The Artist: The Master of the Magdalen is the name given by Osvald Sirén (1922) to the anonymous artist who was active in the second half of the thirteenth century and painted a panel in the Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence representing Saint Mary Magdalen and eight episodes of her life (fig. 4), hence his name. Around this work has been assembled a group of stylistically related paintings that cover a period extending from ca. 1265–ca. 1290. This was a period of enormous transition, just prior to the transformative innovations of Giotto at Assisi. In his earlier work, the Master of the Magdalen was strongly influenced by Coppo di Marcovaldo (ca. 1225–ca. 1276), whose impressively large painting of the Madonna and Child in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, Siena, dates from 1261. However, by the 1280s, the anonymous master’s paintings reflect the spatial and expressive world of Cimabue, the most important Florentine painter prior to Giotto. The transformation of the master’s style is especially evident in the architecture of the thrones of the Virgin as well as in the increasing elegance in the delineation of her face and gestures. These differences are readily evident by comparing the Virgin in a portable triptych in The Met’s collection (
41.100.8), considered an early work of the artist, ca. 1265–70, with the fragmentary picture catalogued, which is generally dated to the 1280s. While not a major personality, the Master of the Magdalen was a gifted painter whose work reflects the transformations in Florentine painting at a crucial period leading to one of the great revolutions in Western art.
The Picture and Its Function: The Met’s panel is a fragment, keyhole in shape, and includes, in addition to the head of the Virgin and her right hand holding a flower, the blessing hand and bent knee of the Christ Child. It was cut from a large panel of the Madonna and Child enthroned of the sort known as a
Maestà—the Madonna in Majesty. It was a fairly common practice to salvage the head of the Madonna or the Madonna and Child in a work of art that had become a cult object but perhaps had been damaged or the style of which was deemed old-fashioned. The excised fragment would then have been incorporated, like a relic, into a more up-to-date altarpiece, often with saints looking up in adoration at the fragment. Essentially, the cult status of the image was enhanced for veneration. Multiple examples of this practice exist. One of the most conspicuous is in Santa Maria di Vallicella, Rome, where, in 1606, no less an artist than Peter Paul Rubens was commissioned to paint a monumental altarpiece with an opening for the display on festival days of a miraculous image of a fourteenth century fresco of the Madonna and Child that had been removed from the exterior of the church. His altarpiece included a painting of the Madonna and Child that serves as a cover for the cult image (figs. 5 and 6). The added frame of The Met’s picture has at its base a metal attachment that may have been used to suspend a votive lamp.
The Original Format: The original altarpiece from which The Met’s panel has been excised may have been close in size, format and composition to a work by Cimabue in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, Bologna (fig. 7) which shows the Madonna and Child enthroned accompanied by two diminutive angels. The position of the Christ Child’s leg in Cimabue’s work may give some idea of the original posture of the Christ Child in The Met’s fragment, which is likely to date soon after ca. 1285. Cimabue’s
Maestà (Musée du Louvre, Paris) provides the closest stylistic point of comparison; that work has been dated by Luciano Bellosi to the mid-1280s[1]. The sidelong glance of the Virgin and the blessing gesture of the Christ Child can be compared to a number of paintings dating from the 1280s, including Duccio’s
Rucellai Madonna of 1285–86 (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence). The degree to which the artist was indebted to these models to update his style is evident from the earlier, small, portable triptych in The Met’s collection mentioned above. A small painting in the Acton Collection, Florence, seems to depend from The Met’s fragment, though the child in that work is seated rather than standing.
Keith Christiansen 2012; updated 2020
[1] See Luciano Bellosi,
Cimabue, 1998, pp. 102–13.
