Benedetto di Bindo(?), Bust of a Deacon Saint

Henri François de Saint-Levé d’Aguerre (1859–1931), Paris;¹ Alphonse Kann (1870–1948), Paris; sale, American Art Association, New York, January 7, 1927, lot 28; Brummer Gallery, New York, 1927

The roughly rectangular section of fresco and mural substrate has been set into a larger (33.7 × 63.7 cm) masonry surround. The surface is scratched and extensively abraded, and a coating of grime is preserved beneath an opaque, discolored layer of varnish. Punched areas meant to simulate gilding may originally have been painted an ochre yellow, only miniscule fragments of which survive.

This fresco fragment shows the bust of a young saint, wearing a dalmatic that identifies him as a deacon. The figure, painted against a blue background, has lost most of its original details and coloration, although some of the flesh tones are still visible in the head, along with small traces of an orange or pink pigment in the tunic. The image, truncated at the top and bottom, possibly depicted the saint full-length inside a multilobed arch. A certain sophistication in approach is suggested by the elaborate punch work used to evoke the embroidered borders of the dalmatic as well as by the concern with the perspectival foreshortening of the arch on the right side.

The fragment, overlooked by most art-historical scholarship, first appeared in the 1927 sale of the Alphonse Kann collection, where it was listed as “Simone Martini (Attributed to).” Charles Seymour, Jr., who cited the traditional attribution to Simone Martini and earlier French provenance as possible indicators of a papal commission in Avignon, France, catalogued it as “Sienese school (following of Simone Martini?),” with a date in the middle of the fourteenth century.² The Sienese attribution was maintained by Federico Zeri, who listed the image in his files as the product of an anonymous Sienese painter active in the second half of the fourteenth century.³ Carl Strehlke, in an unpublished checklist of the Italian paintings at Yale, discerned links with the style of Lippo Vanni and proposed a date in the mid-1300s, whereas Laurence Kanter tentatively labeled the fragment as a work of Benedetto di Bindo.⁴

If the association with Simone Martini seems far-fetched, a Sienese provenance cannot be discounted. What little may be garnered of the morphological characteristics of the figure, along with the handling of detail such as the soft folds of cloth in the saint’s collar, call to mind some of the production of the last generation of fourteenth-century Sienese painters, influenced by Bartolo di Fredi and Taddeo di Bartolo. While it is impossible to advance precise comparisons, suggested analogies with the work of Benedetto di Bindo, especially as represented by his work on the reliquary cupboard for Siena Cathedral, completed in 1412, are not unreasonable (fig. 1). None of the known surviving fresco commissions by Benedetto di Bindo, however, are sufficiently similar to the Yale fragment to lead to a definitive attribution, nor do they include the same unusual and extensive punched decoration. In the absence of other identifiable remains from the same cycle, and in light of the fragment’s condition, the question of its authorship must, for the moment, remain unresolved. —PP

1. According to Joseph Brummer in a letter to the Gallery, curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. A descendant of the oldest French nobility, Henri François de Saint-Levé d’Aguerre appears to have been both a collector and dealer, mostly of early medieval and Renaissance sculpture and works of art. He is cited on several occasions in relation to objects acquired by Joseph and Ernest Brummer; see Brummer Gallery Records, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Following Henri’s death in 1931, the dealing business was conducted by his son, Guillaume de Saint-Levé (1893–1971). Their residence and/or business address is recorded on a note card in the Brummer files at the Metropolitan, under “d’Aguerre, Henry [later crossed out and overwritten with Guillaume] de Saint-Levé / 90 Avenue Kléber/ Paris.” ↩︎

2. Seymour 1970, 90, no. 63. ↩︎

3. Fototeca Zeri, Federico Zeri Foundation, Bologna, inv. no. 7389. ↩︎

4. Curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. ↩︎