Master of 1493

Bishop Burton Parochial Church Council, Kingston-upon-Hull;

By whom sold, London, Sotheby’s, 19 April 1967, lot 11 (as B. di Giovanni);

Where acquired by Mr. Betts, London;

With Georges Marlier, Brussels, June 1967;

Private collection;

By whom anonymously sold, (“Property of a Private Family Collection”), New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2001, lot 61 (as Attributed to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

With Fabrizio Moretti, London;

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 28 January 2010, lot 241 (as Attributed to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

Where acquired.

E. Fahy, "Bartolommeo di Giovanni Reconsidered," in Apollo 97 (May 1973), p. 269 (as Bartolommeo di Giovanni);

E. Fahy, Some Followers of Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1976, p. 161, no. 81, reproduced fig. 30 (as Bartolommeo di Giovanni);

E. Fahy, "The Este Predella Panels and other works by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany," in Nuovi Studi 2001/2002, 2003, p. 23 (as Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

C. Daly, "Thinking Through a Tondo by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany," in Journal of the Walters Art Museum 77 (2024), https://journal.thewalters.org/volume/77/essay/tondo/ (as Master of 1493).

Brussels, Galerie Robert Finck, Collection de tableaux anciens de XVe au XVlle siècle, 1972, no. 3;

San Diego, Timken Museum of Art, June - September 2017, on loan.

The attribution of this elegant depiction of the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist remained elusive until only recently. In 1973, Everett Fahy published the panel as a work by Bartolommeo di Giovanni, an opinion he revised in 2003, when he attributed it to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, an anonymous Florentine painter working in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and so-named by Fahy in reference to an altarpiece housed in the Fiesole Church of San Francesco in the early twentieth century. When Fahy examined the work in person before its sale in 2010, he further revised his opinion and considered the work to have been produced by an artist in the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany's workshop. More recently, Christopher Daly, refining that artist's oeuvre, identified a corpus of paintings by a distinct hand, that of the Master of 1493, so-named in relation to a dated altarpiece originally in the Church of San Matteo in Arcetri and today in the Museo del Cenacolo di Andrea del Sarto, Florence (inv. 1890 no. 3453).

We are grateful to Dr. Christopher Daly for his assistance cataloguing this work.