FG FINE ART LTD
Master of Verruccio
(Francesco da Rimini?)
Active between the first and second quarter of the XIV century
A
This panel is a rare work of the fourteenth-century Riminese School and constitutes the left half of a diptych; the right part being the Crucifixion in Cambridge. Divided into two separate registers, the upper half shows the Nativity while three standing saints are depicted in the lower half. The iconography of the Nativity recalls the same scene in a small panel by the ‘head’ of the Riminese School, Giovanni da Rimini, today in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, in Rome: the rocky landscape, derives from that painting, as does the pose of the Madonna - seated on a red mat on the rocky terrain’s downward slope - and the representation of Saint Joseph in isolation.
Nativity with Saint Christopher, a female martyr and Saint John the Baptist
Tempera on panel, 22 x 14.1 cm
PROVENANCE
Sotheby’s, London 14 January 2021, lot 109
Private collection
BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Minardi, Un dittico del Maestro di Verrucchio ricostruito, in “Paragone”, LXXV, 173-174 (887-889), 2024, pp. 46-59
Maestro di Verucchio (Francesco da Rimini?), Nativity with Saint Christopher, a female martyr and Saint John the Baptist
Maestro di Verucchio (Francesco da Rimini?), Crucifixion, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum.
Reverse of the diptych panels
The present work constitutes the left half of a diptych; the right part being the Crucifixion in Cambridge. The two panels share the same dimensions, conservation history and decorative red background on the reverse . The decoratiion consists of an intersecting pattern at centre occupying the full width of the panel, with four rhombi at its headpoints and a circle in each corner. It is a decorative motif typically found on wooden intarsia on furniture of the period. Also on the reverse of the panels is an 18th- or 19th-century hand attributing both works to Gherardo Starnina (c.1360–before 1413), clearly dating from when the paintings were still in Italy. In the present panel, the same hand wrote the number 402 in small characters, followed by the larger number 140: the latter is consistent with the number 139 on the reverse of the Cambridge panel. The consecutive numbering, which by its style of handwriting appears to date from the first half of the 19th century, must originate from a time when the two panels were still to alongside one other in the same collection. Their attribution to the Florentine painter Starnina, who was little known in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (and, even then, only through the writings of Giorgio Vasari), implies that the diptych was still to be found in Florence at that time. Unfortunately it has not been possible to uncover more of the paintings’ early provenance or history of ownership: a wax seal on the reverse of the present panel, seemingly dating from the 19th century, is indecipherable.
There are also traces of clasp marks – on the right of the present work and on the left of the Cambridge panel – indicating that these two paintings were once physically connected. Research undertaken by Victor Schmidt, and close study of the two companion paintings by Giovanni da Rimini in Rome and London, have revealed that the two halves of a diptych or panels belonging to small, portable polyptychs were not always physically connected but sometimes only placed alongside one another (given that any trace of hinges or other connecting mechanisms is often lacking). On the other hand, the fact that metal clasps have survived on one side of the Maestro di Verucchio’s Crucifixion in Urbino points to that panel having once been physically connected to the other half of the diptych in Birmingham, as is indeed the case with the panel in Cambridge and that under consideration here, by the same Master.
The author of the present painting is unquestionably the Maestro di Verucchio. It was to him that the Crucifixion in Cambridge had already been attributed by Federico Zeri and Carlo Volpe had noted that the panel was evidently part of a diptych, the other half of which had not been identified until now. The name of this artist, who was active in 14th-century Rimini, was coined by Mario Salmi in 1931-32 in connection with the cross in the collegiate church in Verucchio, in the vicinity of Rimini. In the decades that followed the identity of this artist became conflated with others, namely Francesco da Rimini and other masters identified by Volpe (‘il Maestro della Madonna Cini’, ‘il Maestro del trittico Fesch’ and ‘il Maestro della beata Chiara’) whose works were frequently interchanged. The most detailed survey of the Maestro di Verucchio’s work, and one with which the present writer agrees, is that outlined in the exhibition Il Trecento riminese. Maestri e botteghe tra Romagna e Marche (1995), in which the works of several anonymous painters with stylistic similarities were brought under a single author. This accepts, with only a small element of doubt, the proposal put forward by Miklós Boskovits that the entire group should be attributed to a single hand – that of Francesco da Rimini. In the context of this exhibition, this figure emerges as a prolific and sophisticated painter belonging, as indeed Pietro da Rimini did, to the second generation of artists working in the city, after that of Giuliano and Giovanni da Rimini.
The painting under examination here belongs to a mature phase of the artist’s career. His earlier production on panel includes the works in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia and Kunsthaus, Zurich. Next comes the triptych of which the Adoration of the Magi survives in the Lowe Art Museum at Coral Gables, Florida, and the Vision of Saint Clare of Rimini in the National Gallery, London, which must date from after 1326 (the date of the saint’s death). As highlighted by Boskovits, the works produced in the late 1320s and in the ensuing decade are marked by a greater degree of Gothic meticulousness. After the aforementioned Marian triptych, the painter produced the triptych of the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio and works such as the diptychs in Florence-Dublin and Birmingham-Urbino, as well as the Crucifixion in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, which must count among his latest works.
A full fact sheet is available on request.
