Pantaleon

R. Pallucchini, "'Pantaleon Pinsit,'" in Arte Veneta, XIII-XIV, 1959-60, p. 195-196, reproduced, fig. 266;
G. Gamulin, "Ritornando sul Quattrocento," in Arte Veneta, XVII, 1963, p. 15;
M. Boskovits, "Appunti su un Libro Recente," in Antichità viva, X, no. 5, 1971, p. 13, note 22;
"Pantaleon" in Dizionario Enciclopedico dei Pittori e degli Incisori Italiani, Milan 1990, vol. VIII, p. 303.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This panel has not been restored for many years. There is a joined crack which is stable in the wood in the upper center. There are additions on the extreme right and left edges and the panel is quite noticeably curved from left to right. The paint layer is stable yet quite dirty. If the painting were to be lightly cleaned, a good deal of the yellowness would be removed but needless to say old restorations would become more apparent. It does not appear that the picture is broadly restored in any sense but there are numerous spots of thinness in the sky and to a lesser degree in the faces and hands of the figures.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Rodolfo Pallucchini (see Literature) was the first to recognize a small group of panels of corresponding subject and compositions attributable to this still somewhat obscure painter.  In fact, the present signed Adoration, then in a Parisian private collection, supplied him with the name of the artist, with which he was able to associate another similar Adoration he had seen a few years earlier at the Galerie Charpentier, then attributed to Leonardo Bellini. To those, he was able to add a third work based on stylistic grounds, then in a private collection in New York.  To this cohesive core, he also suggested the addition of two other paintings in the Accademia, Venice, yet another Adoration and a Madonna and Child which had been previously attributed to the Master of the Ludlow Annunciation, as well as other works.¹ Other historians accepted this grouping (all of whom deprived the evolving corpus of the Ludlow namepiece) and added other pictures.  Boskovits, however, pared Pantaleon's body of work down, restituting to the Ludlow Master the paintings in the Accademia, as well as other pictures erroneously given to Pantaleon.  Whatever the critical vagaries of his career, Pantaleon would appear to be an artist who had experience of contemporary Venetian painters (such as Jacopo Bellini and Antonio Vivarini, but with an archaizing tendency.

1. This master was christened by Longhi after a panel formerly in the collection of Lady Ludlow at Luton Hoo, and has now been convincingly identified as the Dalmatian painter Lorenzo Marini, or Lovro Dobričević in Croat. For recent discussions in English on this fascinating painter who was active in Dubrovnik (then Ragusa) in the mid quattrocento, see Croatia: Aspects of Art, London 2009, J.J. Norwich, ed. (with essays by D. Ekserdijian and D. Cooper, both of which discuss Dobričević).