MASP

Maestro di San Martino alla Palma is the name by which Italian historians conventionally designate an otherwise anonymous painter active in 14th-century Florence. The name refers to the church in the city of San Martino alla Palma where much of the artist’s work is found. For a long time the authorship of these works was erroneously attributed to Bernardo Daddi (1280-1348), a painter who was influenced by the Maestro. The Maestro’s works stand in counterpoint to the monumental paintings of Giotto (circa 1266-1337), a style which dominated Italian art in the 14th century. His painting is charged with Gothic values, characterized by linear compositions and affectionate, intimate relationships between the characters depicted, with the presence of miniatures. The work in the MASP collection, most likely created for an altar — given the angular, upward pointing format at the top — shows a traditional scene of Christian iconography in which the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus exchange looks, and reflects the introduction of affective, human elements in religious imagery.

— MASP Curatorial Team

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As Camesasca (1987, p. 36) has noted, e Virgin and the Child work originally was probably wider, with its upper part culminating in a cusp. It is an image for an altar, possibly the central part of a retable meant for private devotion. What immediately commands attention in this work is the intense mutual contemplation of the two sacred gures, absorbed in a kind of silent dialogue. Within the scope of Marian iconography pertaining to the first half of the 14th century, this a­ectionate exchange of gazes clearly denes a tendency with a philosophical and theological resonance in keeping with the physiology of visual rays within a Euclidian-Pythagorean matrix, involving the neo-Platonic metaphysics of love. According to this concept, the act of gazing is energy, an extension of the soul, a kind of vis, with a­ective potency transmitted by spiritelli (as conceived by the poets from Guido Cavalcanti to Petrarch) that project this force onto the mesmerized soul being contemplated (Klein 1970, pp. 33-64). In Tuscan sculpture and painting at that time, this tendency to represent the Virgin and the Child gazing at each other, as if in mutual fascination, was common to several artists involved in diferent degrees with the gurative poetry of that time, which was inuenced by the doctrine of Alberto Magno concerning the e­ects of vision (De motibus animalium, i, ii, chapters 4-7). But this tendency took on somewhat diferent forms in the works of Giovanni Pisano and in those of the brothers Lorenzetti; while the sculptor lent a more intellectual tone to his work, the Sienese painters seemed to be more sensitive to the purely a­ective dimension of the gaze. Berenson was the rst to detect the kinship of the Masp work with these artists, as well as to stress its more intimate a nity with the Lorenzettis: “it might be supposed that this Madonna with the Child facing her, holding her nger with one hand and her robe with the other, is more inspired by Giovanni Pisano than by the Lorenzettis. e le hand however leaves no doubt that if the work was not actually painted by the Lorenzettis, it comes closest to representing their work”. Although the work belongs to a precise spiritual sphere, its attribution has given rise to divergent interpretations from the beginning of the century. According to Camesasca, Van Marle placed it among the works which compose the “higher level” of Bernardo Daddi’s immediate circle, but Van Marle was actually referring to another work, when he wrote: “as to the two triptychs made by those close to Daddi, one of them belongs to Ruozzi, Spello (Umbria), and the other one to F. M. Perkins, Lastra a Signa” (1924, III, p. 400). is is because Van Marle’s description of the work (“the Virgin on the throne in the center of four gures, with the Nativity and the Crucixion on the lateral panels”) does not correspond at all to our small Virgin. In any case, the work was successively attributed by O­ner (1934) to a “friend of Daddi” and, as from 1947, to the painter of the ne Virgin on the rone amongst the Angels and the Faithful, kept in the parochial Church in the hamlet of San Martino alla Palma, near Florence. For Oner, the personality of the artist of the Masp Virgin must have been “the oldest among the few whose style was clearly dened, within the inner circle of Bernardo Daddi. His natural inclination was to become part of the Florentine miniaturist trend”. Later scholars such as Bellosi and Donati not only further emphasized the high artistic level of Maestro di San Martino alla Palma, but also considered him a true predecessor of Bernardo Daddi (Donati 1976, p. 6), one of the forerunners in Florence, together with Lippo di Benivieni and Maestro di Figline, of a “dissident” trend against the “rationalism” imposed by the prevailing poetics of Giotto at the beginning of the century. Bellosi (1974, p. 78) commented: “Rich in gothic subtleties is the delightful proto-Daddian ‘Maestro di San Martino alla Palma’. In short, the long-standing assumption regarding the Sienese inuences on Florentine painting, at the time of Bernardo Daddi, must be reviewed, exactly because ever since the end of the 13th century, there had been a stream of Florentine Gothic artists that was very active until the third decade of the 14th century, of which Bernardo Daddi was only a late heir”. One of the most remarkable implications arising from this hypothesis is that the Masp work–Madonna and Child– might dated much earlier in the second decade of the 14th century at the latest. More recently this consensus has been reconsidered by Damiani (1985) and Camesasca (1987), who have tended to stress the role of Daddi. According to Camesasca, the “São Paulo Madonna, in any case, is a variation on the Marian typology created by Daddi” (1987, p. 39) and the discussion as to the inclusion of the Masp work in the Daddi catalogue must remain open. On this basis, Camesasca changes the dating to circa 1340-45. Whoever may have been the executor of the Masp’s piece, on our understanding there are two factors which seem to be indisputable. Firstly, the same artist also painted the great work of San Martino alla Palma, the Santa Brigida all’Opaco and New York Historical Society Madonnas (as Procacci already suggested in 1932), the Berlin Museum Crucixion, the Göttingen panel, and others. Secondly, this group of works is not only stylistically consistent but also precedes the better known Bernardo Daddi works.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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