Taddeo di Bartolo, Saint John the Baptist, One of Two Panels from a Dismembered Altarpiece

For more on this panel, see Taddeo di Bartolo, Saint Jerome.

on the scroll held by Saint John the Baptist, ECCE AGNUS DEI QUI T[OLLIT]

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, has been thinned to 2.9 centimeters and cut across the top and bottom. A dowel hole on the right edge, 36.5 centimeters from the bottom edge, is tangent with the back surface of the panel, indicating that up to 1 centimeter thickness has been lost (assuming the hole was originally centered). No other dowel holes are in evidence. Two nail heads aligned 18 centimeters from the top edge, one 6 centimeters from the left edge and the other 5.5 centimeters from the right edge, indicate the placement of a batten at this height. The gilding and paint surface are thin, evenly abraded in an aggressive cleaning by Andrew Petryn in 1966–67 that left underdrawing in the draperies and terra verde priming layers beneath the flesh tones fully apparent.¹ Old repaints covering surviving fragments of spandrel decoration were removed in that conservation campaign, leaving exposed areas of wood that underlay original framing moldings (fig. 1). These were filled with new gesso during a cleaning at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 1999–2000, bringing the missing surfaces to a level uniform with the surviving paint and gilded surfaces. They were then touched out in neutral colors, leaving islands of surviving bolus and silver leaf exposed but confusing the nature of the losses as extensions of the painted image rather than framing members. Scattered gilding losses at either edge and especially at the lower-left corner, as well as small losses in the saint’s red robe and hair shirt, were also filled and inpainted at that time.

1. Only the Baptist was treated in this campaign, not the related Saint Jerome panel. Both panels are reproduced in Seymour 1970, 95, nos. 66–67, in their precleaning state. ↩︎