Overview
This panel is part of a small triptych by one of the most sought-after artists in Florence:
Also apparent is the high level of Nardo’s technical skill. Notice, for example, how the deep wrinkles, thick hair, and wiry-looking beard of Saint Peter grant this figure a grave solemnity. Such effects were not easily achieved using the tempera paints employed by Nardo and his contemporaries. Tempera paints, made with pigment and egg yolk, were quick-drying and could not—like oils—be blended or built up in translucent layers on the surface of the panel. Instead, delicate, opaque brushstrokes—all but invisible—were set side by side. Shading was accomplished by light hatching or by juxtaposition of differing tones. Early tempera paintings are sometimes said to have a “linear” quality. In part, this derives from the hard contours that circumscribe painted objects and the lack of convincing tonal gradation from light to dark. By contrast, Nardo’s paintings demonstrate a delicate modeling of light, intermediate, and dark tones to grant his figures the impression of three-dimensional volume.
Entry
This panel is part of a portable
On publishing the painting with an attribution to Nardo di Cione (which is unanimously accepted),
In his remarkable analysis of the triptych, then in the Goldman collection, Offner did not disguise his great admiration for this painting: he praised it for the “gemlike solidity” of its colors, the “introspection, greater warmth and simpler humanity” of its protagonists, and in particular the “passionate tenderness” of Mary’s face
Yet, in spite of its excellent condition and extremely high level of quality, the former Goldman triptych now in the National Gallery of Art does not seem to have particularly drawn the attention of scholars in the half century since Offner wrote his appreciative essay. The reason for this can perhaps be found in its extremely simple and clear composition and its stylistic character so manifestly Nardesque that it cannot leave any doubts about its authorship. If any doubts persist, they concern not the triptych’s attribution but its date. Yet the chronology of the apparently rather brief artistic trajectory of Nardo di Cione is a very intricate question and, after Offner, few other scholars have attempted to tackle it. Our only secure points of reference for ordering Nardo’s works are the triptychs dated 1365 and the probable date of 1356–1357 for the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel. On this basis it can be maintained with some confidence that, as Offner astutely observed, the execution of the Gallery painting must be situated closer to the Strozzi frescoes, even though it is difficult to establish whether it should precede or postdate them. In the chronological reconstruction of Nardo’s career proposed in Offner’s monograph dedicated to the artist (1960), the triptych was placed in a group of paintings that also included the triptych formed by The Coronation of the Virgin in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the laterals in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich,
In the London Coronation, the artist does not appear to be interested in placing his figures in a three-dimensional space: Jesus and his mother sit on a virtually invisible throne, and, both by their position in profile and by the preference shown for wide expanses of color, testify to the artist’s wish to reduce the plasticity of forms to the surface plane. In the two groups of five saints of the laterals now in Munich, the regilding of parts of the
An aura of grandeur is conferred on the polyptych now in Bojnice by its relatively squat and ponderously solemn figures who yet seem more free in their movements, and who wear mantles constructed of deep and broad folds
Aspects of the gold tooling and of the ornamental motifs of the gilded stuff that envelops the child underline the Washington triptych’s affinity with the Bojnice polyptych and the Madonna and Child in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
Miklós Boskovits (1935–2011)
March 21, 2016
Provenance
Gustav Adolf Wilhelm von Ingenheim [1789-1855], who acquired it in the first half of the nineteenth century, probably in Italy;[1] Ingenheim family, Schloss Reisewitz, Silesia; sold 1922 to (A.S. Drey, Munich); sold 1923 to Henry Goldman [1856-1937], New York;[2] sold January 1937 to (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris);[3] sold 1937 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1939 to NGA.
Exhibition History
- 2008
- L'eredità di Giotto. Arte a Firenze 1340-1375, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, 2008, no. 36, repro.
Technical Summary
The
The figures and some of the drapery folds were delineated with incised lines.
The central panel has a slight convex warp. Probably in an effort to flatten the wood, the back of the panel was scored from the top right corner approximately to the center, at an angle that follows the wood grain. The back of the panel is covered by a layer of modern reddish brown pigment. The base, including the area around the blue paint of the inscription, has been regilded; the upper frame members retain their original gilding, which has been locally repaired. The painted surface is generally very well preserved. There is
Bibliography
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- 1923
- Marle, Raimond van. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. 19 vols. The Hague, 1923-1938: 3(1924):655.
- 1924
- Offner, Richard. "Nardo di Cione and His Triptych in the Goldman Collection." Art in America 12 (1924): 99, 101, 105-106, 111, fig. 1.
- 1927
- Gommosi, Gyorgy. "Nardo di Cione és a Szépművészeti Múzeum somzée-féle Madaonnaja." Az Országos Magyar Szépművészeti Múzeum. Évkönyvei 5 (1927-1928): 16.
- 1927
- Offner, Richard. Italian Primitives at Yale University: Comments and Revisions. New Haven, 1927: 16.
- 1927
- Offner, Richard. Studies in Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century. New York, 1927: 97, 100, 101, 103-105, fig. 1.
- 1931
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- 1932
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- 1933
- Venturi, Lionello. Italian Paintings in America. Translated by Countess Vanden Heuvel and Charles Marriott. 3 vols. New York and Milan, 1933: 1:no. 54, repro.
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- 1937
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- 1940
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- 1941
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- 1941
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- 1944
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- 1947
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- 1960
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- 1963
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- 1965
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- 1966
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- 1967
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- 1968
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- 1972
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- 1972
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- 1975
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- 1978
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- 1979
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- 1980
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- 1982
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- 1983
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- 1985
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- 1991
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- 2001
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- 2004
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- 2004
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- 2009
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