The Prophet Jeremiah

Pancrazio Iovetti’s Prophet Jeremiah was first published in 1932 by Bernard Berenson who united it with another bust roundel depicting the Prophet Daniel (present location unknown), and with two rectangular, full-length panels of Saint John the Baptist and Saint James, last recorded in the Salocchi collection, Florence around 1960 (op. cit.). Berenson gave the four panels to Pancrazio, but referred to him as ‘Panciatico di Antonello da Calvi’, Antonello being the artist’s father and Calvi being his hometown. The misnomer ‘Panciatico’ appears to have originated from the misreading of a document, dated 30 November 1477, pertaining to the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine altarpiece painted for the church of Santa Maria della Verità, Viterbo, now in the town’s Museo Civico (S. Santolini, I pittori del sacro: P. e Rinaldo Iacovetti da Calvi: una famiglia di pittori Umbri tra XV e XVI secolo, Arrone, 2001, p. 49). Pancrazio had become a pupil of the Florentine painter Benozzo Gozzoli when the latter was working in Umbria. Berenson dated the four panels to 1471, a moment in which, he noted, Pancrazio was much closer in style to Benozzo. He also indicated the curious detail of Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ecce Virgho choncipiet et (‘Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.’ ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’; VII.14), words which in fact belonged to Isaiah, rather than to Jeremiah. Everett Fahy considered the Prophet Jeremiah to be by Benozzo Gozzoli himself, classifying it as such in his archive and noting that the attribution had been endorsed by Andrea De Marchi in correspondence from 2006 (Fondazione Federico Zeri fototeca, Università di Bologna, no. 107192). The Prophet Daniel does not appear in Fahy’s records and the two full-length panels are included under ‘Florence, 1450-1500: Unknown Saints’. While Zeri’s opinion on the attribution of the present prophet is not cited in the archive, the three other panels do appear, each with an attribution to Domenico di Zanobi, formerly known as the Master of the Johnson Nativity (ibid., nos. 13487, 13488 and 13490). More recently, however, Carl Strehlke restored the Saint Jeremiah to Pancrazio Iovetti (private communication with the owner). Christopher Daly notes a marked similarity between the four panels published by Berenson and a newly discovered fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, comparing the fresco's Saint Roch with the two Salocchi saints (private communication, dated 20 May 2021). He believes the fresco is likely to be by the same hand, a painter he has named the Master of Santa Maria Novella, to whom he has also given the Bishop Saint and Saint Jerome pair, which sold at Cambi, Genoa, 30 May 2018, lot 193.