Crocker Art Museum acquires 14th-century altarpiece by Jacopo di Cione

30 May 2022

The Crocker Art Museum has purchased a small altarpiece by the Florentine painter Jacopo di Cione, depicting the Madonna Nursing the Christ Child with Saints Lawrence and Margaret.

This small altarpiece is the work of Jacopo di Cione, active in Florence in the second half of the fourteenth century. The Virgin nursing the Christ Child among saints was an important subject in early Renaissance Italy, and the Virgin's pose here is a specifically Florentine invention. The main panel dates on stylistic grounds to about 1380, while the predella is a later addition by another hand, so the coats of arms it carries are not original to the picture above and the circumstances of the commission remain unknown.

Jacopo's dates are uncertain. He was probably born around 1340, was documented in Florence in 1365 and registered in 1369 with the guild to which painters belonged. He came from a family of artists, and after the death of his brother Andrea, called Orcagna, in 1368, he took over the workshop. Much of its output in the 1370s and 1380s was collaborative, involving at least two hands, among them the anonymous Master of the Ashmolean Predella. The painting was given to that master when it appeared at auction in 1988, but opinion now favours Jacopo on grounds of style and quality. Berenson published it tentatively as Jacopo and dated it to about 1375. Offner gave it to the Master of the Vatican Coronation, an earlier name for the same anonymous hand. Boskovits and Gregori proposed that the Virgin and Child are Jacopo's while the flanking saints may have been designed by him and executed by the master, an attribution Sonia Chiodo would extend to the whole panel, while Laurence Kanter argues for Jacopo throughout on grounds of quality.

The panel is characteristic of the late Florentine trecento after Giotto, with the Virgin enlarged above the saints and her pose combining the Madonna of Humility with the Madonna Enthroned. The Child's patterned mantle points to the Florentine trade in luxury textiles, and his partial nudity follows a development within the Orcagna workshop across those decades. Both the nudity and the nursing insist on the humanity of the Holy Family and on Mary as nurturer of the Church. Saint Lawrence stands at the left in a deacon's dalmatic, holding a Gospel and the gridiron of his martyrdom. Saint Margaret is opposite, emerging from the dragon in green and gesturing towards her head, a reference to her beheading. As patron of childbirth she may have been included because the commission marked a birth in the patron's family.

The predella, possibly as late as the early fifteenth century, shows Christ as the Man of Sorrows in a central roundel with the Arma Christi behind him, between the Mater Dolorosa and a mourning Saint John the Evangelist, a grouping common in the trecento and early quattrocento. The arms between the figures were identified in 1991 by Jessie McNab of the Metropolitan Museum as most likely those of the Bonciani and the Pollia, both families of French origin. The Bonciani had a chapel at Santi Apostoli, where Jacopo painted a large altarpiece with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in 1383. No archival evidence connects either family to this picture, and since the predella is an addition, the arms do not explain the commission in any case.