The Betrayal of Christ; and The Way to Calvary

Simone di Filippo Benvenuti, the son of a cobbler, was apparently a pupil of the Bolognese painter Dalmasio di Jacopo di Scannabecchi di Dalmasio, who married his sister in 1350 and died in 1372. His name, Simone dei Crocifissi, is due to the sequence of four major crucifixes he supplied for Bolognese churches about 1360-1365. Simone seems to have worked with Vitale da Bologna, and was himself a formative influence on his nephew, Lippo di Dalmasio. By the standards of the time Simone was a prolific artist, and he was the dominant force in Bolognese painting from the early 1360s until the time of his death in 1399. That these panels are relatively late works by Simone was recognised independently, on the basis of images, by both Professore Andrea dei Marchi and by Everett Fahy.

Judge Murnaghan assembled a substantial collection of early Italian pictures in the interwar years, a number of which are now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.