Ulysses taking leave of Penelope and Telemachus before setting sail for Troy

This splendid spalliera panel, datable to circa 1500, by the Master of the Apollo and Daphne Legend, depicts a pivotal moment from the Trojan War: the departure of Ulysses (Odysseus) for Troy. The composition unfolds across an expansive coastal landscape, with ships at anchor, a fortified city rising at right, and a group of carefully observed figures dressed in elegant late quattrocento costume. In Renaissance Florence, episodes from the Trojan War could be adapted—no less than biblical scenes—to underscore virtues suited to a nuptial context. Here, Ulysses’s departure (and, by implication, his eventual reunion with Penelope) evokes themes of courage, loyalty, and conjugal fidelity.

Federico Zeri and Everett Fahy simultaneously constructed the oeuvre of the artist now known as the Master of the Apollo and Daphne Legend—an anonymous painter active in late fifteenth-century Florence, working in the orbit of Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. Fahy initially designated the artist as the 'Master of the Ryerson Panels,' but later adopted Zeri’s name, derived from the painter’s Apollo and Daphne cycle, formerly in the Samuel H. Kress Collection (now in the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago). Although the Master’s identity remains unknown, Fahy proposed that he may correspond to one of Ghirlandaio’s documented but otherwise elusive pupils—Niccolò Cieco, Jacopo dell’Indaco, or Baldino Baldinetti. More recently, Dr. Nicoletta Pons has advanced Giovanni di Benedetto Cianfanini (1462–1542) as a possible candidate; a follower of Botticelli who later collaborated with Lorenzo di Credi and Fra’ Bartolommeo.

We are grateful to Christopher Daly for bringing additional literature to our attention.