Overview
The Virgin sits directly on the ground, eschewing the throne that is her right as Queen of Heaven. The Madonna of Humility, as this type of representation is called, appeared at the end of the Middle Ages as devotion to Mary took on a greater personal, human dimension. The infant’s reaching for her breast to nurse is a natural gesture—and layered with symbolism. At a time when all but the poorest families sent their children to wet nurses, his gesture reinforces the idea of Mary’s humility. Since milk was believed to be blood that had been converted in the mother’s body, the artist is evoking Jesus’s sacrifice and the sacrament of communion. And, because the Virgin was associated with the Church itself, the nursing allusion points further to the sustenance given to the faithful by the Church, emphasized by Mary’s large, sheltering body.
The Madonna of Humility was an especially popular subject in 14th-century Florence, and this painting seems to have been a model for several others—which suggests that Jacopo’s painting originally occupied a prominent place in the city. Jacopo was the younger brother of two painters, Andrea (called Orcagna) and
Entry
The image of Mary seated on the ground (humus) accentuates the humility of the mother of Jesus, obedient ancilla Domini (Lk 1:38). The child’s gesture, both arms raised to his mother’s breast, alludes, in turn, to another theme: the suckling of her child, a very ancient aspect of Marian
Osvald Sirén (1917) published the panel as an autograph work of
As for the dating of our panel, its attribution, even partial, to Orcagna implies that it was completed by or not much later than 1368, the year of the artist’s death. Sirén (1917) dated the painting to c. 1350, and Raimond van Marle (1924) substantially accepted the proposal. Gronau (1932), though he too supported an attribution to Jacopo, dated the painting c. 1360–1370. Presumably Berenson (1936) had a similar dating in mind when classifying the panel as a youthful work by Jacopo. So did Meiss (1951), who defined the painting as “probably designed by Orcagna and partly executed by Jacopo di Cione.”
The hypothesis that the panel is an autograph work by Orcagna clearly would need to be verified by comparing it with authenticated works of this artist, or works generally recognized as by his hand, in particular the
The stylistic features that distinguish the art of Orcagna in the last two decades of his life emerge from a comparative assessment of the above-cited paintings. They document his gradual transition from ample, softly modeled and majestic forms, defined by sharp contours, chiaroscuro effects of great delicacy, and a predilection for the abstract purity of large sweeping expanses of color, to a quite different manner. His late works are characterized indeed by a more marked, even at times brutal, accentuation of the three-dimensionality of bodies. Apparently, after the experience of realizing the sculptures for the
The artist of the Madonna in the Gallery, however, does not seem to have aimed at results of this kind. The delicate passages of chiaroscuro confer softness on the flesh parts, while the gradual darkening of the varicolored marble floor on which Mary is sitting subtly accentuates its extension into depth.
It is in fact in the oeuvre of Jacopo di Cione that our panel finds its closest affinities, in particular with the polyptych painted between 1370 and 1371 for the Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore and with the Florentine Pala della Zecca (now in the Galleria dell’Accademia) for which Jacopo received final payment in 1373.
Miklós Boskovits (1935–2011)
March 21, 2016
Provenance
Art market, Florence; Philip Lehman [1861-1947], New York, by 1917;[1] sold September 1943 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1952 to NGA.
Exhibition History
- 1917
- Loan Exhibition of Italian Primitives, F. Kleinberger Galleries, New York, 1917, no. 5, repro.
- 1946
- Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1946.
Technical Summary
The support is constructed with several (probably five) planks of wood with vertical grain. The painted surface is surrounded by unpainted edges, originally covered by the now lost engaged frame. The panel has been thinned down to its present thickness of 0.6 cm, backed by an additional panel, and cradled by Stephen Pichetto in 1944. It has suffered from worm damage in the past. The painting was executed on a white
Pichetto removed a discolored varnish during his treatment in 1944. Mario Modestini removed the varnish again and
Bibliography
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- 1966
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- 1967
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- 1997
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- 1998
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- 2003
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- 2004
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- 2006
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- 2009
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- 2010
- Boskovits, Miklós, and Daniela Parenti, eds. Cataloghi della Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze: Dipinti. Vol. 2, Il tardo Trecento: dalla tradizione orcagnesca agli esordi del gotico internazionale. Florence, 2010: 154, 174.
- 2016
- Boskovits, Miklós. Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, 2016: 191-200, color repro.
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