Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, mid or late 1510s

[1] The Albergotti chapel of the Duomo, on the left side of the main altar, preserves its original stained glass window, commissioned in 1516 by the canon Baldassare di Luca Albergotti from Guilleaume de Marcillat and executed the following year (see Angelo Pasqui and Ubaldo Pasqui, Nuova guida di Arezzo e de'suoi contorni, Arezzo, 1880: 88 n. 59, and Girolamo Mancini, Guglielmo de Marcillat francese insuperato pittore di Vetri, Florence, 1909: 25). As such a dating would not seem to contradict the style of the NGA painting, it is quite possible that the latter was executed for the same chapel and in the same time period. Against this hypothesis is, however, the circumstance that the chapel's dedicatee, Saint Sylvester, is not represented on the altarpiece. Among those flanking the Madonna, two figures of evangelists can be recognized, one of whom is probably Mark. Near to one of the Albergotti residences in Arezzo, the "Palazzo delle Statue" in Via Ricasoli, there was a now destroyed church dedicated to this latter saint (San Marco a Murello; see Angelo Tafi, Guida Storico-Artistica, Arezzo, 1978: 282), and one cannot exclude that the NGA panel was instead executed for this church.

[2] Guido A. Angelucci, Memori Istoriche per servire di Guida al Forestiero in Arezzo, Florence, 1819: 83, mentions the modifications made in the 1810s by Bishop Agostino Albergotti to his family chapel in the Cathedral. This work and the construction of a new altar might have caused the removal of the original altarpiece and its transfer to the family gallery. An early twentieth-century photograph in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence shows, however, the NGA painting in a sumptuous baroque frame bearing the coat-of-arms of the Albergotti. Possibly the panel obtained this new frame when it entered the family gallery; in this case it must have been there by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Oreste Brizi, Nuova Guida di Arezzo, Arezzo, 1838: 49, in his description of the Albergotti collection, mentions a painting by Signorelli, but unfortunately fails to specify its subject.

[3] See Collection de tableaux anciens de F. Lombardi and H. Baldi, Florence, n.d. [1845]: 13. The collection had been formed since 1838; see Denys Sutton, "Aspects of British Collecting-IV," Apollo 122, no. 282 (August 1985): 94. William B. Spence, The Lions of Florence, Florence, 1847: 137, states that the private gallery of the restorers and dealers Lombardi and Baldi was one of the most important of its kind in Florence. Although the catalogue of their collection does not give information about the origin of the painting, its provenance from the collection of the marchesi Albergotti is confirmed by Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy, from the II to the XVI Century, 3 vols., London, 1864-1866: 3(1866); Milanesi in Vasari, ed. Milanesi 3, 1878: 701; and Robert Vischer, Luca Signorelli und die italienische Renaissance, Leipzig, 1879: 236, 269.

[4] Luitpold Dussler, "An Unpublished Signorelli in an English Private Collection," The Burlington Magazine 47 (July 1925): 3, states that the painting was bought by the grandfather of the owner, in Florence. Hugh Brigstocke ("Lord Lindsay as a Collector," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 64, no. 2 [Spring 1982]: 323 n. 3) reports the existence of a receipt pertaining to the painting's acquisition from Metzger in the archives of the earl of Crawford and Balcarres. The receipt is dated 17 May 1875. An annotation in NGA curatorial files reads as follows: "Mr. Walker [John Walker, NGA Chief Curator and then Director] copied from the Inventory (in old hand) at earl of Crawford's: it was once at the Villa Palmieri and was bought from the heirs of Francesco Lombardi in Florence in 1875 for 1300 fr." It is known that Villa Palmieri was bought by the 25th earl of Crawford in 1873 and sold in 1907 (see Harold Donaldson Eberlein, Villas of Florence and Tuscany, Philadelphia and New York, 1922: 346). According to the 1946 sale catalogue, the painting was brought to England in 1905.

[5] This location is given by Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1932: 533, and Italian ed., trans. Emilio Cecchi, Milan, 1936: 459, and the 1946 sale catalogue also specifies that this and other paintings of the collection sold at the same auction were "removed from Haigh Hall."

[6] The Wildenstein invoice to the Kress Foundation for 16 items, including this painting, is dated 23 June 1949 (copy in NGA curatorial files, see also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1375).