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Inscription

upper center on scroll: INRI (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews)

Provenance

Melzi collection, Milan.[1] (Robert Langton Douglas [1864-1951], London and Dublin);[2] sold to (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); sold July 1932 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York; [3] gift 1939 to NGA.

[1] The NGA Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture, Washington, D.C., 1941, mentions the Melzi collection, Milan, which is the provenance information given in the bill of sale to the Kress Foundation. Fern Rusk Shapley, in Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century, London, 1966: 110, and Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:364, refers to it as the collection of the Duchessa Melzi d'Eril in Milan, whose famous collection is known to have contained mostly Lombard paintings and only one Tuscan work, a tondo attributed to Ghirlandaio (see Guido Carotti, Capi d'arte appartenenti a S.E. la Duchessa Josephine Melzi d'Eril Barbo, Bergamo, 1901: 32, and Giulio Melzi d'Eril, La Galleria Melzi e il collezionismo milanese del tardo Settecento, Milan, 1973). There did exist in Milan, however, another collection with the same name, albeit less well-known--that of the lawyer Gennaro Melzi, who began to collect in the early years of this century; a part of this collection was placed at auction in 1928 (see La raccolta Melzi, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, 19-23 March 1928). The sale catalogue does not list the Gallery's painting, which could have been purchased privately either before or after the auction.

[2] See the letter of 1 May 1941 from Douglas to Edward Fowles of Duveen Brothers, in which Douglas writes: "I sold this picture to Count Contini." (Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Series II.I, Collectors' files, reel 299, box 244, folder 3, copy in NGA curatorial files.)

[3] The bill of sale for a polychrome wooden statue, two vases, a green velvet cope, a book of Piazzetta drawings, and ten paintings, including the Pesellino, which is titled Crucifixion and Two Saints, is dated 29 July 1932 (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2127.

Exhibition History
1935
Exposition de L'Art Italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo, Petit Palais, Paris, 1935, no. 358.
Bibliography
1941
Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 150-151, no. 220.
1942
Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 243, repro. 166.
1944
Frankfurter, Alfred M. The Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1944: 29, repro.
1945
Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 43, repro.
1959
Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 62, repro.
1965
Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 100.
1966
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 109-110, fig. 300.
1968
National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 89, repro.
1975
European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 264, repro.
1979
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:364; 2:pl. 263.
1984
Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 90, no. 51, color repro.
1985
European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 303, repro.
1988
Wheeler, Marion, ed. His Face: Images of Christ in Art: Selections from the King James Version of the Bible. New York, 1988: no. 91, repro.
1997
Barstow, Kurtis. "The Gualenghi-d'Este Hours": Art and Devotion in Renaissance Ferrara. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1997: viii, 153, 327 fig. III.24.
1998
Faxon, Alicia Craig. “Sacrifice." In Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art. Edited by Helene E. Roberts. 2 vols. Chicago, 1998: 2:778.
2003
Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 569-573, color repro.
2015
Sonnevend, Margit. "La cuspide centrale di una smembrata pala d'altare di Pesellino nel Museo Cristiano di Esztergom." Acta Historiae Artium 56 (2015): 89-102, fig. 2.
2015
Sonnevend, Margit. "Pesellino oltároromzat-töredéke az esztergomi Keresztény Múzeumban." Ars Hungarica 41, no. 3 (2015): 331-344, fig. 2.
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