The Master of the Santa Felicità Adoration of the Magi (active Florence mid–15th century)
TUSCAN RENAISSANCE CASSONE PANELS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION (LOTS 12-19)
The Master of the Santa Felicità Adoration of the Magi (active Florence mid–15th century)

Trajan and the Widow: a cassone panel

Details
The Master of the Santa Felicità Adoration of the Magi (active Florence mid–15th century)
Trajan and the Widow: a cassone panel
tempera and gold on panel, in an engaged frame
18 3/8 x 63 3/8 in. (47 x 161 cm.)
Provenance
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 5 July 1985, lot 69, as ‘Scheggia’.
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 9 July 2008, lot 249, as ‘Master of the Epiphany of Santa Felicita’.

Lot Essay

The story of the Emperor Trajan’s encounter with the widow, widely known from the Golden Legend and related by Dante in Book X of Purgatory was evidently favoured by Florentine patrons.

This panel was attributed by Everett Fahy on the basis of a photograph to Scheggia in 1985, but when he inspected it in 2007, he re-attributed it to the artist’s contemporary, Paolo Schiavo, to whom he had attributed a cassone front of the Return of Judith to Bethulia, and the route of the Jews defeating the Assyrians (sold Sotheby’s, New York, 25 January 2007, lot 30). In 2008, Lorenzo Sbaraglio attributed both panels and a group of other works of the kind to his ‘Maestro dell’Epifania di Santa Felicita’, so-named after the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence; influenced by Scheggia and others, he evidently worked in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century. The attribution is accepted by Andrea de Marchi.

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