MASP

Maestro del 1416

Madonna with the Child Enthroned and Four Saints, 1410-15

  • Author:
    Maestro del 1416
  • Bio:
    Florença, Itália, ativo entre o final do século 14 e o segundo decênio do século 15
  • Title:
    Madonna with the Child Enthroned and Four Saints
  • Date:
    1410-15
  • Medium:
    Têmpera sobre madeira
  • Dimensions:
    107 x 62,5 x 11,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Moinho Santista S.A., 1947
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00004
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



In Madonna with Child Enthroned and Four Saints, Saint Julian (?), Saint John the Baptist, Saint Anthony the Abbot, and Saint James the Elder are next to the Virgin. At the center is the vase with the lilies symbolizing Mary Immaculate, to whom Christ gives the parchment predicting the sacrice. Although the robe and the garments of the Virgin were completely repainted, the figures of Christ and particularly the saints have been conserved with their meandering rhythms and chromatic modeling, which turn this work into a stirring example of the wealth of international Gothic in its Florentine expression at the time of Lorenzo Monaco. e work was attributed to the Florentine painter Rossello di Jacopo Franchi (1376-1456) by Berenson (1932, p. 186), an attribution accepted by Bardi (1948) and still found in the museum documents. By 1933, however, O­ner raised the issue out of this painter’s identity, reattributing part of his catalogue to an anonymous gure, then known as Maestro della Crocissione Griggs. In 1966, Bellosi nally identied the artist as Giovanni Toscani, whose neo-Giottesque drawing is denitely foreign to the gothic delicacy of our small retable. More recently, the Rossello di Jacopo Franchi catalogue was the subject of a Ph.D. thesis by Carol Peters, at the University of Indiana, who rejected the attribution of the Masp’s altar to Rossello and generically qualified this altarpiece as the work of a “provincial painter from the early 15th century” (1981, p. 304). On rst sight of a photograph of the work, Professor L. Bellosi did not hesitate to rescue it from anonymity and attribute it to the so-called Maestro del 1416, who was given the name of a re-table of this year conserved in the Florence Galleria dell’Accademia. His stylistic prolerst studied by Zeri (1969, pp. 66-70) – shows such proximity with that of Lorenzo di Niccolò di Martino, that one could compare it to the later activity of the latter painter, mistakenly considered to be Niccolò di Pietro Gerini’s son (Fahy 1978, p. 376; Maetzke 1986). On the other hand, Zeri, assuming that our work was still part of the Prince Fabrizio Massimo’s Collection, in Rome, attributed our small Madonna to Maestro del 1416 (1968, p. 69). In line with Zeri’s theory, Boskovits –who conrms the attribution of the small altar to the Maestro del 1416 (verbal communication, 1996) – does not believe that this master is Lorenzo di Niccolò di Martino, although he admits there are close stylistic a nities between them. In order to include our work in this artist’s catalogue, it is important to note its extreme similarity to an identical altar in the Florentine Galleries, dated by Zeri between 1410 and 1415, which provides a chronologically precise parameter to date our work.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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