Scholarly Article

Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, c. 1345

Part of Online Edition: Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Miklós Boskovits

Publication History

Published online March 21, 2016

A woman cradling a baby boy sits on an arched throne, which is surrounded by twenty men, women, and winged angels against a glimmering gold background in this vertical painting. The panel on which it is painted comes to a pointed arch at the top, and a gold, carved, twisting column frames the scene to each side. Most the people have pale skin faintly tinged with green and all have bright gold, plate-like halos. The woman, Mary, wears a forest-green, gold-edged robe covering her head, shoulders, and body over a peach-colored dress, which is decorated with gold, geometric designs. She has wavy, strawberry-blond hair, a straight nose, wide, narrowed eyes, and her pink lips are closed. Her body faces us but she looks down and to our right, toward a pair of women on that side of the throne. The baby looks in the same direction, and has short, blond, curly hair, pudgy cheeks, a wide, bare chest, and scrawny arms. The fabric wrapped around his waist and legs shimmers from canary yellow to sky blue, and is crimson red on the underside. He reaches one arm across his body to our right, toward a small gray bird held by one of two women standing next to the throne. Those women and the others around the throne are smaller in scale than Mary. Their bodies face the throne, and most look up toward it. They all wear gold-trimmed robes in ultramarine blue, ruby red, emerald green, pale pink, fawn brown, ivory white, or golden yellow. Each person holds one object, including a palm frond, flute, ring, ointment jar, wooden cross, sword, lamb, or a book. One man, to our lower left, wears a furry garment under his robe and holds a red cross and a scroll. Another man, to our right, holds a book and a large, gold skeleton key. Even smaller in scale, two winged angels play instruments in the lower center, at the base of the throne. Finally, to each side of the throne, over the saints surrounding it, there are two pairs of two angels. In each of that final pair of angels, one is painted entirely in cobalt blue and the other entirely in scarlet red. Crimson-red fabric embellished with gold, stylized leaf patterns hangs behind Mary, on the throne. — Bernardo Daddi, Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, c. 1345, tempera on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.61

Entry

The painting, which formed the central panel of a portable triptych for domestic devotion, represents the Madonna and Child, in larger proportions than the other figures in the composition, seated on a raised throne. The throne is in the form of a tabernacle or ciborium; its crocketed triangular gable is framed by the inner trefoil arch of the panel, and its inner canopy is decorated with an azure star-studded “sky.” Mary supports her child with both hands. The Christ child is holding a fruit, perhaps a pomegranate, in his left hand and is stretching out his right to take the small bird perched on a finger of the angel closest to him. The throne is flanked on both sides by a red seraph and an azure cherub and, below these, by two pairs of angels, of which the one to the far left plays a shawm — the medieval precursor of the oboe — and that on the opposite side a psaltery; the concert of angels is completed by the portative organ and the viol played by two angels kneeling in the foreground. Of the four saints to the sides of the throne we can identify, to the left, Apollonia, with a tooth in her hand, and, more doubtfully, Catherine of Alexandria to the far right, while the six saints in the foreground are Lucy, John the Baptist, Andrew, Paul, Peter, and Agnes.

The painting has always been recognized as an autograph work by Bernardo Daddi, to whom Richard Offner (as cited in Sinibaldi and Brunetti 1943) was the first to attribute it. Subsequently, however, the same scholar (1958) conjectured the hand of assistants in its execution, but this proposal has found little or no support in the more recent literature. Indeed, the only interventions alien to Daddi in the execution are those of modern restorers. Stylistic affinities have been observed between the panel in the National Gallery of Art and the triptych dated 1338 now in the Seilern collection of the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London, and there are also various shared features of ornamentation. Thus, some of the motifs punched in the gold ground of the Washington painting are present both in the Seilern triptych and in other dated works by Daddi of the following year. Similar, too, are the decoration of the cloth of honor and some aspects of the garments.

The details in question suggest for our panel a date either close to or probably slightly after 1340. In this phase the artist tended to add more spaciousness to his compositions, while his figures gain in grandeur thanks both to their expanded forms and the amplitude of the mantles that envelop them. At the same time, however, they become more relaxed in posture, more spontaneous in gesture . Not only spectators but participants in the action, they confer a certain air of naturalness on the scene. Typical examples of this interpretive approach are the female saint in our panel, who with a friendly, caressing gesture rests one hand on Mary’s throne; the Christ child, who twists impulsively away from his mother to grasp the small bird that the angel, smiling, is offering to him; and the two female saints portrayed below this angel and the two angels on the other side of the throne, who exchange glances, commenting in silent complicity on the child’s joyful reaction. Other characteristic aspects of this phase in Daddi’s art are a tendency toward simplification of the drawing: for example, the mantle of Saint Agnes that falls in an unbroken perpendicular line from head to ground; the preference for faces drawn in profile; and the clarity of the compositional structure. The modeling, too, is softer than in Daddi’s previous works, dated before c. 1335, anticipating developments that would be expressed more powerfully in the last years of the artist’s life.

Technical Summary

The painting was executed on a single plank of wood, 2.6 cm thick with vertical grain. The outer edges of the wooden support and of the engaged frame, which were originally covered with gesso, have been scraped and smoothed down. Long, red, concave channels were cut into the outer edges on both sides of the frame, from the base to the spring of the arch. A continuous layer of gesso was applied to the front of the panel, including the colonettes and molding, and to the back of the panel, which was then covered with dark red paint. Areas to be gilded were prepared with red bole. The gold ground was embellished with punch marks in the halos and around the edges of the arched termination of the painted surface. The figures were placed on the panel by incising their outlines into the wet gesso. The paint was applied with discrete brushstrokes, with green underpainting in the flesh areas. The trim on the robes was mordant gilded.

The panel has not been thinned and retains its original reverse coating. In spite of the coating, the panel has a convex warp. A blackened hollow area at the bottom of the frame on the left side may be the result of a candle burn. By the mid-1930s, the panel appeared much darkened by dust and opacified varnishes, and the face of the Virgin had been heavily inpainted, while some areas of the painted surface appeared worn. Mario Modestini treated the panel in Italy in 1948. The paint layer is somewhat abraded, especially in the Madonna’s face and the Christ child. There is some inpainting in the shadowed portions of some of the figures’ blue robes, in the profile of Saint Paul, and in the face of the female saint (Margaret?) standing close to the throne on the right side.