Saint Paul and a Group of Worshippers, 1333

The panel, with the frontal figure of the standing saint, who is not accompanied to the sides by a series of superimposed narrative scenes of his legend as in so-called biographical icons, belongs to a type of image that began to appear in Florence and in other cities in Italy in the thirteenth century and remained widespread throughout the following century: narrow and elongated in format, these paintings were probably intended to be hung against a pillar in a church.[1]  [1]
On the typology and function of panels with the figure of a single standing saint, cf. Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 5, Bernardo Daddi and His Circle, ed. Miklós Boskovits, Ada Labriola, and Martina Ingen­daay Rodio, new ed. (Florence, 2001), 222 n.1. Paintings of this kind, however, were more frequently painted directly onto the pillar or onto the wall of the church with the more economical technique of fresco.[2]  [2]
Pillar frescoes with figures of saints, the patrons of a family or guild, are common in fourteenth-century Florence; we may cite those in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore and in Orsanmichele. See Walter Paatz and Elisabeth Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz: Ein kunst­geschichtliches Handbuch, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1940 – ​1953), 3:625 – ​629; and Diane Finiello Zervas, ed., Orsanmichele a Firenze, 2 vols., Mirabilia Italiae (Modena, 1996), 1:549 – ​557.
Panels with single figures of saints were realized either with a votive intention, as for instance the one by Daddi himself representing Saint Catherine of Alexandria and a kneeling donor, now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence,[3]  [3]
See Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 5, Bernardo Daddi and His Circle, ed. Miklós Boskovits, Ada Labriola, and Martina Ingendaay Rodio, new ed. (Florence, 2001), 221 – ​226. The painting’s votive character is suggested by the presence of the donor as devotee — ​​evidently a member of the Medici family, as is indicated by the well-known family coat of arms at the foot of the panel. or as an expression of the cult of a confraternity or a religious lay company that met to pray and sing before the image at particular times. Both the number of the minuscule kneeling figures below the saint — ​​six men and six women — ​​and the absence of any name or coat of arms of a donor family make it likely that a confraternity commissioned our panel.[4]  [4]
For more on this question, see Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, Population and Social Structure (New York and London, 1982); John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994). An appendix in Henderson lists confraternities active in Florence between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries. He included among them a Compagnia di San Paolo, founded in 1434, which used to meet in the Badia Fiorentina, and a Compagnia di San Paolo dei Sarti, founded in 1435, whose meeting place is unknown. One should not forget, however, that confraternities were often active many years or even decades before their first documentation.

The composition of the painting is decidedly archaic: the device of placing the inscription of the name of the saint over a red groundGround
 The layer or layers used to prepare the support to hold the paint. against the gold on both sides, divided into two syllables by the figure, is especially found in paintings dating to the last decades of the thirteenth and early decades of the fourteenth centuries.[5]  [5]
Examples of a bilateral placing of the inscription include the thirteenth-century panel of Saint Luke and two devotees attributed to the Magdalen Master, now in the Uffizi, Florence (no. 3493), and various Florentine paintings of the early Trecento, such as Giotto’s polyptych in the church of the Badia (now displayed in the Uffizi) or the panel of the Vicchio-­Paris Master representing Saint Felix, formerly in the Cini collection in Venice; cf. Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 6, Following of the St. Cecilia Master, Lippus Benivieni, Master of the Fogg Pietà (New York, 1956), 116. Also archaizing seems to be the exclusive use of decorations incised by hand, without any punched motifs, in the ornament of the halo [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Tracing of halo, Bernardo Daddi, Saint Paul and a Group of Worshippers, 1333, tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection. (Joanna Dunn, National Gallery of Art, Washington): in the years in which Bernardo painted this panel, major Florentine painters preferred to use the more rapid and labor-saving as well as more showy method of decorations impressed with punches in the gold ground. On the other hand, ornamental motifs very similar to those that decorate the halo of Saint Paul in this panel are also found in the lateral panels of the polyptychPolyptych
 Type of object with several panels, usually an altarpiece, although it may also fulfil other functions. The polyptych normally consists of a central panel with an even number of side-panels, which are sometimes hinged to fold. Although in principle every object with two panels or more may be called a polyptych, the word is normally used as a general term for anything larger than a triptych. As with diptychs and triptychs, the size and material can vary. —Victor M. Schmidt, Grove Art © Oxford University Press painted by Bernardo Daddi for the Ospedale della Misericordia in Prato only a few years later.[6]  [6]
In the polyptych in Prato — ​​probably dating to after 1334, when Fra Francesco di Tieri became rector of the hospital — ​​the particular foliate motif in the halo of Saint Catherine (further embellished in the external and internal circles with tiny motifs impressed with metal tools) seems virtually identical with the decoration of the halo of Saint Paul in the National Gallery of Art. The year 1337, when Bernardo Daddi was entrusted with the commission to paint the altarpiece of the Cappella del Sacro Cingolo in what is now the cathedral (then pieve) of Prato, should be considered a probable terminus ante quem for the hospital polyptych; cf. Richard Offner, Miklós Boskovits, and Enrica Neri Lusanna, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 3, The Works of Bernardo Daddi, new ed. (Florence, 1989), 45 n.53; Richard Offner and Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 4, Bernardo Daddi, His Shop and Following, new ed. (Florence, 1991), 124. Bernardo also used motifs incised by hand in the halo of a panel of Saint Catherine, its present whereabouts unknown, dated 1333 (the painting was auctioned at Christie’s, New York, January 24, 2003, lot 25); see also Offner (1991, 102 – ​104), though here small punched motifs also appear in the external and internal circles of the halo. So the incised decoration, if it is not a deliberate archaism, is at any rate somewhat demodé, though it would recur throughout the painter’s work. Clearly, this archaic character of the image, the form itself of the panel with the triangular gable (without the inscribed Gothic arch and other decorative elements that usually embellished painted panels from the 1330s on), and the severity of expression of the frontally standing saint misled art historians, who failed for so long to recognize the master who painted it. Osvald Sirén’s attribution to the Master of Santa Cecilia, or to Buonamico Buffalmacco, with whom the art historian thought he could identify the anonymous master (1919, 1920), was the first attempt to establish an authorship.[7]  [7]
Osvald Sirén, “A Great Contemporary of Giotto, 1,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 35 (1919): 228–230, 236; Osvald Sirén, “The Buffalmaco Hypothesis: Some Additional Remarks,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 37 (1920): 183. Raimond van Marle (1924) accepted his reference to the Master of Santa Cecilia, but Richard Offner (1927, 1931, 1947) firmly rejected it, though without suggesting an alternative name.[8]  [8]
Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 3, The Florentine School of the 14th Century (The Hague, 1924), 276; Richard Offner, “A Great Madonna by the St. Cecilia Master,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 50 (1927): 97; Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 1, The St. Cecilia Master and His Circle (New York, 1931), 17; Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 5, Bernardo Daddi and His Circle (New York, 1947), 7, 39, 42 n. 1, 94 n. 1. By 1931, Bernard BerensonBerenson, Bernard
 (June 26, 1865–October 6, 1959) Art historian and connoisseur. Son of a Lithuanian timber merchant who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1875, he was educated at the Latin School, Boston, and at Harvard University, where he studied Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and German. In an unsuccessful application for a traveling fellowship to Europe, he wrote, ‘Art prevails in this programme because it is there that I feel myself weakest. One can study literature here . . . but art not at all.’ On his subsequent visit to Europe in 1885, financed by friends, his rapid visual self-education led to the decision to settle in Italy and to devote his life to the study of Italian art. —William Mostyn-Owen, Grove Art © Oxford University Press had given the painting to “a contemporary and close follower of Giotto,” and George Martin Richter was “inclined to feel [the painting] is too good for Maso, and [thought it] could be by Orcagna.”[9]  [9]
These opinions are recorded by Duveen Brothers, Inc.; see cable, November 3, 1931, Duveen’s London office to Duveen’s Paris office; cable, November 4, 1931, Paris to London; and letter, July 9, 1935, Duveen’s New York office to Edward Fowles in the Paris office (Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: reel 101, box 246, folder 4; copies in NGA curatorial files). I wish to thank Anne Halpern in the National Gallery of Art department of curatorial records and files for this information. Lionello Venturi’s alternative proposal (1931, 1933) of the authorship of Maso di Banco was probably formulated after the restoration commissioned by Duveen Brothers, Inc., a treatment that attenuated the grandeur and softened the rather rough character of the original image.[10]  [10]
Lionello Venturi, Pitture italiane in America (Milan, 1931), no. 27; Lionello Venturi, Italian Paintings in America, trans. Countess Vanden Heuvel and Charles Marriott, 3 vols. (New York and Milan, 1933), 1: no. 34. The restoration was done in 1928; see cables, April 30 and May 3, 1928, Duveen’s New York office to the Paris office (see note 9 for citation). Again, Anne Halpern kindly provided this information. Wilhelm Valentiner (1933, 1935) accepted the proposed attribution to Maso, as did Luigi Coletti (1942, 1946), at least initially; Ugo Galetti and Ettore Camesasca (1951) endorsed it, and Walter Paatz reported it skeptically (1941) before the later literature jettisoned it for good.[11]  [11]
Wilhelm R. Valentiner, “Die Leihausstellung frühitalienischer Malerei in Detroit,” Pantheon 12 (1933): 238 – ​239; Wilhelm R. Valentiner, “Giovanni Balducci a Firenze e una scultura di Maso,” L’Arte 38 (1935): 29; Luigi Coletti, “Contributo al problema Maso – ​Giottino,” Emporium 98 (1942): 463 – ​464; Luigi Coletti, I Primitivi, vol. 2, I senesi e i giotteschi (Novara, 1946), xli; Ugo Galetti and Ettore Camesasca, Enciclopedia della pittura italiana, 3 vols. (Milan, 1951), 2:1604, 1606; Walter Paatz and Elisabeth Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz: Ein kunst­geschichtliches Handbuch, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1940 – ​1953), 2 (1941): 51. Emilio Cecchi gave the panel to Giotto (Florentine, c. 1265 - 1337) himself (1937). The more cautious definition “School (or follower) of Giotto,” with which the painting was first labeled in its present location (“The Mellon Gift” 1937), was promulgated by the earlier catalogs of the National Gallery of Art (NGA 1941, NGA 1949) and by the volume Duveen Pictures (1941), in which an attribution with a question mark to Giotto himself was hazarded; the postwar studies also abandoned it (Salvini 1952, Vigorelli and Baccheschi 1966).[12]  [12]
“The Mellon Gift: A First Official List,” Art News 35 (1937): 15; Emilio Cecchi, Giotto (Milan, 1937), 174; National Gallery of Art, Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture (Washington, DC, 1941), 80 – ​81; National Gallery of Art, Paintings and Sculpture from the Mellon Collection (Washington, DC, 1949), 7; Duveen Brothers, Duveen Pictures in Public Collections of America (New York, 1941), no. 12; Roberto Salvini, ed., Tutta la pittura di Giotto, Biblioteca d’arte Rizzoli (Milan, 1952), 52; Giancarlo Vigorelli and Edi Baccheschi, L’opera completa di Giotto (Milan, 1966), 122 – ​123. David George Wilkins (1969, 1985), however, did not exclude the possibility that it might have been “a product of the late Giotto workshop,” while Arno Preiser (1973) preferred to speak vaguely of “Florentine school.”[13]  [13]
David G. Wilkins, Maso di Banco: A Florentine Artist of the Early Trecento (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1969), 214; David G. Wilkins, Maso di Banco: A Florentine Artist of the Early Trecento (New York, 1985), 209; Arno Preiser, Das Entstehen und die Entwicklung der Predella in der italienischen Malerei (Hildesheim and New York, 1973), 37 – ​38. Richter (1941) returned to the old identification proposed by Sirén and conjectured an attribution to Buffalmacco, a point of view that remained without any following.[14]  [14]
George Martin Richter, “The New National Gallery in Washington,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 78 (1941): 177 n. 3. So, too, did the hypothesis of Richard Offner (1958), who compared the panel in the Gallery with four lateral panels of a dismantled polyptych in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence (nos. 8704, 8705, 8708, 8709), subsequently given to Lorenzo Monaco (Florentine, c. 1370 - c. 1425) by Federico Zeri and by most modern authorities.[15]  [15]
Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 8, Workshop of Bernardo Daddi (New York, 1958), 46 n. 2. On the problem relating to the dismantled polyptych from the Ardinghelli Chapel in the Church of the Carmine, documented between 1398 and 1400, cf. the contribution by Angelo Tartuferi, in Daniela Parenti and Angelo Tartuferi, eds., Lorenzo Monaco: Dalla tradizione giottesca al Rinascimento (Florence, 2006), 120 – ​127. Berenson, in letters to Edward Fowles and Joseph Duveen, had altered his opinion in favor of Daddi by 1935, and the dealer recorded it on the 1936 bill of sale to the Mellon Trust while describing the painting as “attributed to Giotto.”[16]  [16]
Letters (see note 9 for citation): Bernard Berenson to Edward Fowles, July 13, 1935, in which Berenson wrote, “This attribution [to Bernardo Daddi] I came to years ago, and it has stood the test of time — ​​for me”; Berenson to Joseph Duveen, October 20, 1935; Berenson to Joseph Duveen, October 15, 1936. Information kindly supplied by Anne Halpern. For the bill of sale, see Provenance, note 6. Coletti (1950) reproposed Daddi’s authorship, perhaps independently and with considerable caution.[17]  [17]
Luigi Coletti, “Il Maestro colorista di Assisi,” Critica d’arte 8–9 (1949–1950): 447. This view finally achieved almost unanimous acceptance after being cited in the posthumous edition of Berenson’s Lists (1963) and then in the catalogs of the Gallery from 1965 onwards.[18]  [18]
Apart from the above-cited catalogs and scholars, the following recognized, though sometimes with reservations or doubts, Bernardo Daddi as the master of the Saint Paul: Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri, Census of Pre-­Nineteenth-­Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, 1972), 63, 437, 645; Miklós Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370 – ​1400 (Florence, 1975), 22, 195 n. 47, 243 n. 201; Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 9, The Miniaturist Tendency (Florence, 1984), 71, 349 – ​350, pls. 177b, 178; Richard Offner and Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 1, The St. Cecilia Master and His Circle, new ed. (Florence, 1986), 309; Richard Offner, Miklós Boskovits, and Enrica Neri Lusanna, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 3, The Works of Bernardo Daddi, new ed. (Florence, 1989), 35 n. 15, 37, 87, 391; Richard Offner and Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 4, Bernardo Daddi, His Shop and Following, new ed. (Florence, 1991), 166 n. 3, 513; Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 5, Bernardo Daddi and His Circle, ed. Miklós Boskovits, Ada Labriola, and Martina Ingendaay Rodio, new ed. (Florence, 2001), 635; Roberta Ferrazza, “Elia Volpi e il commercio dell’arte nel primo trentennio del Novecento,” in Studi e ricerche di collezionismo e museografia, Firenze 1820 – ​1920 (Pisa, 1985), 414 n. 50; Roberta Ferrazza, Palazzo Davanzati e le collezioni di Elia Volpi (Florence, 1993), 128, 174 (repro.), 216 n. 52, 220 n. 70; Enrica Neri Lusanna, in The Martello Collection: Further Paintings, Drawings and Miniatures 13th – ​18th Centuries, ed. Miklós Boskovits (Florence, 1992), 54; Enrica Neri Lusanna, “Daddi, Bernardo,” in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (New York, 1996), 8:442; Lucia Meoni, San Felice in Piazza a Firenze (Florence, 1993), 41 fig. 27, 44; Alessandro Conti, “Maso, Roberto Longhi e la tradizione offneriana,” Prospettiva 73 – ​74 (1994): 36, 38 fig. 6, 43 n. 19; Erling S. Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting with Particular Consideration to Florence, c. 1330 – ​1430, 2 vols. (Oslo, 1994), 1:99, 108, 110 n. 174; 2: punch chart 5.3; Andrew Ladis and Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “Sculpture’s Pictorial Presence Reflections on the Tabernacles of Orsanmichele,” Studi di storia dell’arte 5 – ​6 (1994 – ​1995): 45, 49 n. 3, 53 fig. 6; Ada Labriola, “Daddi, Bernardo,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, ed. Günter Meißner, 87 vols. (Munich, 1999), 23:356; Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York, 2004), 444; Angelo Tartuferi, in Da Bernardo Daddi al Beato Angelico a Botticelli: Dipinti fiorentini del Lindenau–Museum di Altenburg, ed. Miklós Boskovits and Daniela Parenti (Florence, 2005), 70.

How, then, can this panel be inserted in the sequence of the painter’s works, assuming that the date in the inscription should be transcribed as 1333?[19]  [19]
The reading of the date as 1333 seems to be safe (but see Inscription note 1). However, as Erling S. Skaug (2008) observed, it might mean any date between January 1, 1333, and March 24, 1334. In fact, in Florentine style the year began on March 25. Skaug recalled that a big punch mark that Bernardo used in a Madonna dated August 14, 1333 (inv. no. 6170, Galleria dell’​Accademia, Florence), never appeared again in the artist’s later works and hypothesized that the punch, absent also in the Gallery's Saint Paul, might have been lost at the time of the disastrous flood in November 1333. See Erling S. Skaug, “Bernardo Daddi’s Chronology and Workshop Structure as Defined by Technical Criteria,” in Da Giotto a Botticelli: Pittura fiorentina tra gotico e rinascimento; Atti del convegno internazionale Firenze, Università degli Studi e Museo di San Marco, May 20 – ​21, 2005, ed. Francesca Pasut and Johannes Tripps (Florence, 2008), 82 – ​83. Observing the imposing figure of Saint Paul and especially his brooding face, rigidly frontal, dilated eyes, as well as the forms modeled (as the old photo testifies) with extreme delicacy, we may at first be reminded of certain paintings by Giotto himself, especially in his earlier phase. But the elements that exclude a Giottesque authorship are too many to be ignored. The proportions of the figure (in which the ratio between head and overall height of the figure lies between 8:1 and 9:1) are without parallel in Giotto’s oeuvre, with the exception of the final phase in his career, for example in the frescoes in the chapel of the Bargello, Florence, where the scenes painted by the artist (or by his pupils) are populated by very tall figures.[20]  [20]
Giovanni Previtali and Giovanna Ragionieri, Giotto e la sua bottega, ed. Alessandro Conti, 3rd ed. (Milan, 1993), 129, 348 – ​353; Janis Elliott, “The Judgement of the Commune: The Frescoes of the Magdalen Chapel in Florence,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 (1998): 509 – ​519. The subtle detailing of the garments and the saint’s furrowed brow are also quite alien to Giotto. The works most closely related to the Saint Paul in Washington are to be found, instead, in the output of Bernardo Daddi, especially among those paintings that reveal affinities with Giotto’s pupil Taddeo Gaddi, with whom Bernardo seems to have established a kind of collaborative venture around 1333 – ​1334.[21]  [21]
The composition of the small triptych with folding shutters now in the Museo del Bigallo in Florence, which bears the date 1333, is virtually replicated by Taddeo Gaddi in a work of similar structure signed and dated 1334, now in the Gemälde­galerie in Berlin (nos. 1079 – ​1081), a circumstance that has been variously interpreted. James Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1864) believed that the Florentine triptych was also painted by Taddeo, while in more recent times, once Daddi’s authorship of it was universally accepted, the inference has been drawn that a now lost prototype from the hand of Giotto (Florentine, c. 1265 - 1337) himself (Coletti 1946) or of Maso di Banco (Longhi 1959) must have existed. The present writer (Boskovits 1987; cf. also 2001), on the other hand, conjectures, if not a shared shop, then perhaps a collaboration between the two artists and a kind of commercial arrangement whereby Bernardo painted only panels for Florentine churches, and Taddeo almost exclusively frescoes. See Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1864), 1:360 – ​362; Luigi Coletti, I Primitivi, vol. 2, I senesi e i giotteschi (Novara, 1946), xliii; Roberto Longhi, “Qualità e industria in Taddeo Gaddi,” Paragone 10, no. 109 (1959): 34 – ​35; Miklós Boskovits, ed., Frühe italienische Malerei: Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Katalog der Gemälde, trans. Erich Schleier (Berlin, 1988), 50; Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 5, Bernardo Daddi and His Circle, ed. Miklós Boskovits, Ada Labriola, and Martina Ingendaay Rodio, new ed. (Florence, 2001), 12. In his cycle of frescoes in the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, Taddeo adopted extremely tall figures of powerful monumentality.[22]  [22]
On the decoration of the Baroncelli Chapel, see Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia, MO, 1982), 88–112. On the other hand, the rhythm of the draperies in the Washington panel is too refined, too static, and the chiaroscuro modeling of the forms too delicate for an artist trained exclusively in the school of Giotto. Admittedly, the physiognomic type of the saint is rather unusual in the production of Daddi’s shop;[23]  [23]
I wonder whether it was not the saint’s youthful face, with its close-trimmed beard, that prompted so acute a connoisseur as Richard Offner to compare the Saint Paul in Washington with the image of the same saint in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (inv. no. 8709), rather similar in facial type but in style clearly belonging to the last years of the fourteenth century. nonetheless a Saint Paul with a youthful face framed by a short and silky beard does occasionally appear in Daddi’s paintings dating to the early 1330s.[24]  [24]
I refer, for example, to the image of the saint that appears in the left shutter of a portable triptych in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts (no. 18.33), dated 1334. The delicately calligraphic pictorial modeling of the face can be compared with that of the frontal bust of Christ in the votive Madonna, now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, executed in February 1335.[25]  [25]
Richard Offner and Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, sec. 3, vol. 4, Bernardo Daddi, His Shop and Following, new ed. (Florence, 1991), 192 – ​200. The date indicated in the inscription below, February 25, 1334, is in Florentine style, which calculated the year as beginning on March 25. The soft fabric of our saint’s mantle, breaking into sweeping folds that further emphasize the figure’s corporeal substance, seems very similar to that presented by Daddi in the already cited figure of Saint Catherine, dated 1333.[26]  [26]
See note 3 above. In conclusion, that Bernardo Daddi was the artist of the Gallery panel can, I think, be unhesitatingly confirmed.[27]  [27]
Perhaps it may not be superfluous to refer briefly to the kinship sometimes suggested between the Saint Paul and a fresco now preserved in the Pinacoteca of Forlì. In a typewritten note (copy in NGA curatorial files), Wilhelm Suida observed similarities between the panel and the representation of the same saint in a fragment of mural painting from the church of Santa Maria in Laterano (or di Schiavonia) at Forlì, where some saints and part of the Procession of the Magi are represented. Since some authorities claimed to have deciphered the signature of a certain Agostino in the fresco, Suida concluded that it was this painter, not otherwise documented, who executed the panel in Washington; cf. Eberhard Kasten, “Agostino,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, ed. Günter Meißner, 87 vols. (Munich, 1992), 1:546 – ​547. Unpublished and ignored by the more recent literature, the hypothesis was cited only by Fern Rusk Shapley (1979); denying that the two paintings belong to the same master, she asserted the view that the painter “Augustinus, probably a native of Forlì, made use of a cartoon inherited from the painter of No. 3,” that is, the Saint Paul. Although Anna Tambini (1982) accepted this proposal in substance, it should be rejected. Apart from the fact that the reading of the presumed signature is quite uncertain (cf. Viroli 1980), the shared use and exchange of cartoons between fourteenth-century painters seems very improbable. The Saint Paul in the fresco, though presented in a frontal pose similar to the saints painted by Bernardo Daddi, is different both in pictorial style and in physiognomic type. It is clearly the work of an Emilian or Lombard artist of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, who could not, I think, have been influenced in any way by the Florentine panel. See Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1979), 1:152; Anna Tambini, Pittura dall’Alto Medioevo al Tardogotico nel territorio di Faenza e Forlì (Faenza, 1982), 112; Giordano Viroli, ed., La Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì (Forlì, 1980), 25 – ​28.

Miklós Boskovits (1935–2011)

March 21, 2016