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Lot Essay
This small painting originally formed part of a series of ten panels depicting episodes from the life of Saint Catherine which were probably intended as a predella for an altarpiece commissioned in 1447 by the guild of the Pizzicaiuoli (purveyors of dry goods) for their new chapel dedicated to the Purification of the Virgin in the church of the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. The central panel of this altarpiece is likely the painting today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena (fig. 1). Six oblong panels of saints, four of which survive (Aartsbischoppelijk Museum, Utrecht and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection) as well as a Crucifixion (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) have also frequently been associated with this commission. The Pizzicaiuoli manufactured candles, which they distributed during the celebrations for the feast of the Purification (February 2). The altar played a central role in these festivities – an all-night vigil was held around it on the eve of the feast and it served as the starting point of the procession the following morning.
The contract for the commission survives and stipulates that the altarpiece was to be completed by All Saints’ Day (November 1) 1449. The altarpiece was to include both ‘figuris et storiis,’ which suggests both full-size figures and narrative scenes like those found in a predella were intended. Despite the apparent specificity of the original contract, there has been active scholarly debate about the dating of the Saint Catherine series and whether they should be associated with the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece or another work. Three different theories have been advanced regarding the reconstruction of the altarpiece. The earliest hypothesis, first put forward by John Pope-Hennessy in 1938, rejects the association between the Saint Catherine series and the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece entirely, suggesting instead that these panels would have surrounded an image of Saint Catherine. This idea was equally supported by Federico Zeri and Elizabeth E Gardner (1980), who considered it possible the central painting is the one now at the Harvard Art Museums (fig. 2), Pope-Hennessy and Laurence B. Kanter (1987) and Miklós Boskovits and Serena Padovani (1990).
In 1947, Pope-Hennessy offered a second suggestion, proposing that the Saint Catherine series may have been painted for the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece but that they were later additions due to Catherine’s depiction with halos rather than rays, which was typical in Sienese painting prior to her canonization in 1461. Pope-Hennessy’s suggestion was subsequently endorsed by Carl Brandon Strehlke (1988) and Andrew Ladis (1995). This theory is of particular interest because it is known that, in 1462, the guild of the Speziali ordered just such a change be made to a 1426 altarpiece by Giovanni di Paolo in San Domenico, Siena, in which one of the saints was replaced with an image of Saint Catherine, possibly the work in Cambridge (see C.B. Strehlke, in Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420-1500, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1988-1989, p. 220). As Strehlke notes, it’s entirely conceivable the Pizzicaiuoli equally chose to update their altarpiece’s predella around this time as well. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece did ultimately include a series of ten panels depicting the life of Saint Catherine. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the Abate Carli penned a detailed description of the then-dismembered altarpiece. In addition to the central panel, Carli describes ‘Ten very small paintings [that] depict the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, Saint Catherine giving her robe to a poor man, the Blessed Raymond writing her revelation, the saint speaking to the pope (with cardinals dressed in red, Christ giving her Communion, the saint curing a sick woman, her death, three saints giving her the habit, the Exchange of Hearts, the Stigmatization’ as well as a ‘Crucifixion of the Lord’ and ‘six small, oblong panels’ of saints (quoted in Strehlke, op. cit., p. 219).
A third group of scholars has proposed that the Saint Catherine series not only formed part of the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece but they were part of the artist’s original program. This hypothesis was first offered by Cesare Brandi (1947; 1949) and has been endorsed by Gertrude Coor (1959), Elizabeth Ourusoff de Fernandez-Gimenez (1967), H.W. van Os (1971), Keith Christiansen (1990) and, most recently, Andrea De Marchi (2012). According to a reconstruction proposed by van Os and later supported by Christiansen, the oblong panels of saints would have originally flanked the central Purification panel.
Catherine died in Rome on 29 April 1380. Like Christ (and Saint Francis), she was only thirty-three years of age, which logically invited comparisons with Him. In fact, her dying words are said to have been those of Christ on the cross. Even before her early death, she had prepared for the day by obtaining indulgences from Pope Gregory XI and his successor, Urban VI. Early sources relay that at the moment of her death, as seen in this painting, only her closest followers were present. However, they also emphasize that, in her final moments, she prayed before a cross and received Communion. A tonsured monk right of center can be seen holding a chalice and paten, though a cross is entirely absent. The right quarter of the painting has been made up, which Strehlke (op. cit., p. 220) points to as evidence that it may originally have had another scene contiguous to it on the right. It is unfortunately not known whether the restored portion follows the painting’s original composition or whether it would originally have included a figure holding a cross. The monk who raises his arms appears to be based on the one at center in Giotto’s Death of Saint Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence.
The present painting is the only surviving work associated with the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece to remain in private hands. In addition to the afore-mentioned central panel in Siena, the oblong panels of saints in Utrecht and New York and the Crucifixion in Amsterdam, the nine other predella panels are today divided between the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. Though widely dispersed today, the majority of the predella panels remained together through the early decades of the twentieth century.
The altarpiece appears to have remained in situ until at least 1575, when it was described by the priest Francesco Bossio in his Memoriale della visita pastorale (Archivio Arcivescovile, Siena, Ms. ‘Sante Visite,’ no. 21). At some point in the seventeenth century, and possibly by 1639, the altarpiece was relocated to the altar of Santa Cristina in the church’s cemetery. By that time Carli described the painting, various pieces were divided between the rector’s rooms and the new dormitory of the wet nurses. While the central panel was transferred from the dormitory to the Instituto di Belle Arti in the nineteenth century (and from there to the Pinacoteca), a large number of the other panels – including nine of the ten scenes from the Saint Catherine series and four of the six oblong panels of saints – were purchased in Siena by the Nazarene painter and early connoisseur of the Italian primitives, Johann Anton Ramboux (1790-1866), probably in 1838. It was in that year that Ramboux wrote to his fellow painter, Johann David Passavant (1787-1861), informing him that he had purchased a number of paintings in Siena which Ramboux was having sent to Germany. The paintings featured as separate lots in Ramboux’s 1867 sale, with each of the nine panels belonging to the Saint Catherine series finding their way into the collection of Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
At least seven of the nine panels from the Hohenzollern’sches Museum subsequently found their way into the possession of the collector/dealer Dr. Hans Wendland. It was at Wendland’s 1921 sale that four of these panels, including the present painting, were acquired by Jules Féral (d. 1949), an expert at the auction house, for the renowned collection of the Belgian engineer and financier Adolphe Stoclet. Stoclet’s collection of medieval metalwork, enamels, Pre-Columbian and Asian works of art, Egyptian sculpture and Byzantine and, perhaps most significantly, late-medieval Italian paintings was installed at Stoclet Palace, a Brussels villa designed in 1907 by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffman with interior decoration by Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff (fig. 3). Stoclet had previously acquired at least three of the other panels directly from Wendland in 1913. The present painting was sold to the Minneapolis collector John Russell Vanderlip circa 1930, while the other six (representing the paintings in Cleveland, Detroit, Madrid and two of the works in New York) remained in the Stoclet collection until his daughter, Michèle Stoclet sold them to the New York dealer Rudolf J. Heineman in the mid-1960s. Upon his death, Vanderlip bequeathed our painting to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in whose collection it remained until 1958.
The contract for the commission survives and stipulates that the altarpiece was to be completed by All Saints’ Day (November 1) 1449. The altarpiece was to include both ‘figuris et storiis,’ which suggests both full-size figures and narrative scenes like those found in a predella were intended. Despite the apparent specificity of the original contract, there has been active scholarly debate about the dating of the Saint Catherine series and whether they should be associated with the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece or another work. Three different theories have been advanced regarding the reconstruction of the altarpiece. The earliest hypothesis, first put forward by John Pope-Hennessy in 1938, rejects the association between the Saint Catherine series and the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece entirely, suggesting instead that these panels would have surrounded an image of Saint Catherine. This idea was equally supported by Federico Zeri and Elizabeth E Gardner (1980), who considered it possible the central painting is the one now at the Harvard Art Museums (fig. 2), Pope-Hennessy and Laurence B. Kanter (1987) and Miklós Boskovits and Serena Padovani (1990).
In 1947, Pope-Hennessy offered a second suggestion, proposing that the Saint Catherine series may have been painted for the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece but that they were later additions due to Catherine’s depiction with halos rather than rays, which was typical in Sienese painting prior to her canonization in 1461. Pope-Hennessy’s suggestion was subsequently endorsed by Carl Brandon Strehlke (1988) and Andrew Ladis (1995). This theory is of particular interest because it is known that, in 1462, the guild of the Speziali ordered just such a change be made to a 1426 altarpiece by Giovanni di Paolo in San Domenico, Siena, in which one of the saints was replaced with an image of Saint Catherine, possibly the work in Cambridge (see C.B. Strehlke, in Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420-1500, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1988-1989, p. 220). As Strehlke notes, it’s entirely conceivable the Pizzicaiuoli equally chose to update their altarpiece’s predella around this time as well. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece did ultimately include a series of ten panels depicting the life of Saint Catherine. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the Abate Carli penned a detailed description of the then-dismembered altarpiece. In addition to the central panel, Carli describes ‘Ten very small paintings [that] depict the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, Saint Catherine giving her robe to a poor man, the Blessed Raymond writing her revelation, the saint speaking to the pope (with cardinals dressed in red, Christ giving her Communion, the saint curing a sick woman, her death, three saints giving her the habit, the Exchange of Hearts, the Stigmatization’ as well as a ‘Crucifixion of the Lord’ and ‘six small, oblong panels’ of saints (quoted in Strehlke, op. cit., p. 219).
A third group of scholars has proposed that the Saint Catherine series not only formed part of the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece but they were part of the artist’s original program. This hypothesis was first offered by Cesare Brandi (1947; 1949) and has been endorsed by Gertrude Coor (1959), Elizabeth Ourusoff de Fernandez-Gimenez (1967), H.W. van Os (1971), Keith Christiansen (1990) and, most recently, Andrea De Marchi (2012). According to a reconstruction proposed by van Os and later supported by Christiansen, the oblong panels of saints would have originally flanked the central Purification panel.
Catherine died in Rome on 29 April 1380. Like Christ (and Saint Francis), she was only thirty-three years of age, which logically invited comparisons with Him. In fact, her dying words are said to have been those of Christ on the cross. Even before her early death, she had prepared for the day by obtaining indulgences from Pope Gregory XI and his successor, Urban VI. Early sources relay that at the moment of her death, as seen in this painting, only her closest followers were present. However, they also emphasize that, in her final moments, she prayed before a cross and received Communion. A tonsured monk right of center can be seen holding a chalice and paten, though a cross is entirely absent. The right quarter of the painting has been made up, which Strehlke (op. cit., p. 220) points to as evidence that it may originally have had another scene contiguous to it on the right. It is unfortunately not known whether the restored portion follows the painting’s original composition or whether it would originally have included a figure holding a cross. The monk who raises his arms appears to be based on the one at center in Giotto’s Death of Saint Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence.
The present painting is the only surviving work associated with the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece to remain in private hands. In addition to the afore-mentioned central panel in Siena, the oblong panels of saints in Utrecht and New York and the Crucifixion in Amsterdam, the nine other predella panels are today divided between the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. Though widely dispersed today, the majority of the predella panels remained together through the early decades of the twentieth century.
The altarpiece appears to have remained in situ until at least 1575, when it was described by the priest Francesco Bossio in his Memoriale della visita pastorale (Archivio Arcivescovile, Siena, Ms. ‘Sante Visite,’ no. 21). At some point in the seventeenth century, and possibly by 1639, the altarpiece was relocated to the altar of Santa Cristina in the church’s cemetery. By that time Carli described the painting, various pieces were divided between the rector’s rooms and the new dormitory of the wet nurses. While the central panel was transferred from the dormitory to the Instituto di Belle Arti in the nineteenth century (and from there to the Pinacoteca), a large number of the other panels – including nine of the ten scenes from the Saint Catherine series and four of the six oblong panels of saints – were purchased in Siena by the Nazarene painter and early connoisseur of the Italian primitives, Johann Anton Ramboux (1790-1866), probably in 1838. It was in that year that Ramboux wrote to his fellow painter, Johann David Passavant (1787-1861), informing him that he had purchased a number of paintings in Siena which Ramboux was having sent to Germany. The paintings featured as separate lots in Ramboux’s 1867 sale, with each of the nine panels belonging to the Saint Catherine series finding their way into the collection of Karl Anton, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
At least seven of the nine panels from the Hohenzollern’sches Museum subsequently found their way into the possession of the collector/dealer Dr. Hans Wendland. It was at Wendland’s 1921 sale that four of these panels, including the present painting, were acquired by Jules Féral (d. 1949), an expert at the auction house, for the renowned collection of the Belgian engineer and financier Adolphe Stoclet. Stoclet’s collection of medieval metalwork, enamels, Pre-Columbian and Asian works of art, Egyptian sculpture and Byzantine and, perhaps most significantly, late-medieval Italian paintings was installed at Stoclet Palace, a Brussels villa designed in 1907 by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffman with interior decoration by Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff (fig. 3). Stoclet had previously acquired at least three of the other panels directly from Wendland in 1913. The present painting was sold to the Minneapolis collector John Russell Vanderlip circa 1930, while the other six (representing the paintings in Cleveland, Detroit, Madrid and two of the works in New York) remained in the Stoclet collection until his daughter, Michèle Stoclet sold them to the New York dealer Rudolf J. Heineman in the mid-1960s. Upon his death, Vanderlip bequeathed our painting to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in whose collection it remained until 1958.