(Active in Florence between the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th century)
Madonna and Child enthroned,
tempera on panel, 169.5 x 60 cm, with integral frame

Provenance:
Sale Christie‘s, London, 11 July 1981, lot 92 (as Rossello di Jacopo Franchi);
European Private Collection

Literature:
F. Zeri, Sul catalogo dei dipinti toscani del secolo XIV nelle Gallerie di Firenze, in “Gazette des Beaux-Arts”, 71 (1968) pp. 65-78, 77-78 note 11 (Fototeca Zeri, Bologna, n. 10116, Ravello, private collection)

The painting shows the Madonna and Child enthroned and, at the pinnacle, the figure of God the Father within a small trilobate cornice: The Child faces the observer in a pose of blessing. An inscription runs along the base of the throne: it has disappeared almost entirely but ends with the words “me pinsit” on the right.

The figures of the Madonna and Child are marked by a strongly sculptural approach and overall solemn tone, in part attenuated by the expression of the Child; this, plus the considerable size of the panel, indicate that it used to be the central part of a triptych, of which Federico Zeri, attributing the whole to the Master of 1416, identified the side panels, now in Krakow. These show Saint James the Greater and Saint Michael the Archangel on one panel, and Saint John the Baptist and Saint Matthew on the other (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie; Zeri 1968).

This painting may be added to the large series of works grouped together over the years by scholars under the conventional name of the Master of the Straus Madonna. The name derives from a panel showing the Madonna and Child donated in 1944 to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston by Mr. and Mrs. Straus. Two further pictures were matched with this one, which perhaps constitute the missing leaves of a dismembered triptych: a Saint John the Evangelist (New Haven, Yale University, Art Gallery) and a Saint Agnes (Worcester, Art Museum).

In more recent times a convincing hypothesis has been put forward suggesting that the anonymous Master was in fact the Florentine painter Ambrogio di Baldese (see S. Chiodo, Pittori attivi a Santo Stefano al Ponte e a Firenze e un’ipotesi per l’identificazione del Maestro della Madonna Straus, in: Paragone, 49 (1998), 3rd series, 18, pp. 48-79).

The present picture seems to belong to a late phase in the stylistic development of the Master, towards the first or second decade of the Quattrocento, when he adhered to the manners of the International Gothic, and to Gherardo Starnina in particular, following the latter’s return to Florence from Spain.

The painting has been displayed at the XII Mostra mercato dell’Antiquariato of Florence, room 121; in Palazzo Nervi, Turin, in 1982, and was sold by Christie’s London in 1980 with an attribution to Rossello di Jacopo Franchi.

We are grateful to Alessandro Tomei for confirming the attribution after examining the painting in the original and for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot.