.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Giovanni Bonsi was one of the several Florentine painters formed under the influence of Andrea Orcagna and Jacopo di Cione. Evidently renowned in his lifetime, he was among the artists consulted about the construction of Florence's Duomo in 1367. Little else is known of his biography; a 'Iohannes Bonsi pictor populi S. Laurentii' was enrolled in the Town Guilds after 1358 but his date of death is not recorded. Any reconstruction of his artistic personality depends on his only signed work, the altarpiece dated 1371 from San Miniato al Tedesco in the province of Pisa, now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (Madonna and Child enthroned with Saints Onufrius, Nicholas of Bari, Bartholomew and John the Evangelist, inv. no. 9).
Although the origin of the present panels is unknown, they certainly once comprised the uppermost pinnacles of an altarpiece, as yet unidentified. They were first given to Bonsi by Miklós Boskovits in 1975; Andrea De Marchi, to whom we are grateful, supports his attribution. Saint Leonard of Noblac was a fifth-century saint who converted Clovis I (circa 466-511), first King of the Franks, to Christianity. King Clovis gave Leonard the right to release any worthy prisoner who also converted; thus the Saint is often represented with chains or broken fetters in his hands, as here. He is the patron saint of prisoners, captives, and slaves. Saint Anthony Abbot, sometimes called Saint Anthony the Great, was a third-century saint from Egypt, who seems to have been the first ascetic to abandon communal life for the wilderness.
A note on the provenance
Judge James Murnaghan and his wife Alice assembled a substantial collection of Old Masters in the early and mid-twentieth century, a number of which are now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, where James served as Chairman to the Board of Governors. Upon his death in 1973, there were some 1,200 paintings at their Fitzwilliam Street home in Dublin.
Although the origin of the present panels is unknown, they certainly once comprised the uppermost pinnacles of an altarpiece, as yet unidentified. They were first given to Bonsi by Miklós Boskovits in 1975; Andrea De Marchi, to whom we are grateful, supports his attribution. Saint Leonard of Noblac was a fifth-century saint who converted Clovis I (circa 466-511), first King of the Franks, to Christianity. King Clovis gave Leonard the right to release any worthy prisoner who also converted; thus the Saint is often represented with chains or broken fetters in his hands, as here. He is the patron saint of prisoners, captives, and slaves. Saint Anthony Abbot, sometimes called Saint Anthony the Great, was a third-century saint from Egypt, who seems to have been the first ascetic to abandon communal life for the wilderness.
A note on the provenance
Judge James Murnaghan and his wife Alice assembled a substantial collection of Old Masters in the early and mid-twentieth century, a number of which are now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, where James served as Chairman to the Board of Governors. Upon his death in 1973, there were some 1,200 paintings at their Fitzwilliam Street home in Dublin.