The Mourning Saint John the Evangelist

c. 1270/1275

Master of the Franciscan Crucifixes

Artist, Umbrian, active 1260s and 1270s

Shown against a shiny gold background, a cleanshaven young man with carrot-orange hair stands with his head tipped sharply to rest in one hand in this vertical painting. His skin is pale with a noticeably green tint. He tips his head to our left and looks at us with brown eyes. His left cheek flushes with a bright pink circle, and four vertical white strokes indicate creases in the flesh above the cheekbone. Visible strokes in butter yellow pick out his chin, nose, wrinkles on his furrowed forehead, and the fingertip of his pinky finger, along his cheek. His long-sleeved, lapis-blue garment falls in stylized folds to his bare feet. The lighter, slate-blue mantle wraps around his torso to his knees. The long fingers of his left hand, on our right, rests against his thigh. White highlights create swirling, angular patterns in the folds of the garments. A halo around his head is punched and incised into the gold background. A network of cracks runs across the gold background, and the red layer underneath is visible in some areas.

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Saint John the Evangelist, most beloved of Jesus’s disciples, holds his head in sadness. According to John’s Gospel, he was present at Christ’s crucifixion, and this panel, along with one depicting the Virgin Mary also in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, was originally part of a large, painted crucifix (see Reconstruction).

The cross to which the Gallery's panels belonged was probably made for the church of San Francesco in Bologna, and has a touching story around it. A commentary written in the late 1300s recounts how a crucifix in that church had spoken to console a monk visiting from England. That monk was John of Pecham, a Franciscan theologian who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279 after his return to England. The story helps define the probable dating of the Gallery's two pictures, which are not signed or dated. This anonymous artist painted crucifixes for other Franciscan churches—hence the name he has been given by scholars. Those included one at the basilica in Assisi, the mother church of the order and where Saint Francis is buried. It is likely that the artist trained in Assisi, and since all his known works seem to have been Franciscan commissions, he may well have been a Franciscan friar himself.

The two mourners would have appeared at the ends of the cross’s lateral arms—Mary on the left, John on the right. The dimensions of the two panels—each nearly three feet tall—suggest just how large the entire cross must have been. Examples that survive intact often measure 10 feet tall or more.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 1

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    tempera on panel

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    original panel: 81.2 × 31.1 cm (31 15/16 × 12 1/4 in.)
    overall: 82.2 × 33.3 cm (32 3/8 × 13 1/8 in.)
    framed: 91.1 x 41.8 x 6 cm (35 7/8 x 16 7/16 x 2 3/8 in.)

  • Accession

    1952.5.14

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: The Mourning Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1270/1275

This horizontal painting is made up of three parts: in the center square panel, a woman reclines under a wooden shelter set into a rocky cave, which is surrounded by angels, and narrower wings to either side are each occupied by a standing man. All the people have pale skin, which is tinged with faint green. The three panels are joined with a gold frame, and the gold background behind the central scene and the men in the side panels are covered with a noticeable network of cracks. In the central panel, a cobalt-blue robe nearly envelopes the reclining woman’s body; this is Mary. It covers her head and falls open where she crosses her wrists over her chest to show a pink garment underneath. A flat gold halo encircles her head ,and her body is surrounded by a field of crimson red, almost like an aura. She rests under a wooden structure with a pitched roof, which is surrounded by craggy, barren rock. A swaddled infant lies in a rectangular, tray-like manger. The infant’s head is also surrounded by a gold halo. Fine gold rays emanate down into the structure from a star just above the peak of the roof. A bull and a donkey look down at the baby from the far side of the manger. The interior of the structure behind them is black. In a smaller scale, two women wash a haloed infant in a tub in front of the rocky cave near the lower left corner of this panel. A man with a white beard and hair sits to our left of Mary, holding a pink cloak at his throat and looking toward the infant. Above and around the rocks, seven winged and haloed angels cluster on each side. One angel to the right presents a scroll with black writing to two men accompanied by a dog and several sheep in the lower right. The man in the panel to the left, Isaiah, has a gray beard and long, wavy hair, and he wears a lilac-purple cloak draped over a coral-orange robe. In his right hand, on our left, he holds an unfurled scroll with large black lettering. His other hand is raised with one finger pointing upward. He looks to our left, away from the central scene. On the right, Ezekiel, echoes Isaiah's pose. Ezekiel holds an open scroll with his left hand, on our right, and his other hand is raised. He also wears a coral-colored robe, but his is overlaid with a blue cloak. His receding hair is short and brown, as is his beard. Like Isaiah, he takes up most of the height of the panel and gazes to our left, toward the central panel.

Scholarly Series:  Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The two fragments (NGA 1952.5.13 and .14) were originally lateral terminals of a painted Crucifix presumably made for the church of San Francesco, Bologna, sometime after 1254 and before 1278;[1] the Crucifix is known to have been in the Lombardi Malvezzi Chapel in that church in 1577,[2] and was transported to the Bolognese church of Santa Maria in Borgo in 1801 (perhaps by which time its two lateral terminals might have been removed);[3] purchased, probably in Italy, by Osvald Sirén [1879–1966], Stockholm, by 1922.[4] Philip Lehman [1861–1947], New York, by 1928; purchased June 1943 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[5] gift 1952 to NGA.
[1] Writing around 1385-1390, Fra Bartolomeo da Pisa in his treatise De conformitate describes the case of a friar who was reprimanded by the Father General of his order and went to complain in front of the Crucifix in the church of San Francesco in Bologna, which is said to have consoled him in reply. “Frater iste dicitur fuisse magister Joannes Peccam Anglicus,” adds the author (see Fra Bartolomeo da Pisa, “De conformitate vitae Beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Jesu,” Analecta Franciscana 4 [1906]: 521-522). The friar in question was the celebrated Franciscan theologian John Peckham, who arrived in Italy from England in 1276 and stayed there till 1279. Lucas Wadding (Annales minorum, vol. 5 [1642], ed. G.M. Fonseca, Quaracchi, 1931: 58) also reports the episode, inserting it in events of the year 1278. Albeit with the necessary caution, this year, or at least the period of time covered by Peckham’s residence in Italy, can thus be considered a terminus ante quem for the execution of the painting, which indeed seems datable to the 1270s on stylistic grounds. Perhaps 1254, when the apse of the church collapsed, can be considered a terminus post quem for the Crucifix, as Silvia Giorgi suggests (Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Catalogo generale-I, ed. J. Bentini, G.P. Cammarota, and D. Scaglietti Kelescian, Venice, 2004). In 1299 it was apparently on the choir-screen of the church (Donal Cooper, Projecting Presence: the Monumental Crosses in the Italian Church interior, in Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and other Objects, ed. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd, Aldershot and Burlington, 2006: 61 n. 42). Miklós Boskovits was unable to see any stylistic justification for dating it to the years 1254-1263, as Giorgi suggested, believing that the completion of the architecture implied that the Crucifix likewise had been realized.
[2] This is suggested by an inscription visible in the church’s central chapel, behind the high altar, formerly that of the Lombardi family and later belonging to the Malvezzi. The inscription mentions the altar erected in the chapel “in hon. SS. Crucifixi”; see Luigi Garani, Il bel San Francesco di Bologna. La sua storia, Bologna, 1948: 245-246. That the Crucifix in question is the one now in the Pinacoteca of Bologna is suggested by the ascertained provenance of this panel from the church of San Francesco; the other two painted Crucifixes still present in the church and its adjoining convent were brought there only in the early years of the twentieth century, and their provenance is uncertain (see Silvia Giorgi in Massimo Medica and Stefano Tumidei, eds., Duecento: forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna, Venice, 2000: 189, 200).
[3] See Garani 1948, 245-246. Perhaps at the time of its arrival in Santa Maria in Borgo, the Crucifix was subjected to interventions that integrated its already incomplete form with the additions visible in the reproduction published by Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà (La Croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione, Verona, 1929: fig. 536). Here the lateral terminals, evidently lacking, are shown substituted by others, without any figural representations. It is probable, however, that the lateral terminals had been truncated earlier, as happened in the case of various other painted crucifixes, and that the fragments with the figures of the mourning Madonna and Saint John were used as devotional panels by the friars, who were then forced to abandon the convent after the suppression of religious orders in 1798.
[4] Sirén (Toskanische Maler im XIII. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1922: 221-222, 223, 224, 339, pl. 8) published the two panels as belonging to an unspecified private collection in Stockholm, but Miklós Boskovits had little hesitation in identifying the collector as Sirén himself. Sirén is known to have bought paintings both for his own pleasure and for sale. He also acted as a middleman between art dealers and collectors (see Edward Fowles, Memories of Duveen Brothers, London, 1976: 130, 151, 153), even handling the restoration of paintings that passed through his hands (see Roger Fry, Letters of Roger Fry, edited by Denys Sutton, 2 vols., London, 1972: 2:400).
[5] Robert Lehman, The Philip Lehman Collection, New York, Paris, 1928: n.p., pls. 59, 60. The bill of sale for the Kress Foundation’s purchase of fifteen paintings from the Lehman collection, including this pair, is dated 11 June 1943; payment was made four days later (copy in NGA curatorial files). The documents concerning the 1943 sale all indicate that Philip Lehman’s son Robert Lehman (1892–1963) was owner of the paintings, but it is not clear in the Lehman Collection archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, whether Robert made the sale for his father or on his own behalf. See Laurence Kanter’s e-mail of 6 May 2011, about ownership of the Lehman collection, in NGA curatorial files. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1864.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1946

  • Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1946, no. 809.

1999

  • The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi, Petit Palais, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1998-1999, no. 3/2, repro., as The Mourning [same] by Master of the Blue Crucifixes (shown only in New York).

2000

  • Duecento: Forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, 2000, no. 50, repro.

Bibliography

1907

  • Vollmer, Hans. "Meister des Hl. Franziskus von Assis." In Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker and Hans Vollmer. 37 vols. Leipzig, 1907-1950: 37(1950):105.

1922

  • Sirén, Osvald. Toskanische Maler im XIII. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1922: 221-222, 223, 224, 339, pl. 82.

1923

  • Marle, Raimond van. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. 19 vols. The Hague, 1923-1938: 1(1923):402.

1928

  • Lehman, Robert. The Philip Lehman Collection, New York: Paintings. Paris, 1928: no. LX, repro.

1929

  • Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn. La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione. Verona, 1929: 845, 855, 857, 884.

1930

  • Mayer, August L. "Die Sammlung Philip Lehman." Pantheon 5 (1930): 115.

1931

  • Venturi, Lionello. Pitture italiane in America. Milan, 1931: no. 5, repro

1933

  • Venturi, Lionello. Italian Paintings in America. Translated by Countess Vanden Heuvel and Charles Marriott. 3 vols. New York and Milan, 1933: 1:no. 6, repro.

1941

  • Coletti, Luigi. I Primitivi. 3 vols. Novara, 1941-1947: 1(1941):24.

1943

  • Sinibaldi, Giulia, and Giulia Brunetti, eds. Pittura italiana del Duecento e Trecento: catalogo della mostra giottesca di Firenze del 1937. Exh. cat. Galleria degli Uffizi. Florence, 1943: 149, 151.

1945

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 5, repro.

1946

  • Frankfurter, Alfred M. Supplement to the Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1946: 15, repro.

  • Douglas, Robert Langton. "Recent Additions to the Kress Collection." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 88 (1946): 85.

  • National Gallery of Art. Recent Additions to the Kress Collection. Washington, 1946: n.p.

1949

  • Garrison, Edward B. Italian Romanesque Panel Painting: An Illustrated Index. Florence, 1949: 14, 221 n. 605, repro.

1955

  • Lazarev, Viktor Nikitič. "Un crocifisso firmato di Ugolino Tedice." Paragone 6 (1955): 9, 12 n. 40.

1957

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Comparisons in Art: A Companion to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. London, 1957 (reprinted 1959): pl. 3.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 11, repro.

1963

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 297, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 85.

1966

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 4, fig. 5.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 75, repro.

1971

  • Pittura nel Maceratese dal Duecento al tardo gotico. Exh. cat. Chiesa di S. Paolo, Macerata, 1971: 44 n. 3.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 287, 646, 665.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 220, repro.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:312-313; 2:pl. 224.

1980

  • Scarpellini, Pietro. "Le pitture." In Il tesoro della Basilica di San Francesco ad Assisi. Edited by Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto. Assisi, 1980: 40-41.

1982

  • Tambini, Anna. Pittura dall’Alto Medioevo al Tardogotico nel territorio di Faenza e Forlì. Faenza, 1982: 34-35.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 253, repro.

1986

  • Lunghi, Elvio. "Maestro dei Crocifissi Blu." In La Pittura in Italia. Il Duecento e il Trecento. Edited by Enrico Castelnuovo. 2 vols. Milan, 1986: 2:596.

1987

  • Marques, Luiz. La peinture du Duecento en Italie centrale. Paris, 1987: 58, 286.

1989

  • Todini, Filippo. La pittura umbra dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento. 2 vols. Milan, 1989: 1:125 as by Maestro dei Crocifissi Blu.

1991

  • Tartuferi, Angelo. Giunta Pisano. Soncino, 1991: 82, 94.

  • Tomei, Alessandro. "Giunto Pisano." In Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale. Edited by Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana. 12 vols. Rome, 1991-2002: 6(1995):811.

1998

  • Morello, Giovanni, ed. Sauver Assise. Exh. cat. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Milan, 1998: 50.

1999

  • Morello, Giovanni, and Laurence B. Kanter, eds. The Treasury of Saint Francis of Assisi. Exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Milan, 1999: 64, repro. 65.

  • Cannon, Joanna. "The Stoclet ‘Man of Sorrows’: A Thirteenth-Century Italian Diptych Reunited." The Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 110 n. 28.

2000

  • Medica, Massimo, and Stefano Tumidei, eds. Duecento: forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna. Exh. cat. Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna. Venice, 2000: 186, 194, 197-200, 201, 203, 210, repro. 198.

  • Medica, Massimo. “La città dei libri e dei miniatori.” In Duecento: forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna. Edited by Massimo Medica and Stefano Tumidei. Exh. cat. Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna. Venice, 2000: 125.

  • Benati, Daniele. “La città sacra: Pittura murale e su tavola nel Duecento Bolognese.” In Duecento: forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna. Edited by Massimo Medica and Stefano Tumidei. Exh. cat. Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna. Venice, 2000: 106 n. 42.

2002

  • Giorgi, Silvia. "Maestro dei Crocifissi Francescani." In La pittura in Europa. Il Dizionario dei pittori. Edited by Carlo Pirovano. 3 vols. Milan, 2002: 2:534.

  • Cannon, Joanna. "The Era of the Great Painted Crucifix: Giotto, Cimabue, Giunta Pisano, and their Anonymous Contemporaries." Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 576.

2004

  • Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna). Catalog generale. Edited by Bentini, Jadranka, Gian Piero Cammarota, and Daniela Scaglietti Kelescian. Vol. 1 (of 5), Dal Duecento a Francesco Francia. Venice, 2004: 43.

2006

  • Cooper, Donal. "Projecting Presence: The Monumental Crosses in the Italian Church Interior." In Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and other Objects. Edited by Robert Maniura and Rupert Sheperd. Burlington, VT, 2006: 54-55, 61 n. 42, repro. 68.

  • Tambini, Anna. Storia delle arti figurative a Faenza. Vol. 1 (of 4), Le origini. Faenza, 2006: 75, repro. 79.

2016

  • Boskovits, Miklós. Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, 2016: 276-285, color repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20172933

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