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Lot Essay
Bernardo Daddi was the most lyrical and refined of the early followers of Giotto, memorable as a colorist and for the consistent delicacy of his forms. He was arguably the dominant artistic personality in Florence in the last two decades of his life. These panels, depicting Saint John the Evangelist and a bishop saint, possibly identifiable as Nicholas of Bari, are fragments of Daddi’s signed and dated altarpiece, painted in the 1348, last year of his life, for the church of San Giorgio a Ruballa at Bagno a Ripoli near Florence (fig. 1; now Courtauld Institute of Art, Gambier Parry Collection, London). They originally constituted two of five sections of the altarpiece’s predella, along with the Saints Lucy and Catherine of Alexandria sold in these Rooms in 2022 (fig. 2; 9 June 2022, lot 35). As their punched border indicates, the present Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Nicholas of Bari (?), were originally parts of a single panel and would have been the fourth element from the left in the predella.
The attribution to Daddi was accepted unanimously by early scholars, including Roger Fry, William Suida, Osvald Sirén, Lionello Venturi, Paul Schubring, Raimond van Marle and Bernard Berenson (loc. cit.). In 1947, Richard Offner gave it to an 'Assistant of Daddi', but subsequently regarded it as from Daddi's studio (loc. cit.). Others meanwhile, including Frederick Antal, Karla Steinweg, Bernhardt Degenhart and Benjamin Schmitt, Luciano Bellosi, Richard Fremantle and Federico Zeri regarded it as substantially autograph (loc. cit.), a view championed by Miklós Boskovits (loc. cit.). Publishing the present two panels and the Saints Lucy and Catherine in 2014, Ada Labriola listed them as Daddi and workshop (loc. cit.), a hypothesis refuted by Laurence B. Kanter (private communication 8 December 2023) and Carl Brandon Strehlke (unpublished manuscript, 2012).
In 1935, van Marle correctly associated these panels and the Saints Lucy and Catherine with one of Saints Margaret and Agnes in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg (inv. no. 452). Offner in 1958 identified a panel of the Madonna and Child with four Angels, then in the possession of Miss R. Lawrence Jones, as the central element of the predella, and recognized that all four panels were components of the San Giorgio a Ruballa polytych: the missing panel, with Saints Gregory and an Evangelist, then in the Stanley Simon collection, New York, was later identified by Zeri in 1971.
Offner persuasively noted that the paired saints of the predella's lateral section echo the four pairs of full-length saints flanking the central compartment of the altarpiece which depicted a Crucifixion. In the main tier, Daddi used profiles and near profiles to almost architectural effect, linking the various elements of the design and bridging the obvious differences in scale between the main panel and those at either side. The intelligence that lay behind the overall design is demonstrated by the way the heads in these panels, and their companions from the predella, are seen at angles, echoing those of the lateral saints in the main tier. Above all though, it is Daddi’s use of color that united the components of the altarpiece. Blue, the most expensive pigment of the time, has a dominant role: six of the eight full-length saints are dressed at least in part in blue – sometimes of course for proper iconographic reasons – and the color is also used for some of the soldiers in the Crucifixion. Saint Catherine's position as a princess is emphasized by the elegant brocade of her dress. This echoes the brocaded mantles of Saints Bartholomew and Stephen in the upper tier and, as the artist and his patrons would have been well aware, was of a type imported from the Near East, where it would have been manufactured.
The collection of Michel van Gelder was, after that of Stoclet, among the most ambitious assemblages of early pictures and works of art formed in Belgium in the early twentieth century. In the Château Zeecrabbe, the dining room contained Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century pictures, but two rooms were dedicated to early Italian pictures, a third, the 'salle gothique' to early Netherlandish pictures and a fourth to the seventeenth-century Dutch masters.
The attribution to Daddi was accepted unanimously by early scholars, including Roger Fry, William Suida, Osvald Sirén, Lionello Venturi, Paul Schubring, Raimond van Marle and Bernard Berenson (loc. cit.). In 1947, Richard Offner gave it to an 'Assistant of Daddi', but subsequently regarded it as from Daddi's studio (loc. cit.). Others meanwhile, including Frederick Antal, Karla Steinweg, Bernhardt Degenhart and Benjamin Schmitt, Luciano Bellosi, Richard Fremantle and Federico Zeri regarded it as substantially autograph (loc. cit.), a view championed by Miklós Boskovits (loc. cit.). Publishing the present two panels and the Saints Lucy and Catherine in 2014, Ada Labriola listed them as Daddi and workshop (loc. cit.), a hypothesis refuted by Laurence B. Kanter (private communication 8 December 2023) and Carl Brandon Strehlke (unpublished manuscript, 2012).
In 1935, van Marle correctly associated these panels and the Saints Lucy and Catherine with one of Saints Margaret and Agnes in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg (inv. no. 452). Offner in 1958 identified a panel of the Madonna and Child with four Angels, then in the possession of Miss R. Lawrence Jones, as the central element of the predella, and recognized that all four panels were components of the San Giorgio a Ruballa polytych: the missing panel, with Saints Gregory and an Evangelist, then in the Stanley Simon collection, New York, was later identified by Zeri in 1971.
Offner persuasively noted that the paired saints of the predella's lateral section echo the four pairs of full-length saints flanking the central compartment of the altarpiece which depicted a Crucifixion. In the main tier, Daddi used profiles and near profiles to almost architectural effect, linking the various elements of the design and bridging the obvious differences in scale between the main panel and those at either side. The intelligence that lay behind the overall design is demonstrated by the way the heads in these panels, and their companions from the predella, are seen at angles, echoing those of the lateral saints in the main tier. Above all though, it is Daddi’s use of color that united the components of the altarpiece. Blue, the most expensive pigment of the time, has a dominant role: six of the eight full-length saints are dressed at least in part in blue – sometimes of course for proper iconographic reasons – and the color is also used for some of the soldiers in the Crucifixion. Saint Catherine's position as a princess is emphasized by the elegant brocade of her dress. This echoes the brocaded mantles of Saints Bartholomew and Stephen in the upper tier and, as the artist and his patrons would have been well aware, was of a type imported from the Near East, where it would have been manufactured.
The collection of Michel van Gelder was, after that of Stoclet, among the most ambitious assemblages of early pictures and works of art formed in Belgium in the early twentieth century. In the Château Zeecrabbe, the dining room contained Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century pictures, but two rooms were dedicated to early Italian pictures, a third, the 'salle gothique' to early Netherlandish pictures and a fourth to the seventeenth-century Dutch masters.