Lorenzo Monaco Active 1389 - 1423 or 1424 Florence(?)

Cini collection (Fondazione Giorgio Cini), Venice;
Private collection.

M. Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento 1370-1400, Florence 1975, p. 355 (as by Lorenzo Monaco, datable to circa 1405-10);
M. Eisenberg, Lorenzo Monaco, Princeton 1989, p. 206, reproduced fig. 284 (as by an Imitator of Lorenzo Monaco);
L. Kanter, in Painting and illumination in early Renaissance Florence 1300-1450, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17 November 1994 - 26 February 1995, p. 304, reproduced fig. 119 (as by Lorenzo Monaco).

The attribution to Lorenzo Monaco has been independently endorsed by Everett Fahy, Laurence Kanter and Miklos Boskovits, the last of these publishing it for the first time in 1975 (see Literature).

Lorenzo Monaco was born Piero di Giovanni and only assumed his monastic name after taking his vows in 1391 and entering the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence. He was ordained a subdeacon in 1392 and a deacon in 1396 but some time after this date he opened up a workshop outside of the monastery, becoming a successful painter and manuscript illuminator and one of the most influential artists working in Florence in the early Quattrocento. His paintings combine a highly refined sense of colour with a great elegance of form that have been described as “paralleling in two dimensions the accomplishments of Lorenzo Ghiberti in relief sculpture.”¹

The iconography of The Madonna of Humility, in which the Madonna is shown seated on a pillow holding the Christ Child in her arms, was popular in early Renaissance Florence and Lorenzo Monaco painted the subject on a number of occasions. The spirit of the iconography is a reflection on Mary's virtues, thus justifying her place alongside the Holy Trinity: as Freuler has observed, "the virtue of humility is considered the basis, or requirement, for the Virgin's Maternity and hence her acceptance into the Holy Family as the Mother of the Son of God."² Lorenzo Monco's examples, which vary in both quality and date of execution, tend to fall into two categories: the first in which the Christ Child blesses with His right hand and the second in which the Christ Child embraces the Madonna (as here).³ These panels were intended for private devotion and Lorenzo Monaco’s output of such paintings was prolific, in all probability to meet his clients’ demand. Kanter has described how Lorenzo Monaco developed the motif in the early 1390s from an earlier tradition of showing the Madonna and Child seated upon clouds, to its final solution in which the Madonna and Child are seated on a pillow and placed on a decorated or marble ledge.

The present work may have once formed part of a triptych or polyptych, constituting the central panel of a larger altarpiece. The Madonna and Child group is placed centrally within the picture space and the setting, much like that in other variants of the same subject, is kept to an absolute minimum. The horizon line in all adaptations of the theme is low and the ledge on which the Madonna sits runs along the foreground of the entire picture space, only partially interrupted by the occasional curl of the Madonna’s robe spilling over the edge. In this particular rendition the unadorned marble pavement, with its painted horizontal lines, is very similar to that in each of Lorenzo Monaco’s Four Patriarchs, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.⁴ Those panels have been dated to circa 1405-10 and a similar date of execution seems likely for this Madonna, although Kanter believes the panel to have been painted a little earlier, in circa 1400 (verbal communication).

1. Kanter, under Literature, p. 221.
2. G. Freuler, in Lorenzo Monaco. A bridge from Giotto's heritage to the Renaissance, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Galleria dell' Accademia, 9 May - 24 September 2006, pp. 100-101, under cat. no. 2.
3. Examples of the former, with the Christ Child blessing, include the paintings in The Brooklyn Museum Collection, New York (inv. 34.842), dated by Kanter to circa 1420-22, in The Toledo Museum of Art (inv. 1945.30), and in The John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. J10), datable to circa 1420. Examples of the latter, in which the Christ Child embraces the Madonna, include the paintings of 1404 in the Museo della Collegiata, Empoli (inv. 2), that of 1407 in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (inv. 2773) and the present work.
4. Kanter, op. cit., pp. 253ff., cat. no. 32a, all reproduced in colour pp. 254-57.