Stefano di Giovanni, called Sassetta, Virgin Annunciate

Robert Langton Douglas (1864–1951), London; Dan Fellows Platt (1873–1937), Englewood, N.J., by 1911–36; E. and A. Silberman Galleries, N.Y.; Hannah D. and Louis M. Rabinowitz (1887–1957), Sands Point, Long Island, N.Y., by 1944

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, is 2.8 centimeters thick and appears not to have been thinned. The original engaged frame moldings vary in depth from 4.8 to 6.5 centimeters at the top and measure 3.5 centimeters at the sides. The back of the panel has been painted with a thick gray coating, masking evidence of its carpentry, but a wide split in the front of the panel, 8.5 centimeters from its right edge, may follow a seam between two joined planks at that point. The gilding and paint surfaces are both severely abraded. The elongated shapes of original corbel supports are now revealed as exposed gesso beneath the spring of the framing arch at either side. Silver-leaf decoration in the pavement and beneath the Virgin’s draperies survives only as darkly stained bolus. Flesh tones are abraded to green underpaint. There is no record of the treatment that reduced the painting to this state, although it may be inferred that it occurred after 1970 and probably after 1972.¹

From its earliest discovery and its subsequent publication by F. Mason Perkins in 1911, this panel has been universally recognized and admired as one of the rare surviving works by the premier artist of the Sienese quattrocento, Sassetta.² Perkins reported that it had been found, presumably by Robert Langton Douglas, heavily overpainted in oils but that it had then been sensitively restored by an “expert hand,” assumed, probably correctly, to be Icilio Federico Joni.³ The restored state (fig. 1)—in which it was known to all scholars through the early 1970s—must have been scarcely less heavily overpainted than its previous condition, though undoubtedly more in an early Renaissance style. Its most recent cleaning was unnecessarily harsh but revealed passages of extreme delicacy and quality in parts of the paint surface. Modern spiral colonettes at either side of the picture field were removed during this cleaning, but the regilding of the frame, the structure of which is original, or other modern additions to it, like the central crocket at the top, were not addressed, exaggerating the contrast with the severely dilapidated appearance of the painted image.⁴

Perkins believed that the painting might originally have functioned as a pinnacle to the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece (fig. 2), documented as having been commissioned for the chapel of Saint Boniface in Siena Cathedral in 1430 and completed by 1432, and he therefore proposed a hypothetical provenance from Chiusdino, where the main panel of that altarpiece was then housed.⁵ In 1913 he submitted a brief notice to Rassegna d’arte calling attention to an Annunciatory Angel by Sassetta in Massa Marittima (fig. 3) that must have been a corresponding pinnacle from the opposite side of the same altarpiece. While the relationship of the Angel to the Virgin is self-evident, Perkins’s opinion that they were fragments of the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece was merely supposition; it was repeated, however, without challenge for the next forty years by all authors, who presumed that a missing central pinnacle representing the Blessing Redeemer might yet be found, as such a figure (although unaccompanied by an Annunciation group) is specified in Sassetta’s original contract.⁶ Although this reconstruction resurfaced sporadically in subsequent literature,⁷ it was contested by Federico Zeri in 1956 on the grounds that the essentially Renaissance, unified field structure of the Madonna of the Snows would not have been surmounted by three overtly Gothic pinnacles.⁸ Beyond the intellectual incongruity of such a juxtaposition, Zeri contended that the two known pinnacle panels are earlier in style than the Madonna of the Snows. Presuming them to be among Sassetta’s earliest works, he proposed instead that they formed part of the dispersed altarpiece painted between 1423 and 1426 for the Arte della Lana, most of the surviving fragments of which are today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Adding credibility to this proposal was the fact that two of the small pinnacles from the Arte della Lana altarpiece, representing half-length figures of the prophets Elijah and Elisha (fig. 4), are vaguely similar in shape to the Yale and Massa Marittima pinnacles.

Zeri’s argument was in part based on internal visual evidence and in part formulated to accommodate a full-length figure of Saint Anthony Abbot by Sassetta now in the collection of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena (fig. 5), which he and Roberto Longhi had recently discovered in a private collection in Florence. He wished to identify the Saint Anthony as one of two lateral panels to the Arte della Lana altarpiece—the other would have represented Saint Thomas Aquinas—as described in eighteenth-century sources, which also mention Annunciation pinnacles.⁹ Zeri’s argument was based on sound stylistic observations, but it was accepted in full only by Enzo Carli¹⁰ and was dispelled entirely in 1982, when the Musée du Louvre, Paris, acquired a full-length image of Saint Nicholas of Bari by Sassetta (fig. 6) that is obviously a companion to the Saint Anthony Abbot. Rejecting any association with the Arte della Lana altarpiece, Claudie Ressort elected to extend Zeri’s identification of the Yale and Massa Marittima panels as pinnacles to the newly discovered Saint Nicholas and the Saint Anthony Abbot.¹¹ She also accepted John Pope-Hennessy’s opinion (in correspondence with her) that the two full-length Saints were later works by Sassetta, painted probably after the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece and, together with a fragmentary Madonna with Cherries in the Museo archeologico e d’arte della Maremma, Grosseto, possibly remnants of an altarpiece painted for the Petroni Chapel in San Francesco, Siena. Keith Christiansen, acknowledging that the Saint Nicholas and Saint Anthony Abbot cannot have been part of the Arte della Lana altarpiece but declining to speculate on alternative proposals for their origin, noted that the Saint Anthony panel is beveled at its top, tapering to a width too small to have accommodated the Yale or Massa Marittima pinnacles.¹² He returned the pinnacles to the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece, notwithstanding physical evidence¹³—of which he may have been unaware—that the Madonna of the Snows did not have conventional pinnacles.

Machtelt Israëls, in her monographic study of the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece, definitively disassociated the Yale and Massa Marittima pinnacles from that structure.¹⁴ Initially, she agreed with Christiansen that they were not pertinent to the Louvre and Monte dei Paschi panels either, concluding that they were probably the “only remnants of an altarpiece of so far unknown provenance.” Revisiting the argument in 2010, she advanced evidence that both the Louvre and Monte dei Paschi panels have been trimmed on all sides, that the beveled truncation of the top of the Saint Anthony is not original, and that the structure of the composite wood planks of their supports matches that of the Yale and Massa Marittima pinnacles.¹⁵ The conclusion is unavoidable that these four works were painted on continuous wood supports and are parts of a single altarpiece. Israëls agreed with Zeri that they are early works by Sassetta, preceding the Madonna of the Snows altarpiece, but in her estimation, they are not likely to be as early as the Arte della Lana altarpiece. This seems to be correct, as is her observation that they cannot be associated with the Madonna of the Cherries in Grosseto, which was painted later in the decade of the 1430s.

Two proposals have been advanced to identify the original provenance of the altarpiece of which the Louvre, Monte dei Paschi, Yale, and Massa Marittima panels formed part. For Israëls, a likely candidate is the Petroni Chapel in San Francesco, Siena, which was described by Fabio Chigi in 1625 as containing an altarpiece signed by Sassetta.¹⁶ Although the surviving panels are not overtly Franciscan in iconography, Israëls argued that the uniformly deteriorated condition of all four fragments might be the result of a fire that ravaged the church in 1655 and that the Petroni altarpiece may have been commissioned by Francesca di Francesco di Spinello Tolomei to commemorate the name-saints of her deceased husband, Niccolaccio di Caterino Petroni, and her son, Antonio Petroni. An alternative suggestion by Roberto Bartalini links the two panels with an altarpiece described by Teofilo Gallacini (1564–1641) in the church of San Niccolò in Siena.¹⁷ Neither work is associated with a date in early sources. To these possibilities, Elena Marta Manzi adds a less probable third: a church in Massa Marittima, where the Angel pinnacle, the first of the four fragments to be rediscovered, was recorded as early as 1900.¹⁸ —LK

1. Despite the severity of the cleaning and the radical decision making it entailed, no mention of this treatment can be found in any files at the Yale University Art Gallery. The painting is described by Charles Seymour, Jr. (in Seymour 1970, 207), as “not cleaned,” and it does not appear in Seymour et al. 1972. ↩︎

2. Perkins 1911, 5, fig. 7. ↩︎

3. Mazzoni 2001, 304, citing Perkins 1911, 4. ↩︎

4. Seymour believed the frame was modern; see Seymour 1970, 207. ↩︎

5. Seymour confused the provenance of the Yale picture, claiming that it had remained in Italy, “perhaps at Chiusdino” (where it is not, in fact, recorded at any point), until 1936; see Seymour 1970, 207. ↩︎

6. For the contract, see Israëls 2003, 27. ↩︎

7. Seymour 1957, 12; Seymour 1970, 209; Ritchie and Neilson 1972, no. 9; and Keith Christiansen, in Christiansen, Kanter, and Strehlke 1988, 65. ↩︎

8. Zeri 1956, 36–39. ↩︎

9. The altarpiece was described by the Abate Girolamo Carli, whose text is transcribed by John Pope-Hennessy, in Pope-Hennessy 1939, 6–7, 38n8. ↩︎

10. Carli 1957a, 12. ↩︎

11. Claudie Ressort, in Foucart 1983. ↩︎

12. Keith Christiansen, in Christiansen, Kanter, and Strehlke 1988, 65. ↩︎

13. Blauwkuip 1980, 13. ↩︎

14. Israëls 2003, 60–62. ↩︎

15. Machtelt Israëls, in Seidel et al. 2010, 232. ↩︎

16. Bacci 1939b, 319. ↩︎

17. Roberto Bartalini, in Gurrieri 1988, 297. See also Douglas 1903, 275n3. Douglas referred to a manuscript copy of the Inscrizioni sanesi (vol. 2, p. 100), shown to him by Fairfax Murray but untraced today, to bolster his attribution to Sassetta of a small painting of the Virgin and Child in the rector’s quarters at the Manicomio di San Niccolò, then thought to be the work of Sano di Pietro. ↩︎

18. Manzi 2024, 54. ↩︎