The Crucifixion

In his catalogue entry for the Monte Carlo exhibition, Angelo Tartuferi records that on the back of a photograph of this work in the fototeca of the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, Longhi himself wrote that he believed it to be Central Italian, while Carlo Volpe later published it as the work of the Neapolitan painter Roberto d'Oderisio. Tartuferi also quotes Miklós Boskovits as favouring a Southern Italian origin for the picture. He himself suggests that the painter may have been from the Abruzzi or Puglia, since the depiction of Saint Michael in the cyma (rather than the pelican feeding her young or the Redentore) is very rare outside Venice but could have been derived from Venetian models transported down the Adriatic coast. A crucifix bearing a close resemblance to the present one has been published by Maria Concetta Di Natale (Le Croce dipinte in Sicilia. L'area occidentale dal XIV al XVI secolo, Palermo, 1992, p. 25, fig. 33). This shows very similar types and the handling of the anatomy and drapery of Christ are closely related; the cross itself is also painted in green. Now in the Museo Regionale, Messina, Di Natale considers it the work of a local painter of the first half of the fifteenth century. An example of a Sicilian crucifix with an angel in the cyma is in the Museo Diocesano, Palermo, from the church of San Giovanni di Malta (ibid., p. 124, no. 4, illustrated).