LUCCHESE SCHOOL, late 13th Century

Details

LUCCHESE SCHOOL, late 13th Century

The Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist

tempera on panel
26 x 16in. (66 x 40.6cm.)

Provenance

Private collection, Rome, until 1959
with Thomas L. Hyland, Greenwich, Connecticut, from whom purchased by the museum in 1970

Literature

E. Garrison, Studies in the History of Medieval Italian Painting, IV, 1962, no. 3/4, pp. 382, 384-386, fig. 313
B. Fredericksen, Catalogue of the Paintings in the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1972, p. 3, no. 1, illustrated
B. Fredericksen, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1975, p. 73
L.C. Marques, La Peinture du Duecento en Italie Centrale, 1987, p. 73

Exhibited

Notre Dame, Indiana, University Art Gallery, University of Notre Dame, Art of the Romanesque, 1960, no. 30, 12, illustrated as School of Lucca, probably Bonaventura Berlinghieri, c. 1250
Stanford, CA, Stanford University, From Icon to Image, 1962 Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum, An Exhibition of Italian Panels and Manuscripts from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in Honor of Richard Offner, 1965, no. 12, as 'Lucca, c. 1280-90'

Lot Essay

E. Garrison (op. cit.) has noted the rarity of the Y-shaped cross which appears in only six other panels, all Tuscan. In all of these, Christ is affixed to the cross with three rather than four nails. As the four earliest of these six panels are Lucchese, Garrison concludes that the present lot is also likely to be so. The plain, untooled haloes appear sporadically elsewhere but are quite constant in 13th century Lucchese painting. The "double-shadowed round schematization" of Christ's torso is, too, according to Garrison, distinctly characteristic of Lucchese painting.

L. Marques (loc. cit.) identifies two distinct moments in the production of the workshops of 13th century Lucca. He places the present lot within the second of these, in the third quarter of the century and compares it with the diptychs in the Accademia, Florence; the tabernacles in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, New York; and the Crucifixes in the Barberini Palace, Rome and the Bandini Museum, Fiesole