拍品专文
The workshop of Pietro Lorenzetti was one of the most important in Siena in the early fourteenth century. Pietro and his brother Ambrogio were responsible for many key commissions in the city, including the now lost frescoes that decorated the Ospedale della Scala.
This panel, which has been extensively published and the subject of much scholarly debate, would likely have been part of a diptych, and may have been painted circa 1330-35. A slightly later date however is suggested by the punchwork, with its intricate tooling that is complex in its design and highly skilled in its execution. Notwithstanding the exceptional tooling and the high quality of the figures, in particular the expressivity of the two figures kneeling at the base of the Cross, opinion has been divided on the panel’s attribution. Some scholars, including Millard Meiss, Carlo Volpe and Erling Skaug judged that it was by an artist in the circle of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. It was most recently published in 2009 by Ada Labriola as by Pietro, a view that was also shared by Ernest DeWald, Roberto Longhi, Michel Laclotte, Giulietta Chelazzi Dini and Miklós Boskovits. The last of these published the panel in 1986, comparing it to the figure of Christ in both the fresco in the basilica of San Francesco in Siena, of circa 1330, and the Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saints John the Evangelist, Clare and Francis, made around 1320, now in the Harvard Art Museums, Boston. Gaudenz Freuler, who has inspected the painting recently in the original and to whom we are grateful, believes that Pietro himself may have had a hand in the execution of this work. Debate has also surrounded the identification of the figure to the lower right of the cross. Longhi, in 1951, suggested that it might represent Saint Monica, Saint Clare or Saint Scholastica, however it has since been proposed that she is Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.