Fra Angelico, Saint Joseph(?)

Private collection, England(?); sale, Sotheby’s, London, October 18, 1995, lot 50; Richard L. Feigen (1930–2021), New York, 1995

The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain, has been thinned to a depth of 1 centimeter but not cradled. It exhibits a moderate convex warp. A knot at the lower left has resulted in a visible disturbance of the paint surface in the area of the halo cropped at the bottom edge of the picture field but has not resulted in any loss of paint or gilding. The gilding is well preserved but for a minor repair in Saint Joseph’s halo. The paint surface is evenly and lightly abraded throughout, with small flaking losses inpainted at the profile of the saint’s head and beneath his chin. A long horizontal scratch across the bottom of the composition, 4 millimeters from the lower edge, was caused by a later framing system.

Nothing is known of the collecting history of this panel before its appearance at public auction in London in 1995. A label formerly on the reverse, written in English (presumably indicating an earlier twentieth-century, if not nineteenth-century, presence in an English collection), ascribes the painting to Simone Martini. It was catalogued by Sotheby’s in 1995 as the work of Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, at the suggestion of Everett Fahy.¹ Toscani was, at that time, understood to be the author of a group of pictures formerly brought together under the rubric “Master of the Griggs Crucifixion.”² That group of paintings has recently come to be recognized as heterogeneous, and several of them, including the artist’s name-piece, the Crucifixion in the Griggs collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1), have been separated from Toscani’s work and reassigned to the young Fra Angelico.³ It is with this second group of paintings, works by Fra Angelico, that the Yale Saint Joseph(?) belongs, as was recognized independently by Carl Strehlke, Michel Laclotte, Diane Cole Ahl, and the present author, in letters to its then owner, Richard Feigen. The painting was exhibited in New York in 2005 and in New Haven in 2010 as by Fra Angelico.⁴

The Yale Saint Joseph(?) is distinguished by its scale from nearly all other attributions to Angelico in the earliest part of his career. It has thus far been possible to recognize his hand in works earlier than the high altarpiece from San Domenico, Fiesole (ca. 1419–21), only in small-scale narrative panels and drawings, and in three Virgin and Child compositions that do not provide a direct point of comparison. When Strehlke first attributed the Saint Joseph(?) to Fra Angelico, therefore, he was tempted to suggest that this might be a fragment of the one altarpiece documented from Angelico’s early career, painted for the Gherardini Chapel in Santo Stefano, Florence, for which payments to Angelico were received in January and February 1418. This suggestion gained no traction, however, in part because the dedication of the chapel to the Beheaded Saint John the Baptist could not be reconciled with a plausible reconstruction of the subject of the fragment. Sonia Chiodo’s proposal to identify the Gherardini altarpiece with a pentaptych by the Master of the Straus Madonna (who is, on this basis, to be recognized as Ambrogio di Baldese, also named in documents of payment for decorating the chapel between 1415 and 1417) now at Santa Croce at Greve in Chianti, must now be recognized as correct (see Fra Angelico, Predella: Two Scenes from the Legend of Saint Michael, fig. 4).⁵ Angelico’s contribution to this project was confined to a late-stage alteration of its iconography, as confirmed by the discovery of a predella panel also at Yale (see Fra Angelico, Predella: Two Scenes from the Legend of Saint Michael).

Two suggestions for reconstructing the original subject of the Yale fragment were advanced in the 2005 exhibition catalogue from New York. There, the present author deduced that the full composition is likely to have been horizontal in format, following the grain of its panel support, and it may therefore have represented the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, in which case the Yale fragment could portray either Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea.⁶ Strehlke instead suggested that it is a fragment of an Adoration of the Magi and that the elderly male figure is Saint Joseph. In favor of the latter suggestion is the presence of a straight green-brown bar cutting diagonally across the upper-left corner of the painting, which is perhaps to be interpreted as the edge of the roof covering the shed in which the Christ Child was born. The pseudo-Kufic decoration enlivening the halo cropped at the bottom-left corner of the painting may also support this proposal, as Angelico usually reserved these patterns for the decoration of the Virgin’s halo only. Angelico treated the subject of the Adoration of the Magi numerous times over the course of his prolific career; in all but two of these, the figure of Saint Joseph is oriented in the opposite direction to the figure in the Yale fragment. This is not in itself an argument against the proposal, and the earlier of the two exceptions, a valve of a diptych probably painted around 1425 (formerly in the collection of Marczell von Nemes in Munich, current location unknown),⁷ may provide a rough template for reconstructing the missing portions of the present work. Angelico never precisely repeated a composition at any time in his career, but the general relation of the figures to each other in these paintings may have been similar. The second iteration of the composition in this orientation appears on one of the four reliquaries for Santa Maria Novella, Florence, probably painted shortly after 1430, but this is a much more complex and spatially ambitious rendering that is likely to have borne only a tangential relationship to the Yale fragment.⁸

Whatever the subject of the painting, it remains difficult to envision its original format or purpose. It is far too large to have been part of a predella, where horizontal supporting planks are usually encountered. Tuscan altarpieces of this period were rarely if ever wider than they were tall, and domestic paintings of this scale and presumed subject are commonly found only in the second half of the fifteenth century. It could have been part of the furnishings of a lay or ecclesiastical interior, as was doubtless the case with Angelico’s early Thebaid panel in the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence,⁹ but if so, no relevant comparanda are known, nor have other fragments that may have come from the same source been discovered. It is equally difficult to ascertain its date with confidence, as dating any painting from the first full decade of Angelico’s career is inferential and based on comparisons to other works of uncertain date. The closest correspondence in figure type, drawing of the features, and modeling of the volumes in the Yale Saint occur in the main panels of the high altarpiece from San Domenico, Fiesole, with allowance, on the one hand, for the better state of preservation of those panels and, on the other, for the frontal and hieratic presentation of those figures and their less emotive presence. The San Domenico panels are generally dated around 1421, based on the circumstances of the construction history of the convent and the likely sequence of events leading to Angelico’s residence in the community there. Recent proposals anticipate the beginning of work on the altarpiece to 1419.¹⁰ As it is not possible to be either more precise or in any degree certain about this chronology, assigning a range of possible dates to the Yale fragment around 1419–20 seems prudent. —LK

1. Sotheby’s, London, sale cat., October 18, 1995, lot 50. ↩︎

2. See Bellosi 1966, 44–58, for the conflation of these two personalities. ↩︎

3. Luciano Bellosi, in Arte in Lombardia 1988, 196–97; Boskovits 1994, 365–68; and Strehlke 2019, 110–11. ↩︎

4. Laurence Kanter, in Kanter and Palladino 2005, 24–25; and Laurence Kanter, in Kanter and Marciari 2010, 73–75, no. 21. ↩︎

5. Chiodo 1998, 48–79. Alice Chiostrini’s objection to Chiodo’s proposition (see Alice Chiostrini, in Chiostrini and Maugeri 2023, 78–83) has been shown to be invalid. See note 19 in Fra Angelico, Predella: Two Scenes from the Legend of Saint Michael. ↩︎

6. Laurence Kanter, in Kanter and Palladino 2005, 24–25. ↩︎

7. Illustrated in Kanter and Palladino 2005, 100, fig. 60. ↩︎

8. Museo di San Marco, Florence, inv. no. 276. A thorough and excellent discussion of the four reliquaries from Santa Maria Novella is found in Silver 2018. An alternate view of their relative chronology is expressed by the present author in Kanter and Palladino 2005, 148–51. ↩︎

9. Inv. no. 1890 n. 447, https://catalogo.uffizi.it/it/29/ricerca/detailiccd/1185128. ↩︎

10. Strehlke 2019, 116–29. ↩︎