The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1398-1399

The legend of the childhood of Mary, mother of Jesus, had been formed at a very early date, as shown by the apocryphal Gospel of James, or Protoevangelium of James (second – ​third century), which for the first time recounted events in the life of Mary before the Annunciation. The iconographyIconography, or Iconology
 Terms that refer broadly to the study of subjects and themes in works of art. Iconology, which is based on the results of iconography, is the more wide-ranging and comprehensive. One of the principal concerns of iconography is the discovery of symbolic and allegorical meanings in a work of art. —Willem F. Lash, Grove Art © Oxford University Press of the presentation of the Virgin that spread in Byzantine art was based on this source. In the West, the episodes of the birth and childhood of the Virgin were known instead through another, later apocryphal source of the eighth – ​ninth century, attributed to the Evangelist Matthew.[1]  [1]
The apocryphal text has the title De Ortu Beatae Mariae et Infantia Salvatoris; on the origin of the legend and on its sources see Jacqueline Lafontaine-­Dosogne, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire byzantin et en Occident, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1964 – ​1965), 2:112 – ​128. According to this account of her childhood, Mary, on reaching the age of three, was taken by her parents, together with offerings, to the Temple of Jerusalem, so that she could be educated there. The child ascended the flight of fifteen steps of the temple to enter the sacred building, where she would continue to live, fed by an angel, until she reached the age of fourteen.[2]  [2]
Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire byzantin et en Occident, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1964–1965), 2:128–134. The legend linked the child’s ascent to the temple and the flight of fifteen steps in front of it with the number of Gradual Psalms.[3]  [3]
Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 6 vols. (Gütersloh, 1966 – ​1990), 4, pt. 2: 68. On the fifteen Gradual Psalms (Psalms 120 – ​134), see Frank L. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London and New York, 1958), 578. The image of so long a flight of steps does not in general appear in fourteenth-century Sienese painting, which instead follows other details of the narrative of the Pseudo-­Matthew: it describes the surprise of those present on seeing the infant girl spontaneously ascend the steps on her own and shows the high priest Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist (haloed), welcoming the child.[4]  [4]
Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 6 vols. (Gütersloh, 1966–1990), 4, pt. 2:67–68. The other girls who are being brought up in the temple are represented in a separate zone. One endeavor to which Sienese painters, on the other hand, paid constant attention was that of expressing the splendor of Solomon’s Temple, generally represented as a grand and complex building. The importance of the event was further underlined by the presence of ever more numerous onlookers.

The painting now in the National Gallery of Art appeared in the London exhibition in 1928 as a work by Bartolo di Fredi, an attribution perhaps proposed by Bernard BerensonBerenson, Bernard
 (June 26, 1865–October 6, 1959) Art historian and connoisseur. Son of a Lithuanian timber merchant who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1875, he was educated at the Latin School, Boston, and at Harvard University, where he studied Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and German. In an unsuccessful application for a traveling fellowship to Europe, he wrote, ‘Art prevails in this programme because it is there that I feel myself weakest. One can study literature here . . . but art not at all.’ On his subsequent visit to Europe in 1885, financed by friends, his rapid visual self-education led to the decision to settle in Italy and to devote his life to the study of Italian art. —William Mostyn-Owen, Grove Art © Oxford University Press, who privately confirmed it in 1951.[5]  [5]
Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1979), 1:176. William Suida and Fern Rusk Shapley accepted this opinion in their catalog of the Kress Collection (NGA 1956), commenting that “the attribution to Bartolo​ . . . ​is not likely to be doubted.”[6]  [6]
National Gallery of Art, Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection (Washington, DC, 1956), 28. That attribution was reaffirmed in the 1959 catalog of the Gallery and by Jaqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne (1965).[7]  [7]
National Gallery of Art, Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection (Washington, DC, 1959), 35; Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire byzantin et en Occident, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1964–1965), 2:30 n. 1. As early as 1951, however, Millard Meiss broke ranks, identifying the hand of Paolo di Giovanni Fei in the painting.[8]  [8]
Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), 28. All the more recent literature, apart from the above-cited exceptions, recognizes Meiss’s proposal as correct, including Berenson’s own posthumous edition of Italian Pictures (1968).[9]  [9]
Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools, 3 vols. (London, 1968), 2:130. Confirmation of the attribution came with the discovery that the panel now in Washington comes from Siena Cathedral; documents of 1398 – ​1399 record payments made to Paolo di Giovanni Fei that undoubtedly refer to this painting.[10]  [10]
Vittorio Lusini, Il Duomo di Siena (Siena, 1911), 321 n. 2, and Provenance, note 1. The various inventories of the cathedral later described it as “tauola dipenta colla Ripresentationi al Tempio di Nostra Donna et di sancto Pietro et di sancto Pauolo et di più altri sancti e sancte” (a painted panel with the Presentation of Our Lady and with Saint Peter and Saint Paul and many other saints).[11]  [11]
Quoted by Michael Mallory, Paolo di Giovanni Fei (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1965), 124. It remained on the altar of the chapel of San Pietro at least until 1482 and probably until the early 1580s (see Provenance).

The composition of Paolo’s altarpieceAltarpiece
 An image-bearing structure set on the rear part of the altar, abutting the back of the altarblock, or set behind the altar in such a way as to be visually joined with the altar when viewed from a distance. It is also sometimes called a retable, following the medieval term retrotabulum. The altarpiece was never officially prescribed by the Church, but it did perform a prescribed function alternatively carried out by a simple inscription on the altarblock: to declare to which saint or mystery the altar was dedicated. In fact, the altarpiece did more than merely identify the altar; its form and content evoked the mystery or personage whose cult was celebrated at the altar. This original and lasting function influenced the many forms taken by the altarpiece throughout its history. —Alexander Nagel, Grove Art © Oxford University Press would have followed the scheme prescribed for the altarpieces of the various chapels in the cathedral, a church dedicated to the Virgin: namely, a scene representing a Marian feast at the center, flanked by full-length, standing saints in the lateral panels, including the titular of the altar. As we know from the example of other polyptychsPolyptych
 Type of object with several panels, usually an altarpiece, although it may also fulfil other functions. The polyptych normally consists of a central panel with an even number of side-panels, which are sometimes hinged to fold. Although in principle every object with two panels or more may be called a polyptych, the word is normally used as a general term for anything larger than a triptych. As with diptychs and triptychs, the size and material can vary. —Victor M. Schmidt, Grove Art © Oxford University Press with a provenance from the cathedral, the saints were portrayed one on each side. Moreover, the polyptychs, in contrast to the present appearance of The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, were always enriched with gables comprising half-figure images of other saints above the main register. Though none of these components of Paolo’s altarpiece have yet been identified, there seems no reason to doubt their existence.[12]  [12]
On the compositional scheme prescribed for altarpieces in Siena Cathedral, beginning with that of Sant’Ansano painted by Simone Martini (Sienese, active from 1315; died 1344) and Lippo Memmi (Sienese, active 1317/1347) in 1333 (now in the Uffizi, Florence) and continuing through the fourteenth century, see Kavin Frederick, “A Program of Altarpieces for the Siena Cathedral,” The Rutgers Art Review 4 (1983): 18 – ​38; Hendrik W. van Os, Sienese Altarpieces 1215 – ​1460: Form, Content, Function, vol. 2, 1344 – ​1460 (Groningen, 1990), 99 – ​139. The only one of these altarpieces to retain the paintings of its upper register (except for the one originally at its center) is that for the altar of Sant’Ansano, with busts of prophets in its gable panels, but it does not seem justified to suppose that in this respect the polyptychs of the cathedral were any different from the altarpieces of the main Sienese churches. In fact, in recent times the existence of gable panels has been conjectured both for the polyptych of San Vittore painted by Bartolomeo Bulgarini (Italian, c. 1300 - 1378) around 1351 and now divided among the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copen­hagen; and other collections. See Elisabeth H. Beatson, Norman E. Muller, and Judith B. Steinhoff, “The St. Victor Altarpiece in Siena Cathedral: A Reconstruction,” The Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 610 – ​631; Judith Steinhoff-­Morrison, Bartolomeo Bulgarini and Sienese Painting of the Mid-­Fourteenth Century, 2 vols. (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1990), 2: fig. 20h. For that of San Crescenzio, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1342, of which the main panel is now in the Uffizi, Florence, see Sonia Chiodo, “Attorno a un dipinto inedito di Ambrogio Lorenzetti,” Arte cristiana 91 (2003): 1 – ​6; Erling S. Skaug, “Two New Paintings by Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Technical Criteria and the Complexity of Chronology,” Arte cristiana 91 (2003): 7 – ​17. Andrea De Marchi made the point that the carpenter Paolo Bindi, having realized the wooden structure for the polyptych that Ambrogio Lorenzetti had been commissioned to paint, was paid for constructing not only the predella but also the “cholonne” and the “civori” (possibly to be interpreted as gables); Andrea De Marchi, “La tavola d’altare,” in Storia delle arti in Toscana: Il Trecento, ed. Max Seidel (Florence, 2004), 29.

The documents, therefore, not only confirm the attribution of the panel in the National Gallery of Art to Paolo di Giovanni Fei but also reveal that it is the fragment of a larger complex. It remains uncertain, however, whether Paolo was the sole author of the dispersed polyptych. According to another piece of documentary evidence dating to 1393, in fact, another painter, Bartolo di Fredi, received a payment “per la tavola d’altare di San Pietro che fa.”[13]  [13]
Gaetano Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese, 3 vols. (Siena, 1854 – ​1856), 2:37; Gaudenz Freuler, Bartolo di Fredi Cini: Ein Beitrag zur sienesischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts (Disentis, 1994), 428; Monica Butzek, “Chronologie,” in Die Kirchen von Siena, vol. 3, Der Dom S. Maria Assunta, bk. 1, Architektur, pt. 1, ed. Walter Haas and Dethard von Winterfeld (Munich, 2006), 98. Commenting on this information, Michael Mallory observed, “probably the document​ . . . ​is designating a panel depicting St. Peter rather than one made for the chapel of S. Pietro, or possibly it refers to an altarpiece for the chapel that [Bartolo di] Fredi did actually execute, but which was moved or destroyed,” and he added, “it is even possible that [Bartolo di] Fredi did begin the triptych from which the Presentation of the Virgin remains, but that his work was executed on one of the missing panels.” See Michael Mallory, Paolo di Giovanni Fei (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1965), 128. In the view of the present writer, this latter hypothesis seems the more plausible; in any case, it should be recalled that only one of the chapels in the cathedral was dedicated to Saint Peter. According to some, this means that the execution of the polyptych had already begun in 1392 – ​1393, but for some reason Bartolo’s work was not completed. So the commission was then apparently transferred to Paolo. It was believed in the past that the lost laterals of our Presentation could be identified in two panels by Bartolo di Fredi representing Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but the hypothesis was then shown to be mistaken.[14]  [14]
Hendrik W. van Os, “Tradition and Innovation in Some Altarpieces by Bartolo di Fredi,” The Art Bulletin 67 (1985): 50 – ​66; Gaudenz Freuler, “Bartolo di Fredis Altar für die Annunziata-­Kapelle in S. Francesco in Montalcino,” Pantheon 43 (1985): 21. For a correction of the proposal, see Gaudenz Freuler, Bartolo di Fredi Cini: Ein Beitrag zur sienesischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts (Disentis, 1994), 341. So, in this case, the problem of the collaboration between the two Sienese painters still remains open.[15]  [15]
Recently it was conjectured that the payment to Bartolo referred not to the altarpiece but to the tabernacle commissioned in 1380 to hold the statue of the saint, and destined for the same altar; Monica Butzek, “Chronologie,” in Die Kirchen von Siena, vol. 3, Der Dom S. Maria Assunta, bk. 1, Architektur, pt. 1, ed. Walter Haas and Dethard von Winterfeld (Munich, 2006), 99 n. 1285 and 1286. However, as Monica Butzek verbally advised me, she excluded this eventuality.

Paolo’s painting in Washington has always met with a flattering reception from art historians. Millard Meiss (1951) hailed it as an “important panel”; Enzo Carli (1979), as one of the masterpieces of late-fourteenth-century Sienese painting (“uno dei capolavori della pittura senese del tardo Trecento”); while the Dutch expert on Sienese painting, Henk van Os (1990), described it as “a magnificent painting.”[16]  [16]
Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Prince­ton, 1951), 28 n. 58; Enzo Carli, Il Duomo di Siena (Genoa, 1979), 85; Hendrik W. van Os, Sienese Altarpieces 1215 – ​1460: Form, Content, Function, vol. 2, 1344 – ​1460 (Groningen, 1990), 136. Michael Mallory (1965) was the first to recognize its identity with the documented panel by Paolo di Giovanni Fei in Siena Cathedral. He also subjected it to a meticulous stylistic and iconographic analysis. He observed inter alia that “the series of spaces that the artist has opened up beyond the figures is more complex than anything that he attempted in the Nativity [that is, in the other polyptych by the artist similarly having a scene thronged with figures at the center, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena] or in the Visitation [that is, in the scene frescoed by Paolo in the church of San Francesco, also in Siena], and at the same time the architecture is rendered accurately enough so that we can understand the plan of this church with its polygonal apse and vaulted chapels.” The Washington Presentation, Mallory concluded, “is the most ambitious and successful Sienese painting of the late Trecento as regards interior setting.”[17]  [17]
Michael Mallory, Paolo di Giovanni Fei (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1965), 119.

To illustrate the scene of the entry of the child Mary into the temple, Paolo must have followed an illustrious model, now lost: the one painted by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti as part of a Marian sequence on the facade of the Ospedale della Scala, opposite the cathedral, in 1335.[18]  [18]
Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena: Vicenda di una committenza artistica (Pisa, 1985), 70 – ​73. The frescoes represented the Birth of the Virgin, the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, the Betrothal, the Return of Mary to the House of Her Parents, and, probably, the Assumption. We do not know whether Paolo had been contractually obliged — ​​as Sano di Pietro would be a half-century later [19]  [19]
In 1448 it was decided to add a predella to the altarpiece of the “cappella de’ Signori” in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, and it was specified that “vi si debba fare cinque storie di nostra donna alla similitudine di quelle che sonno a capo le porti dello spedale della scala” (five stories of Our Lady should be made copying those that are above the doors of the Hospital of the Scala). See Gaetano Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese, 3 vols. (Siena, 1854 – ​1856), 2:256 – ​257. The panels of the predella, now dispersed among various collections, were painted by Sano di Pietro and are to be considered simplified reproductions but substantially faithful to the frescoes of Lorenzetti on the facade of the Ospedale della Scala. See Keith Christiansen, “The Cappella de’ Signori Predella,” in Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420 – ​1500, ed. Keith Christiansen, Laurence B. Kanter, and Carl Brandon Strehlke (New York, 1988), 146 – ​148.  — ​​to reproduce the Lorenzettian composition in his panel. Many elements that it holds in common with Sano di Pietro’s version of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana),[20]  [20]
Wolgang Fritz Volbach, Catalogo della Pinacoteca Vaticana, vol. 2, Il Trecento. Firenze e Siena (Vatican City, 1987), 48, fig. 99. and with the many other variations on the theme produced by Sienese painters in the second half of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century,[21]  [21]
Mallory listed the variants of the compositions. Michael Mallory, Paolo di Giovanni Fei (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1965), 135–141. do suggest that he followed the same prototype, albeit with some liberties. The model in question showed Mary at the top of the flight of stairs within an elaborate architectural structure, frontally placed, with one or two priests welcoming her. The child’s arms were humbly crossed over her breast, but she was shown looking backward towards her mother. Behind the priests, at the center, an altar with a golden ciborium (presumably intended to represent the Ark of the Covenant) could be glimpsed in the background, while further to the right was placed the group of girls who would be Mary’s companions during her years in the temple. Placed in the foreground to the left were Mary’s mother and a group of women, and on the other side a group of men including two elderly bearded Jews disputing with each other.[22]  [22]
This motif is less clearly evident in the panel of Sano di Pietro and in the other derivations from the Lorenzettian prototype, where the two old men, busily conversing with each other and in some cases with other figures, are also flanked by Saint Joachim, who dominates the group. Presumably this also was so in the lost fresco of Santa Maria della Scala. The motif of the disputation is particularly conspicuous in Lippo Vanni’s fresco of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in the church of San Leonardo al Lago, and in this respect recalls the National Gallery of Art panel. Another model that the artist must have had in mind in his work was The Presentation of Christ in the Temple [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1342, tempera on panel, Uffizi, Florence. Image: Scala/Art Resource, NY painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the altar of San Crescenzio in Siena Cathedral (now in the Uffizi, Florence).[23]  [23]
Uffizi, Florence, no. 8346; see Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Presentation in the Temple,” Studi di storia dell’arte 2 (1991): 33 – ​50, and on the position of this important painting in the history of the representation of space in fourteenth-century painting see Miriam Schild Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting and the Forerunners of Perspective (New York, 1940), 145 – ​151. In conformity with this latter work, Paolo gives the Temple of Jerusalem a different appearance from that seen in the various versions of the theme painted by other Sienese painters. Following the lost fresco on the hospital facade, those painters describe the temple as a circular-plan building, whereas Paolo shows it as an imposing GothicGothic
 Term used to denote, since the 15th century, the architecture and, from the 19th century onward, all the visual arts of Europe during a period extending by convention from about 1120 to c. 1400 in central Italy, and until the late 15th century and even well into the 16th century in northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. The early gothic style overlapped chronologically with Romanesque and flourished after the onset of Renaissance art in Italy and elsewhere. The term gothic is applied to western European painting of the 13th century to the early 15th century. Unlike gothic architecture, it is distinguished more by developments in style and function than in technique, and even in these areas there is considerable national and regional diversity. The applicability of the term to Italian painting is debated, as is its usefulness in accounting for developments in Netherlandish painting from the early 15th century. Contact with Byzantine art was close in the early 13th century, but after c. 1250 survived principally in the Holy Roman Empire and Italy. —Peter Kidson, Grove Art © Oxford University Press church with a nave and two aisles: an innovative feature that shows his intention — ​​and capacity — ​​to renovate the tradition.

Perhaps the most original aspect of his composition, however, is its color: in contrast to the mainly dark colors enlivened by large splashes of deep red proposed by his predecessors, Paolo has adopted an altogether brighter, sunnier palette to represent the light-flooded interior of the temple, its polygonal apse pierced by a ring of double-lancet windows, its blue-gray stonework articulated with pink stringcourses. The colors of the architecture are matched by those of the various groups of onlookers that throng the interior, almost all of them wearing light-colored clothing: salmon pink, light blue, sage green. On the other hand, Paolo is parsimonious in his use of brilliant colors such as cinnabar red. It should also be pointed out that in his scene the middle distance is as densely inhabited as the foreground; it contains not only the principal group of Mary and Zacharias but also the crowd of girls assembled in a kind of raised singing gallery at the right [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Detail of girls in the singing gallery, Paolo di Giovanni Fei, The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1398–1399, tempera on panel transferred to hardboard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection. Other innovative features of Paolo’s scene are some apparently minor inventions, such as the two foreshortened heads closing off the back of the composition at either side — ​​the heads of young women standing in the background and craning their necks in order to better view the sacred event — ​​thus emphasizing the spaciousness of the scene. The detail — ​​as spontaneous as a snapshot — ​​of the kneeling woman seen from the back in the foreground to the left, half-hidden by the pillar against which the Solomonic column of the lost original frame would have been superimposed, develops a motif with which the painter had already experimented, for example in The Birth of the Virgin in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena.[24]  [24]
No. 116; cf. Piero Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, vol. 1, I dipinti dal XII al XV secolo (Genoa, 1977), 179 – ​180, and Veronica Randon, in Il Crocifisso con i dolenti in umiltà di Paolo di Giovanni Fei: Un capo­lavoro riscoperto, ed. Alessandro Bagnoli, Silvia Colucci, and Veronica Randon (Siena, 2005), 55 – ​57. The trouvaille of placing two children in the foreground, silhouetted against the light-flooded flight of steps, with the evident function of providing a kind of repoussoir, also anticipated a motif of which the International GothicInternational Gothic Style
 (c. 1380–c. 1440) The expressions “Courant international” and “Gothicité international” were first employed by Courajod with reference to analogies between French and Italian sculpture of the period around 1400. He intended to demonstrate Franco-Netherlandish impulses for the Renaissance and to establish the existence of a universal late medieval Gothic style. Von Schlosser (1895) also described the formation of a European-wide “höfische Kunst” marked by widespread occurrences of the same subject-matter, notably in the more mobile medium of tapestry. What became known as the international gothic style (or international style) was seen as the product of courtly patronage and eclectic, supraregional, stylistic, and iconographic preferences. Many of its formal qualities were held to persist well into the 15th century in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Bohemia, and Italy. —Paul Binski, Grove Art © Oxford University Press painters of the following generation would be fond. Not even in this phase of his full maturity, however, was the painter apparently willing to forego the solemn, dreamy, and in general impenetrable facial masks that usually characterize his paintings. Yet he skillfully exploits the expressive potential of the large and nervous hands of his figures to express the resolution, wonder, or doubt of his protagonists. In conclusion, it can be said that the scene proposed by the painter epitomizes and at the same time renews the experiences of a whole century of Sienese figurative culture, projecting them towards what was about to be born in the new century.

Miklós Boskovits (1935–2011)

March 21, 2016