An Allegory of Wisdom?,
tempera on panel, a cassone front, shaped, set into a cassone, decorated overall, with carved, gilded and silver-plated foliage and geometric patterns;
rectangular corpus, lid and base (bottom) later additions,
the cassone overall: 61.5 x 158 x 57.5 cm,
the painted cartouches: each 32.5 x 27.4 cm

Provenance:
Treusch von Buttlar Brandenfels collection, Hanau, Germany;
art market, Germany;
Private European collection

The allegorical subject depicted in the three shaped tempera panel cartouches that are inserted into the body of this cassone, which is elegantly decorated with foliate motifs, could possibly be identified as an Allegory of Wisdom.

Starting from the left, the first scene represents various figures, one of whom wears a laurel crown and converses in the presence of an elder with an authoritative bearing. In the second scene, the discourse continues in an outdoor setting, while the sequence is concluded in another interior, in which the figure with the laurel crown is shown with one other person. The former figure points a finger upward while the latter points down: perhaps in an allusion to Platonism and Aristotelianism. Indeed, the figure with the laurel crown, an attribute of writers and military victors, seems to suggest that the three scenes have a meaning connected with wisdom, excluding of any kind of military significance, which in this context would appear not be relevant.

This cassone reveals close compositional and stylistic similarities to other works from the so-called Master of Carlo III di Durazzo: the figures’ features, their style of dress, the architectural forms and the presence of a tight, quick drawing technique throughout, tightly links the present work with the products from the workshop of this, at present, anonymous master.

The ‘name-piece’ of this group of works is a cassone in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which represents the capture of Naples by the troops of Carlo III di Durazzo in 1381.

The author of the Metropolitan’s cassone was initially believed to have operated in the Neapolitan milieu towards the end of the Trecento (F. Bologna, I pittori alla corte angioina di Napoli, 1266-1414 e un riesame dell’arte nell’età fridericiana, Rome 1969), but more recently he has been associated with the Florentine ambit (M. Boskovits, Il Maestro di Incisa Scapaccino e alcuni problemi di pittura tardogotica in Italia, in: Paragone, XLII, n.s, no. 30, 1991, pp. 35-53; E. Fahy, Florence and Naples: a cassone panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in: Hommage a Michel Laclotte, Paris 1994, pp. 231-243). Specific comparisons to works by Agnolo Gaddi and the Maestro di San Martino a Mensola have been advanced.

Between the scenes ornamenting the front of the cassone there are two coats of arms: these have been identified as those of the Cacciaguerri family of Florence and possibly of the Notti family from Pistoia.

We are grateful to Alessandro Tomei for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot.