JACOPO DEL CASENTINO | Madonna and Child enthroned with saints and angels

Private collection, France;
By whom anonymously sold, London, Sotheby's, 10 July 2008, lot 118. 

The following condition report has been provided by Karen Thomas of Thomas Art Conservation LLC., 336 West 37th Street, Suite 830, New York, NY 10018, 212-564-4024, info@thomasartconservation.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is in good condition overall. Recently cleaned and restored, the condition is essentially as it appears in the catalog photograph. Small losses and normal wear, appropriate for the age of the picture, have been left untouched, aside for a few small losses in Mary's garments and the architecture of the throne that have been restored. A single larger, narrow loss that extends from the pink stone base of the throne to the edge of the frame, left of center, has been beautifully restored with a "tratteggio" technique. A normal, age-related crack pattern is visible across the picture. Wear in the gold ground is visible above the saints' heads, left and right. The decorative painted stone pattern on the reverse shows normal wear with losses on the left and right edges. The panel displays a lateral convex warp. This picture shows no need for conservation treatment and may be displayed in its present state.
"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."

This gracefully rendered panel likely dates to the 1330s and is characteristic of the refined works of Jacopo del Casentino, an attribution independently endorsed by both Luciano Bellosi and Miklós Boskovits.  Surrounding the Madonna and Child seated on an elaborate throne are four saints—John the Baptist, Peter, Francis, and possibly Augustine—and eight angels.  The work is enlivened with a vivid palette set against a gold background, and it clearly reflects the prevailing movement of Florentine artists of the period away from the monumentality of Giotto’s style and towards a more "miniaturist tendency," a feature that defines much of Jacopo’s known corpus.  The present work abounds with small and delightful details, from the small star on the Madonna’s cloak, to the way St. John the Baptist’s right foot slightly curls over the edge of the stone ledge upon which he stands, to the small piece of coral around the Christ Child’s neck, thought to be an effective antidote for childhood illness during medieval times.  One particularly charming element, though, is way the Child, holding the collar of his mother with one hand, turns his body towards an angel on his left to receive an offering of a bouquet of flowers.   The present work would have once formed the central panel of a small portable triptych meant for private devotion, types of which were particularly popular in Florence in the 1320s and 1330s, and indeed marks from the original hinges for the wings are still visible on the reverse.  Its domestic use is further confirmed by a small damage caused by a votive candle at the bottom edge of the painting, restored with tratteggio technique, and the reverse, which is painted to resemble porphyry and thus meant to be visible (fig. 1).  An idea of what the original triptych may have looked like can be inferred in comparing the present work to Jacopo’s triptych sold at Sotheby’s, London, 7 December 2011, lot 1 for £217,250 (fig. 2).  The symmetrical arrangement of the present composition, particularly in the positioning of figures, also calls to the mind the ex-Bondy triptych sold in New York, Christie's, 11 January 1995, lot 119, for $426,000.¹ 

Jacopo del Casentino was born in Arezzo and active in Florence in the first half of the fourteenth century.  Although little is known of the exact details of his life, his reputation amongst his peers is reflected by the fact that he was elected as the first consigliere of the newly founded Painters' Guild, the Compagnia di San Luca, in 1339.  Vasari devoted a chapter of his Lives to Jacopo, but mistakenly claimed that he was a member of the Landini family as well as a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi.  The only evidence as to the origins of is his name, de Casentino, appears on his one and only signed work, The Cagnola Triptych, a portable tabernacle today Uffizi in Florence in which one finds a close echo of the rendering of the long figures and the shape of the step in the present work.²   In 1923, Richard Offner established a more concrete examination of the artist's oeuvre which he returned to in the decades to follow,³ but any chronology for Jacopo's work still remains uncertain, for only two of his surviving works are dated.  These are a Presentation in the Temple in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, which is dated to 1330 on its frame, and a damaged Madonna and Child dated 1342 in the church of Santa Maria in Crespino sul Lamone.⁴ 


1. See B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: The Florentine School, vol. I, London 1963, p. 102, reproduced plate 110.  
2. Inv. no. 9258, See L. Bellosi, in Gli Uffizi. Catalogo Generale, Florence 1979, p. 319 and B. Berenson, ibid., plate 102. 
3. See R. Offner, "Jacopo del Casentino: Integrazione della sua opera," in Bollettino d’arte, vol. III, pp. 1923-1924, pp. 264-282.  See also, R. Offner,  The Fourteenth Century, Florence 1987, vol. II, pp. 381-551.
4.  For the former, see Berenson, ibid., plate 103; for the latter see M. Boskovits, The Fourteenth Century: The Painters of the Miniaturist Tendency, Florence 1984, p. 314, reproduced plates CXXXIX and CXL.