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A man draped in a white cloth steps toward us onto a ledge as he holds a red staff with a white banner in one hand and holds up the other hand to show a wound on the palm in this vertical painting. His pale face has a yellow cast but he has rosy cheeks, and his body is eggshell white. Near the upper left corner of the painting, his raised right hand, to our left, is held palm out to show it has been pierced. The cardinal-red staff he supports in his other hand has a long, fluttering banner with a red cross against a white background. He bends his right knee deeply, so his bare foot rests on a low wall or side of a casket in front of him. He looks up with brown eyes under curved eyebrows. He has a straight nose, and his small, rose-pink mouth is closed. He has shoulder-length, brown curly hair and a forked beard. His voluminous ivory-white cloth drapes over one shoulder and hangs in deep folds across the arm holding the banner and the opposite knee. He has a bloody gash over his right ribs. His entire body is surrounded by radiating lines encompassed in a glowing, golden halo. The corners around the halo are celestial blue. The ledge where he props his foot is painted to look like yellow marble veined with gray, framed with fawn-brown molding along the top edge. A round, black medallion flecked with celery green at the front center of the panel is also surrounded with with brown molding.

Bergognone

Christ Risen from the Tomb, c. 1490

Not on View

Medium

oil on panel

Dimensions

overall: 114.5 x 61.2 cm (45 1/16 x 24 1/8 in.)

framed: 149.5 x 81.3 x 10.2 cm (58 7/8 x 32 x 4 in.)

Credit Line

Samuel H. Kress Collection

Accession Number

1952.5.1

Artists / Makers

Bergognone (artist) Lombard, c. 1453 - 1523

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Provenance

Art market, Italy; exported from Milan probably between 1792 and 1835 and in any case not later than 1859-1860;[1] Arthur L. Nicholson, London, by 1915;[2] (Arthur U. Newton Galleries, New York), by 1936;[3] purchased April 1945 by the Samuel H. Kress Collection, New York;[4] gift 1952 to NGA.

[1] Into one of the vertical members of the painting's cradle a piece of wood with two identical seals is inset. This was obviously from the back of the panel before it was thinned. The seals are decorated with the Austrian imperial eagle and bear a fragmentary inscription of which the words "per l'esportazione" can be read. This type of seal was used by the exportation office of the Accademia di Brera in Milan on the paintings to be exported during the time of Francis I of Austria (1792-1835). Similar seals are visible on the back of a number of early Italian panel paintings; among others are Piero della Francesca's St. John the Evangelist in the Frick Collection in New York and the Saint Augustine by the same artist in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon (see Andrea Di Lorenzo, "Il politico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca: Dispersione, collezionismo, restauri, recostruzione," Il Polittico Agostiniano di Piero della Francesca. Quaderni di Studi e Restauri del Museo Poldo Pezzoli 2, Milan, 1996: 17, 39 notes 32-34 and 52, repro. 105). According to Di Lorenzo (letter of 26 April 2000), the Accademia probably stopped using the seal in 1848, when Ferdinand I of Austria, successor of Francis I (who used the same symbol) abdicated. In any case, the seal was not used after 1859-1860, when Austrian dominion in Milan ended.

[2] See Bernard Berenson's letter dated 26 June 1915, to Arthur L. Nicholson (copy in NGA curatorial files), in which the painting is mentioned.

[3] The painting was shown at the Old Masters' Exhibition at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries in October 1936 and mentioned in the exhibition reviews published in the New York Times (7 and 11 October) and in the New York American (17 October) of the same year. The fact that Berenson did not list the painting in his Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1932, suggests that by 1932 it was already on the art market.

[4] The bill of sale from the Arthur U. Newton Galleries to the Kress Foundation is dated 24 April 1945 and marked paid April 27 (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/524.

Associated Names

Kress Foundation, Samuel H.
Newton Galleries, Arthur U.
Nicholson, Arthur L.

Exhibition History

1936: Old Masters' Exhibition, Arthur U. Newton Galleries, New York, 1936.

1939: Exhibition of Paintings from the Arthur U. Newton Galleries, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1939, no. 1.

1941: 10th Anniversary 1931-1941, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland, 1941, no. 10.

1946: Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1946, no. 781.

1998: Ambrogio da Fossano detto il Bergognone. Un pittore per la Certosa, Museo Civico del Castello Visconteo, Pavia, 1998, no. 39, repro.

Bibliography

1945: Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 85, repro.

1946: Frankfurter, Alfred M. Supplement to the Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1946: 45, repro.

1951: Einstein, Lewis. Looking at Italian Pictures in the National Gallery of Art. Washington, 1951: 62-64, repro.

1959: Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 172, repro.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 16.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 9, repro.

1968: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XV-XVI Century. London, 1968: 20-21, fig. 43.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 36, repro.

1979: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:78-79; 2:pl. 51.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 47, repro.

1988: Wheeler, Marion, ed. His Face--Images of Christ in Art: Selections from the King James Version of the Bible. New York, 1988: 128, no. 103, color repro.

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: 126-129, color repro.