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拍品專文
This notable altarpiece, complete and still in its original engaged frame, surfaced in Rome in 1956, and was recognised by the late Federico Zeri as being by a later-fourteenth-century Venetian master akin to Jacobello di Bonomo, Guglielmo Veneziano and their contemporary, Giovanni da Bologna. When the picture was sold in 2003, Andrea de Marchi correctly recognised that it was by the Master of Teplice, so named from an altarpiece of Venetian provenance bought for the church at Dubl, near Teplice (Teplitz), now in the Diocesan Museum at Litoměřice, Czech Republic, which was formerly attributed to Jacobello di Bonomo. The oeuvre of the artist has been expanded also by the late Miklòs Boskovits, Robert Gibbs, Cristina Guarnieri and Matteo Proccacini, who recognised in 2016 that he was the painter of a major polyptych, now known only from a photograph, which was stolen from the church of S. Susanna at Villagrande di Mombaroccio in the Marche. As Gaudenz Freuler points out in an unpublished report on this picture, the lost altarpiece must have revealed a close affinity with the work of Jacobello, as exemplified by his altarpiece of 1385 at Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna (Museo Storico Archeologico), which in turn is related in structure to the rather earlier altarpiece by Lorenzo Veneziano, the most lyrical of the painters of late trecento Venice, at Lecce (Museo Provinciale Sigismondo Castromediano). Freuler fairly argues that the Teplice Master’s style developed under the influence of works of about 1366-72 by the mature Lorenzo Veneziano. He notes, however, in this altarpiece and the Madonna of Humility at Avignon (Musée du Petit Palais, M.I.664), in which the face of the Virgin is strikingly similar, a response to works by Giotto and his earlier followers in the terrafirma. He proposes a dating of between 1385 and 1395.
Like other Venetian masters of his generation, as the evidence of the Mombaroccio altarpiece indicates, the Teplice Master received commissions from outside Venice. This may in part explain his affinity with Giovanni da Bologna, himself an immigrant to the city. That hill-top castles are shown on either side of the Madonna’s throne and in three of the panels of saints might suggest that the kneeling patron in this altarpiece commissioned it for a church on the frontier of Venetian territory, the fortresses protecting which were a major preoccupation of the Venetian authorities. Few pictures are thus more eloquent of both the artistic complexion and the political-cum-military realities of late fourteenth-century Venice.
Like other Venetian masters of his generation, as the evidence of the Mombaroccio altarpiece indicates, the Teplice Master received commissions from outside Venice. This may in part explain his affinity with Giovanni da Bologna, himself an immigrant to the city. That hill-top castles are shown on either side of the Madonna’s throne and in three of the panels of saints might suggest that the kneeling patron in this altarpiece commissioned it for a church on the frontier of Venetian territory, the fortresses protecting which were a major preoccupation of the Venetian authorities. Few pictures are thus more eloquent of both the artistic complexion and the political-cum-military realities of late fourteenth-century Venice.