BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)
BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)
BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)
3 More
BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)
6 More
Property from a Park Avenue Collection
BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)

Saint Dominic; and Christ Blessing

Details
BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI (SIENA 1436-1518)
Saint Dominic; and Christ Blessing
tempera and gold on panel, marouflaged
the first: 9 ¼ x 10 ¼ in. (23.5 x 26 cm.)
the second: 9 3⁄8 x 10 3⁄8 in. (23.8 x 26.4 cm.)(2)
a pair
Provenance
with Satinover Galleries, New York, until 1920, from whom acquired by,
Robert Lehman (1891-1969), New York, by whom gifted in 1945 to,
Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; [Property offered by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Kansas City, Missouri], Christie's, New York, 6 June 1984, lot 27, where acquired by the present owner.
Literature
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1932, p. 77.
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Central Italian and North Italian Schools, London, 1968, I, p. 40.
R. van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 16, The Hague, 1937, p. 416.
B.B. Fredericksen and D.D. Davisson, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Girolamo di Benvenuto, Their Altarpieces in the J. Paul Getty Museum and a Summary Catalogue of Their Paintings in America, 1966, p. 25.
B.B. Fredericksen and F. Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972, p. 589, no.45-54⁄1, 45-54⁄2.
M.C. Bandera, 'Qualche osservazione su Benvenuto di Giovanni,' Antichità viva, XIII, 1974, pp. 8-9.
J. Pope-Hennessy, Italian Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection, New York, 1987, p. 164.
C.C. Wilson, Italian Paintings XIV-XVI in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, 1996, pp. 182-185, 187, under no. 16.
M.C. Bandera, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Milan, 1999, pp. 104-105, 229, nos. 40 and 41.

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Taylor Alessio
Taylor Alessio Junior Specialist, Head of Part II

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Lot Essay

These panels, which once formed part of a predella, are by Benvenuto di Giovanni, one of the foremost artists in Siena in the late fifteenth century. The predella originally comprised seven three-quarter-length figures, six of which were acquired by Robert Lehman in 1920 and later dispersed. The present works depict Saint Dominic and Christ Blessing, while a panel of Saint Bernardino of Siena is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of Saint Peter Martyr is in the Yale University Art Gallery, and another of Saint Francis is in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The last panel, thought to represent Saint Anthony of Padua, remains untraced. Carolyn Wilson (op. cit., 1996, p. 183) hypothesized the missing panel may have depicted Saint Thomas Aquinas or Catherine of Siena and reconstructed the predella's layout, placing Christ at the center, flanked by Saints Dominic and Francis, with Saints Bernardino and Anthony at either end and Saint Peter Martyr on the far right (ibid.)

Berenson (op. cit., 1932) first identified these panels as by Benvenuto di Giovanni in 1932, an attribution supported by Van Marle and, subsequently Fredericksen and Davisson (op. cit., 1972 ), who proposed a date of circa 1474. Maria Cristina Bandera (op. cit., 1974) later observed that the punch-marks for these works were comparable with the artist’s six pilaster panels from the Kress Collection (three in the Isaac Delgado Museum, New Orleans; and three in the Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg), the only other works in Benvenuto’s oeuvre to use this technique.

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