Lot n° 26
Estimation :
30000 - 40000
EUR
Result without fees
Result
: 52 000EUR
LIPPO DI ANDREA di Lippo, Florence vers 1370 avant 1451
VIRGIN AND CHILD ENTHRONED BETWEEN SAINT BARTHELEMY, SAINT PIERRE, A SAINT, SAINT CATHERINE
Devotional panel
Egg painting and gold ground on poplar panel, ogival shape
95 x 48 cm (overall)
75 x 43 cm (pictorial surface)
Thickness : 3,5cm
The panel is made up of two poplar boards, respectively 38.5cm and 11.8cm wide, with a vertical grain, joined together at the joints and showing traces of wood-eating insects on the reverse.
Carved and gilded wooden frame: original
Pictorial surface and gold background: the Virgin's face is slightly cracked, with minor wear and restoration. Virgin's coat repainted.
Original hallmarked aureoles
Engraved Gothic lettering on the Virgin's halo: AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA
Provenance :
Former Louis Pierre Bresset collection
Beneath a broken arcade adorned with gilded fleurons falling on twisted columns and resting on a pedestal, the Virgin, seated on a raised throne, presents the Blessed Child dressed in a pink robe and standing on Mary's lap. She wears a transparent white dress, highlighted at the neckline and wrists by a braid adorned with pseudo-kufic characters.
A large blue mantle lined with yellow covers her completely. On either side of the virginal group, covered in ample draperies with deep folds and delicate colors, the four saints stand tiered on the steps of the throne.
A whole series of small devotional paintings similar to this one were produced in Florence in the very late 14th and early 15th centuries. Our panel owes its creation to the painter recently recognized as Lippo di Andrea di Lippo, whose body of work has long been proposed under the conventional name of Pseudo Ambrogio di Baldese.
A prolific artist who collaborated in Florence with Niccolo di Pietro Gerini and Agnolo Gaddi, this painter's true identity was rediscovered thanks to archival research carried out by Serena Padovani and clarified by Ugo Procacci [1].
Born around 1370, Lippo di Andrea enrolled at Florence's Arte de Medici e Speziali in 1395. Around 1400, he painted Passion frescoes in the Nerli chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. In 1411, he was enrolled in the Company of St. Luke, and that same year he was in Prato working on the facade of the Ceppo hospital.
In 1435-1436, he worked with Bicci di Lorenzo and Rossello di Jacopo Franchi on figures of apostles for the Florence Duomo tribune. In 1446- 1447, ill, he was unable to sign the catasto (tax) register and disappeared before 1451, when his wife Monna Fia declared herself a widow.
In the stylistic evolution of Lippo di Andrea[1], our panel, with its elegant, refined workmanship, must be situated in the middle of the painter's career. The hieratic attitude of the Virgin and Child, the elongation of the figures with their admittedly diminished statures, dressed in long draperies with deep folds, hollows or points, and the delicacy of the colors, bring our panel closer to the large triptych preserved in the gallery of Yale University in New Haven, dated 1420[2]. These same relationships are found in the Saint Dorothea, frescoed in the church of Saints Jacopo and Lucia in San Miniato, around the same period[3].
While the Virgin's face recalls a distant memory of the physiognomies of Agnolo Gaddi's virgins, her attitude, the transparency of her dress and the movement of her cloak evoke Giotto's Maestà in Florence (Uffizi). This return to early 14th-century forms, found in several Madonnas, including the triptych in Colle di Val d'Elsa (Museo Civico) [4], is one aspect of Lippo di Andrea's style, which abandons the twirling effects of late Gothic and joins, as Serena Padovani has pointed out, with the work of a Masolino in Empoli in 1424, as in the Madonna and Child with two angels, located in a lunette in the church of Santo Stefano.
1 S. Padovani in Tesori d'arte antica a San Miniato, San Miniato 1979, p.55-57 and U. Procacci , "Lettera a Roberto Salvini con vecchi ricordi e con alcune notizie su Lippo di Andrea modesto pittore del primo Quattrocento" in Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Roberto
Salvini, Florence 1984, pp. 213-226
2 Cf. L. Pisani, "Pittura tardo gotica a Firenze negli anni trenta del Quattrocento: il caso dello Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese" in
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Vol. 45, 2001, p.1-36
3 Yale University Art Gallery, no. 1871.22, the work on which the catalog of works by Lippo di Andrea is based; on this work, cf. Charles Seymour Jr. Early Italian Painting in the Yale
University Art Gallery , New Haven-London 1970 , n.77, repr. (attributed to Pseudo Ambrogio di Baldese? ) and L.
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