The Picture: The Virgin is shown kneeling, her head bowed, her hands clasped in prayer. She is cut below the waist. To the left is visible the shoulder of a figure with a cloak of orangish color, an infant hand holding a reed cross (the symbol of John the Baptist), and the overlapping shoulder or arm of another infant. In the background is a grey stone wall and an arch. Cut on all sides, the picture is a fragment of a larger composition known from a circular painting (tondo) in the Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon (inv. no. 20262; see fig. 1 above). Given the closeness of details in both works, the appearance of the composition of The Met’s fragment can be reconstructed with a good deal of confidence. The subject was the Adoration of the Shepherds. The figures were set in a ruined stable with, on the right, an arcade viewed in steep foreshortening. The Virgin was shown kneeling on an elevated, paved floor (coral colored in The Met’s painting), her gaze directed to the infant Jesus, who embraces the advancing figure of his cousin, John the Baptist. The figure of Joseph has both hands protectively around the two infants. On the right, two shepherds have arrived and are shown excitedly discussing what they witness. A landscape with a path into the distance maps out their journey while, on the opposite side, the ox and ass—traditional in depictions of the Nativity—are shown. Seen beyond the stable is a ruined crenellated tower.
Attribution and Date: Although painted with considerable delicacy, the picture is generally ascribed to the workshop of Filippino. According to Vasari, in his 1568 life of the artist, Filippino had several disciples. The most gifted was unquestionably Raffaellino del Garbo (see
14.40.641). Another—to Vasari’s way of thinking a much less accomplished artist—was a disciple called Niccolò Cartoni. Among the works that have been hypothetically associated with him is a painting in the Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, that shows Saint Francis in glory. It must have been based either on a lost painting or a drawing by Filippino. However, because of the lack of documentation, most scholars prefer as a name for this artist the "Master of Memphis." This name has been extended to a group of other works, and among these are both the tondo in Avignon and The Met’s fragment.[1] The problem is that the Met’s fragment is notably higher in quality and more delicate in execution than the Avignon painting, and it therefore seems unlikely that they are by the same artist. For the time being it thus seems best to call both products of Filippino’s workshop. Nelson (2004) has argued that the composition of both paintings consists of components derived from other paintings and drawings by Filippino. This is possible. However, the fact that the primary figural group (which is to say, the Madonna, Saint Joseph, and the two children) is copied in at least two other tondi—one sold January 19, 1984, at Sotheby’s New York, lot 77; the other sold December 8, 1993, at Sotheby’s London, lot 213—suggests that there was a lost original by Filippino that may or may not have included the shepherds. It is The Met’s fragment that allows us to suggest as a date of this lost prototype the late 1490s, based on the Virgin’s facial type, touched with melancholy; her elongated, spindly fingers; and the form and treatment of her veil—no longer diaphanous but of a still fine fabric that hangs in long folds, similar to what is found in Lippi’s altarpiece for the convent of San Domenico in Bologna, which was completed in 1505. It is also the San Domenico altarpiece that offers the best analogy for for the zigzag form of the elevated pavement on which the Madonna kneels in the Avignon tondo.
Keith Christiansen 2018
[1] Nelson 2004, pp. 385–86, discusses the creation of this anonymous master, following the contributions of Everett Fahy and Federico Zeri.
