The Artist: Bernardo Daddi was one of the most important painters of the early Trecento in Florence. He began his activity there in the 1320s during the height of Giotto’s reign over Florentine painting. While his works reveal the influence of Giotto’s recent stylistic innovations, Daddi distinguished himself from his contemporaries with lavish and richly decorated works reminiscent of those of the Sienese painters, such as Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. It was this quality of Daddi’s paintings that led the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson to describe him as "the most Sienese of all Florentines that ever painted." Daddi enjoyed success early in his career as a painter of small-scale, devotional works. By the 1330s, he must have maintained a sizeable workshop to meet the demand for smaller panels and altarpieces, best exemplified by his triptych of 1333 in the Bigallo in Florence. Daddi also executed several major works during his mature period. Following the death of Giotto in 1337, Daddi became the most active painter in Florence, receiving commissions for some of the largest and most important works of the 1330s and 1340s, including the large
Madonna and Child with Angels (1346–47) for Orsanmichele and the so-called San Pancrazio altarpiece (1337–44), which went on to influence altarpiece painting for the remainder of the fourteenth century in Florence.
The Subject: The Met owns three panels relating to the life of the third-century Christian martyr, one of the patron saints of Florence and the ex-titular of the Florentine cathedral prior to its rebuilding in Gothic style (begun in 1296 and rededicated to the Virgin Mary as Santa Maria del Fiore). This panel depicts the fourth scene of the martyrdom of Saint Reparata. According to the
Acta Sanctorum, Reparata was a young girl from Caesarea in Palestine and was martyred during the Roman Emperor Decius’s persecution of the Christians. She was brought before Decius and refused to sacrifice to the Roman pantheon, instead offering to burn herself as a sacrifice to Christ. Decius subjected her to a number of torments for her defiance, all of which she miraculously survived before being beheaded. Here the saint endures her second trial, being tortured with hot irons. Reparata appears on the right side of the composition, flanked by her tormentors and a crowd of soldiers observing the scene. She stands in a subtle contrapposto while tied to a post. Her chest has been exposed, and the folds of her green cloak fall in gentle arcs from her right hip. Reparata turns away from the figure pressing heated metal to her breast and looks up at Christ, who is portrayed in the upper right of the panel, blessing the girl. Christ is subtly juxtaposed with the Emperor Decius, who, appearing in the upper left, also gestures toward the martyr. Decius overlooks the scene from a loggia that is lined with an ornate wall hanging, a recurring element in Daddi’s work. He engages with the soldier standing beside him, possibly giving instruction for the next trial. With the exception of the loggia, the background of the picture consists entirely of the gold ground. Tooling was added to the ground long after the execution of the panel, possibly during the nineteenth century. The
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons has in fact undergone several restorations, both before arriving at The Met and since. In its present state, the panel shows signs of having suffered severe damage, likely prompting the later interventions. In spite of the damage and the subsequent restoration of the panel, it nonetheless clearly demonstrates Daddi’s enormous skill and exquisite handling. The brilliant colors, the delicate modeling of the robes, and the dynamic choreography of the figures combine to produce a prime example of the masterful small-scale paintings for which Daddi is best known.
The Predella: Steinweg (1956) correctly identified the subject of the picture and further associated it with five other panels as the base, or predella, from what, she conjectured, was a highly important altarpiece for the old cathedral of Santa Reparata. The identification of the main panels and the reconstruction of its component parts took place in stages: Conti (1968) identified the main panels as those from an unusually large complex in the Uffizi that includes in one of its lateral panels an image of Saint Reparata. This seven-part altarpiece (polyptych) was known to come from the church of San Pancrazio, where it was mentioned by Vasari (1568), who, however, erroneously ascribed it Agnolo Gaddi. From its documented presence in San Pancrazio, the altarpiece is usually referred to as the San Pancrazio Altarpiece. However, as Padoa Rizzo (1993) and Spilner (1997) independently proposed, the original destination of this altarpiece was the old cathedral, of which Saint Reparata was the titular saint. This is now firmly established (see Bergstein 1991 and Lavin 1999).
The Altarpiece: The San Pancrazio (or, rather, the Saint Reparata) Altarpiece was an exceptionally elaborate altarpiece, consisting of seven main panels, pinnacles, and a two-tiered predella depicting in the upper register, in eight panels, the life of the Virgin, and in the lower register, the story of the martyrdom of Saint Reparata (see fig. 1 above). The details surrounding the commission and execution of the altarpiece were long uncertain. Vasari’s suggestion in the
Lives of the Artists that the polyptych was made for the high altar of the church of San Pancrazio in Florence was commonly accepted and repeated throughout the critical literature. However, it is now established that the polyptych was commissioned for the high altar of the Florentine cathedral and was completed between 1337 and 1344. At the time, the new cathedral complex, with—as noted above—a dedication to Santa Maria del Fiore rather than Santa Reparata, was still under construction and so the altarpiece was placed on a provisional altar in the nave of the old cathedral, which was pulled down by 1375 to make way for the enlarged, Gothic structure we see today. The altarpiece was sold and transferred to the church of San Pancrazio, where in the mid-eighteenth century it was dismantled (see Poggi 1988 and Casu 2014). While the majority of the individual panels were placed in the Uffizi in the early nineteenth century (fig. 2), fifteen of the roughly fifty original panels of the polyptych (including the predella with scenes of Saint Reparata) had already been lost, sold, destroyed, or forgotten.
The Saint Reparata Predella: Six panels from the Saint Reparata series forming, as we now know, the lower register of the predella, are known today and, following their narrative sequence, are as follows:
Saint Reparata before the Emperor Decius (The Met,
43.98.3),
Saint Reparata in Prison (private collection; fig. 3),
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons,
Martyrdom of Saint Reparata in an Oven (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, no. 878),
Saint Reparata Being Prepared for Execution (The Met,
43.98.4), and
Beheading of Saint Reparata (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 3577). Until recently, scholars only knew the
Beheading of Saint Reparata through two photographs, likely taken in the early twentieth century. Hipp (2010) first published the panel after it was identified in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, having arrived in Dresden in the 1940s among many works of art purchased or confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. It should be noted that although the six known panels were at first thought to constitute the complete series, Preiser (1973) and Boskovits (1989) opined that the predella was originally made up of eight panels, the two additional ones yet to be found. Given that the upper-register predella had eight scenes and that Vasari mentions a predella with eight stories of the Madonna and of Saint Reparata ["otto storie della Madonna e di Santa Reparata"], this must be correct. Boskovits cited iconographical reasons for a reconstruction with eight panels, suggesting that two additional scenes of the martyrdom described in the
Acta Sanctorum might have been the subjects of the missing panels. However, the reconstruction of the predella offered by Boskovits is flawed on two counts: the position of the
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons and the potential subject of the sixth (missing) panel. A revised reconstruction of the eight-panel predella is proposed based on visual evidence and the hagiographic account of the martyrdom.
Although Boskovits maintained that the
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons was the third panel of the predella, it was most likely the fourth in the series. In the first reconstruction of the Saint Reparata panels, Steinweg suggested that the
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons and the
Martyrdom of Saint Reparata in an Oven were the central panels of the predella (positioned in the lower tier beneath the main panel with the Madonna and Child), as they are the only two works in which the saint is presented frontally. This claim was overlooked by Boskovits, who, without explanation, shifted the panel away from the center of predella, assigning it the third position in his reconstruction. Nevertheless, the legend of Saint Reparata’s martyrdom seems to confirm that these two works were in fact the central panels of the predella (i.e., the fourth and fifth panels, respectively). The
Acta Sanctorum relates that the first trial undergone by the saint, before being tortured with hot irons, was having boiling lead poured on her. This is one of the two major scenes from the legend that is not among the known panels of Daddi’s predella. Although Boskovits recognized that one of the missing panels must have portrayed Reparata being tortured with boiling lead, he assumed that this scene occupied the fourth position in the series, whereas according to the narrative sequence of the legend, it should instead be the third and
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons the fourth.
In addition to incorrectly ordering panels, Boskovits erroneously suggested that the sixth panel of the predella (the second missing work) depicted the beheading of Saint Reparata, a scene that is already among the known panels of the series. The only other major scene of the legend that is omitted from current reconstructions of the predella is Saint Reparata being stabbed with swords, an event that directly precedes the preparation of Saint Reparata for her execution. Although there is no precedent for a depiction of this scene, in a series of this complexity, devoted to a patron saint, it seems likely that Daddi depicted it. The panel would have occupied the sixth place in the sequence, the seventh showing the saint being prepared for martyrdom. Accordingly, the most up-to-date reconstruction of the predella would be as follows:
Saint Reparata before the Emperor Decius (Scene I),
Saint Reparata in Prison (Scene II); Missing, possibly
Saint Reparata Tortured with Boiling Lead (Scene III),
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons (Scene IV),
Martyrdom of Saint Reparata in an Oven (Scene V), Missing, possibly
Saint Reparata Pierced with Swords (Scene VI),
Saint Reparata Being Prepared for Execution (Scene VII), and
Beheading of Saint Reparata (Scene VIII).
Conclusion: The San Pancrazio altarpiece represents the apex of Bernardo Daddi’s achievement and testifies to the artist’s unrivalled ability to produce cohesive compositions on a small scale. The altarpiece also stands as a testament to his lasting influence on Florentine painting. Daddi transformed the predella from a series of discrete scenes into a continuous narrative sequence, an innovation that greatly influenced the next several generations of Florentine painters. His other major innovation was the pairing of the life of the Virgin with the martyrdom of Saint Reparata in a double predella. The impact of this innovation is demonstrated by the fact that less than twenty years after the completion of the altarpiece, Giovanni da Milano was commissioned to include a double predella in his polyptych for the high altar of the church of Ognissanti in Florence. Paradoxically, it was this innovation by Daddi that long prevented scholars from associating the Saint Reparata predella with the San Pancrazio altarpiece.
The question of when the Saint Reparata predella panels were separated from the larger polyptych remains uncertain. None of the known documents relating to Daddi’s altarpiece, including the account of its disassembly, record the fate of these panels. And while scholars have tentatively linked the dispersal of the predella to the earliest known owners of panels from the predella, the English collectors and dealers William Young Ottley (who is known, for example, to have acquired parts of an altarpiece for Santa Croce by Ugolino da Siena) and George Augustus Wallis, it is unclear when or from whom the works were purchased. By the time the
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons entered The Met’s collection, it was in a poor state of conservation. One scholar writing in the 1930s even described the panel as being "in a state of almost complete ruin." Nearly all of the faces in the panel had been damaged and repainted by a later restorer. Conservators at The Met have since removed the overpainting from the figures, revealing the traces of numerous deep scratches, likely made with a pointed metal instrument, beneath the restoration. Scholars have failed to note that all of the known panels of the Saint Reparata predella have suffered similar damage, and that, in every case, it is
only the torturers’ bodies (specifically their faces, hands, and feet) that have been vandalized. As in the
Saint Reparata Tortured with Red-Hot Irons, the martyr, ironically, is the only figure in the panels to consistently escape harm. It is clear from the targeted nature of the damage that it must have occurred while the predella was still intact, or at the very least, while the panels were still in the same location. The
kind of damage done to the panels—the deliberate violence meted out so selectively to the figures—may help us begin to understand why the Saint Reparata panels were separated from the San Pancrazio altarpiece and later dispersed.
[Dominic Ferrante 2016]
