MASTER OF SAN MINIATO (LORENZO DI GIOVANNI DI... Lot 3005

MASTER OF SAN MINIATO (LORENZO DI GIOVANNI DI NOFRI) (before 1465 Florence 1512) Mary with Child and St. Francis of Assisi and Julianus Hospitator. Tempera on wood. 69,5 × 41,5 cm. Provenance: - Collection Han Coray (1880-1974), Erlenbach (as Francesco Pesellino). - Auction Wertheim, Berlin, collection Han Coray, 1.10.1930, lot 4 (as Francesco Botticini). - Auction Fischer, Lucerne, 2.-5.9.1942, lot 1140. - Swiss private property. Literature: - Raimond van Marle: The Development of Italian Schools of Painting, vol. XVI, The Hague 1937, p. 198 (as Master of San Miniato). - Bernard Berenson: Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine School, vol. I, London 1963, p. 147, plate 1050 (as Master of San Miniato). - Serenella Castri, in: Gigetta Dalli Regoli (ed.): Il Maestro di San Miniato. Lo stato degli studi, i problemi, le risposte della filologia, Pisa 1988, p. 220, cat. no. 16, fig. 139. With a detailed art historical analysis by Prof. Gaudenz Freuler, July 2022. The present panel shows the mother and child in the presence of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Julian. Above her, as a sign of God's merciful grace, hovers the Holy Trinity in the form of a floating mercy seat. The Florentine panel painting embodies the type of "colmo da camera" popular in the Florentine Renaissance. Such panel paintings, usually produced in standardized sizes of about 60-70 cm in height, were usually hung in the bedrooms of wealthy bourgeois houses, where they served for private devotion. In terms of content, they mostly allusively depicted with symbolic inserts the divine grace and mercy of Mary thanks to her divine motherhood, thus giving comfort to the devotee in front of the picture. The style of the present painting, also already attributed to Francesco Botticini, leaves little doubt that it is a work of the so-called Master of San Miniato, to whom it has also been attributed since Raimond Van Marle (see Literature). The Florentine painter, who remained unidentified for a long time, received his notational name because of his altarpiece of the Virgin and Child between St. Sebastian, St. John the Baptist, St. Martin and St. Roch in the church of Santi Jacopo e Lucia in San Miniato, a small town between Florence and Pisa. This artist has recently been identified as Giovanni di Lorenzo di Nofri (see Anna Maria Bernacchioni: Tradizione e arcaismi. Le forme della tradizione: pittori fra continuità e innovazioni, in: Maestri e botteghe. Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento, exhibition-cat. Mina Gregori / Antonio Paolucci / Cristina Acidini Luchinat (eds.), Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 16.10.1992-10.1.1993, pp. 178-179 and Anna Maria Bernacchioni: Pale d'altare della seconda metà del Quattrocento: Committenza e recupero delle identità artistiche, in: Antonia D'Aniello (ed.): Pittura e scultura nella chiesa di San Domenico a San Miniato. Studi e restauri, Pisa 1998, pp. 37-41). The latter was a pupil of Neri di Bicci (1418-1492), in whose workshop he is attested in 1465 to 1466 (see Bruno Santi (ed.): Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze (10 March 1453-24 April 1475), Pisa 1976, pp. 244-245, 264, 268-269, 272). In 1472 he made himself independent and ran his own painting workshop "al canto dei Servi," on the corner of the piazza opposite the Basilica Santissima Annunziata in Florence (see Bernacchioni 1992, p. 179). Compared to the painting style of his teacher, Neri di Bicci, Giovanni di Lorenzo's style of painting is expression more sophisticated, and takes references from the art of the leading Florentine contemporaries. He focuses on a clearer Chiaroscuro modeling of his figures and generally on the clearer articulation of volumes and contours. At the same time, he takes his cue from Filippo Lippi's repertoire of figures, which lends an at times androgynous delicacy to his faces of Madonnas and saints. The artistic roots in Filippo Lippi's art can also be discerned in the present panel painting, but elements of a more recent artistic movement are also noticeable here, which reveal tendencies drawn from Andrea Verrocchio's tradition, which were also shared in the 1470s by the early Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and Filippino Lippi (1457-1504), who worked with him. Andrea Verrocchio's (1435-1488) artistic tendencies are addressed, which he, with his sense of three-dimensionality, particularly pronounced as a sculptor, also transferred to painting and presented a painting style that was oriented toward a stronger definition of volume with more clearly accentuated chiaroscuro, which was to become the measure of all things in Florentine painting around 1470. This assimilation to the art of Andrea Verrocchio on the substrate of the art inspired by Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) is also evident in the present work of the Master of San Miniato alia