by a prominent governmental agency or intended for a prominent public location, the unusually lavish use of gold decoration in this panel might be explained. The panel’s exceptional state of preservation does indicate that it must have been protected, presumably by shutters that closed over it, and the loss of its lower quarter (Charles Seymour, Jr., estimated the original height of the complete panel to be 79 centimeters, based on the assumption that the battens on the reverse were set at regular intervals¹⁵) could have been provoked by water damage from moisture pooling within a stone frame. In the absence of any more solid evidence or documentation, however, these last observations are merely conjectural. —LK

1. F. Mason Perkins (Perkins 1924b) described the painting, already in the Griggs collection, as having come to his attention after he had completed his article in March 1924. Manuscript opinions of 1923 by Osvald Sirén (August) and Tancred Borenius (October) may have been written while the painting was on the market rather than after Maitland Griggs had acquired it; see note 2 below. ↩︎

2. Manuscript opinions on the reverse of photographs preserved in the curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. It is unclear whether these opinions were written for Maitland Griggs or for the (unknown) dealer from whom he bought the painting. As neither Sirén nor Borenius were regular correspondents of Griggs’s, it may be that their opinions were solicited by the dealer and, moreover, that the dealer was British rather than Italian. This is, however, entirely conjecture. ↩︎

3. Bernard Berenson’s opinion is recorded in a letter from Mary Berenson to Maitland Griggs dated January 2, 1925, Griggs correspondence, Yale University Art Gallery Archives; Offner’s opinion, dated January 15, 1925, is recorded in the Frick Art Reference Library, New York. ↩︎

4. Berenson 1936, 269; Berenson 1968, 1:225; Fehm 1986, 154, no. 55; and Seymour 1970, 81–82, no. 55. ↩︎

5. Fehm 1986, 71, no. 10. ↩︎

6. Formerly Archbishop Downey collection, Liverpool; Fehm 1986, 139, no. 45. ↩︎

7. Fehm 1986, 141, no. 46. ↩︎

8. Fehm 1986, 147, no. 49. ↩︎

9. Berenson 1930–31a, 52ff. ↩︎

10. Fehm 1976, 333–50. ↩︎

11. Boucher de Lapparent 1978, 165–74. ↩︎

12. Inv. nos. 146, 151. ↩︎

13. Palladino 1997, 69–72. ↩︎

14. Palladino 1997, 72. The document is transcribed in Fehm 1986, 199. ↩︎

15. Charles Seymour, Jr., in Seymour et al. 1972, 50. ↩︎