Artworks

This painting depicts Christ in Mercy seen from the waist upwards, standing in the sepulchre with open arms, lifted by the Madonna and Saint John the Evangelist who, huddled in humility, kiss His hands. The original setting of this painting awaits further investigation: the vertical veins of the wood panel suggest that it could be the fragment of a predella, as is the case with Spinello Aretino's painting, similar in subject and size, now preserved in the Corsi collection at the Stefano Bardini Museum in Florence . Alternatively, the panel could have decorated a piece of liturgical furniture or simply have been a painting destined for individual devotion. In the latter context, it might have been accompanied by another related subject in an upper part. A composition of this variety can be seen, for example, in a small panel by an Orcagnese painter of the second half of the fourteenth century, once in the collection of Gabriele D’Annunzio and now unallocated .
The background of the composition is covered with gold leaf the edges of which are decorated in correspondence with the halos of the figures in a refined border executed with flower-shaped punch marks and small stars of various sizes.
The figures of the mourners with their substantial forms dominate the composition and bring out, by contrast, the fragility of the dead Christ. The latter’s body appears livid, the chest marked by greenish shadows, tones that are made even more evident by contrast with the pinkish flesh of the two mourners. The figures are defined with unmodulated firm lines which have the effect of enclosing the bodies within three-dimensional geometric shapes. For example, St. John the Evangelist’s garments are articulated in rigid folds, emphasising the three-dimensional character of his figure.
These stylistic elements can be traced in Florentine paintings to the second half of the fourteenth century, particularly in the corpus of works by Jacopo di Cione, the youngest and longest-lived of the three brothers - Andrea, Nardo and Jacopo - who dominated the Florentine art scene from the 1350s until the end of the century. Above all, it is in the work of Jacopo di Cione that we note a close correspondence with this panel, as shown by the comparison between the figure of Christ that rises from the sepulchre and the figures in Christ Crucified with the two Thieves now in the National Gallery of London (Inv. No 1468); or between the figures of the two mourners in the present panel and the analogous ones in the grandiose Crucifixion painted by Jacopo for the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence .
Finally, Jacopo di Cione’s figurative style also includes physiognomic types whose features are marked by a deeply expressive character, emphasised by modelling with a decisive chiaroscuro. With regard to the date - in the context of the long activity of this painter, active from the 1360s until his death in 1399 - this panel should have a rather late dating, probably between the eighth and the ninth decade. The phases of Jacopo di Cione's work have in fact been identified with remarkable clarity by various studies, among which are those of Richard Offner and Miklós Boskovits , whose conclusions are based on the analysis of the painter’s style, and in the instance of scarce documentation, also by firmly dated works.
What emerges is the profile of an artist who took his first steps in the field of painting in the workshop of his older brother, Andrea, and who, like the latter, concentrated his efforts on pursuing the path initiated by Giotto, concentrating above all on the representation of three-dimensional figures, firmly placed in space. In the late 1350s and early 1360s he was also influenced by the Gothic naturalism of Giovanni da Milano, culminating in a more refined Gothic taste around 1370, when he executed the grandiose polyptych for the church of the monastery of San Pier Maggiore and the altarpiece for the Mint of Florence. Later on, from around 1380, his work acquired greater sobriety, with his figures appearing to allude to a world of great moral rigor and austerity, marrying intense devotion with strong penitential traits. It is in this latter context, noting such stylistic characteristics and Cione’s iconographic choices, that the painting discussed here should be placed.
This work is an exemplary testimony to the fervent religiosity and neo-Giottesque revival that dominated the Florentine figurative culture in the last two decades of the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the 1383 plague and the restoration of the Guelph party to the head of the city.