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The Mourning Madonna
Master of the Franciscan Crucifixesc. 1270/1275
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Washington, DC, United States
The Virgin Mary bows her head and rests her cheek on her hand in a universally recognized gesture of grief. This panel and one depicting The Mourning Saint John the Evangelist were originally part of a large, painted crucifix (see The Mourning Madonna). The two mourners would have appeared at the ends of the cross’s lateral arms—Mary on the left, John on the right.
The large crucifix had long been a common part of church decoration in the West, usually suspended high above the main altar or attached to the screen that separated the altar and other areas reserved for the clergy from the nave. However, the look of the crucifix changed dramatically in the early 13th century. Earlier, it had been the living Christ who appeared on the cross, triumphant over death, often crowned. The imagery we are familiar with today--Christ’s body slumped and lifeless, his face marked by the pain he endured--is owed largely to the Franciscans and to the artists, like the anonymous master of this Madonna, who worked for them. The members of this new order of mendicant preachers sought a deeply personal and emotional connection to Christ. Looking to Byzantine models, as the magnificent patterning and gold striations in the drapery show, they developed a new powerful image that pushed viewers to identify directly with Jesus’s suffering, to become--like the Virgin and Saint John--mourners at the cross.
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Details
- Title: The Mourning Madonna
- Creator: Master of the Franciscan Crucifixes
- Date Created: c. 1270/1275
- Physical Dimensions: original panel: 81 × 31.7 cm (31 7/8 × 12 1/2 in.) overall: 82.4 x 33.5 cm (32 7/16 x 13 3/16 in.) framed: 90.8 x 40.6 x 6 cm (35 3/4 x 16 x 2 3/8 in.)
- Provenance: The two fragments (NGA 1952.5.13 and .14) were originally lateral terminals of a painted Crucifix presumably made for the church of San Francesco, Bologna, sometime after 1254 and before 1278;[1] the Crucifix is known to have been in the Lombardi Malvezzi Chapel in that church in 1577,[2] and was transported to the Bolognese church of Santa Maria in Borgo in 1801 (perhaps by which time its two lateral terminals might have been removed);[3] purchased, probably in Italy, by Osvald Sirén [1879–1966], Stockholm, by 1922.[4] Philip Lehman [1861–1947], New York, by 1928; purchased June 1943 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[5] gift 1952 to NGA. [1] Writing around 1385-1390, Fra Bartolomeo da Pisa in his treatise _De conformitate_ describes the case of a friar who was reprimanded by the Father General of his order and went to complain in front of the Crucifix in the church of San Francesco in Bologna, which is said to have consoled him in reply. “Frater iste dicitur fuisse magister Joannes Peccam Anglicus,” adds the author (see Fra Bartolomeo da Pisa, “De conformitate vitae Beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Jesu,” _Analecta Franciscana_ 4 [1906]: 521-522). The friar in question was the celebrated Franciscan theologian John Peckham, who arrived in Italy from England in 1276 and stayed there till 1279. Lucas Wadding (_Annales minorum_, vol. 5 [1642], ed. G.M. Fonseca, Quaracchi, 1931: 58) also reports the episode, inserting it in events of the year 1278. Albeit with the necessary caution, this year, or at least the period of time covered by Peckham’s residence in Italy, can thus be considered a _terminus ante quem_ for the execution of the painting, which indeed seems datable to the 1270s on stylistic grounds. Perhaps 1254, when the apse of the church collapsed, can be considered a _terminus post quem_ for the Crucifix, as Silvia Giorgi suggests (_Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Catalogo generale-I_, ed. J. Bentini, G.P. Cammarota, and D. Scaglietti Kelescian, Venice, 2004). In 1299 it was apparently on the choir-screen of the church (Donal Cooper, _Projecting Presence: the Monumental Crosses in the Italian Church interior_, in _Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and other Objects_, ed. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd, Aldershot and Burlington, 2006: 61 n. 42). Miklós Boskovits was unable to see any stylistic justification for dating it to the years 1254-1263, as Giorgi suggested, believing that the completion of the architecture implied that the Crucifix likewise had been realized. [2] This is suggested by an inscription visible in the church’s central chapel, behind the high altar, formerly that of the Lombardi family and later belonging to the Malvezzi. The inscription mentions the altar erected in the chapel “in hon. SS. Crucifixi”; see Luigi Garani, _Il bel San Francesco di Bologna. La sua storia_, Bologna, 1948: 245-246. That the Crucifix in question is the one now in the Pinacoteca of Bologna is suggested by the ascertained provenance of this panel from the church of San Francesco; the other two painted Crucifixes still present in the church and its adjoining convent were brought there only in the early years of the twentieth century, and their provenance is uncertain (see Silvia Giorgi in Massimo Medica and Stefano Tumidei, eds., _Duecento: forme e colori del Medioevo a Bologna_, Venice, 2000: 189, 200). [3] See Garani 1948, 245-246. Perhaps at the time of its arrival in Santa Maria in Borgo, the Crucifix was subjected to interventions that integrated its already incomplete form with the additions visible in the reproduction published by Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà (_La Croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione_, Verona, 1929: fig. 536). Here the lateral terminals, evidently lacking, are shown substituted by others, without any figural representations. It is probable, however, that the lateral terminals had been truncated earlier, as happened in the case of various other painted crucifixes, and that the fragments with the figures of the mourning Madonna and Saint John were used as devotional panels by the friars, who were then forced to abandon the convent after the suppression of religious orders in 1798. [4] Sirén (_Toskanische Maler im XIII. Jahrhundert_, Berlin, 1922: 221-222, 223, 224, 339, pl. 8) published the two panels as belonging to an unspecified private collection in Stockholm, but Miklós Boskovits had little hesitation in identifying the collector as Sirén himself. Sirén is known to have bought paintings both for his own pleasure and for sale. He also acted as a middleman between art dealers and collectors (see Edward Fowles, _Memories of Duveen Brothers_, London, 1976: 130, 151, 153), even handling the restoration of paintings that passed through his hands (see Roger Fry, _Letters of Roger Fry_, edited by Denys Sutton, 2 vols., London, 1972: 2:400). [5] Robert Lehman, _The Philip Lehman Collection, New York_, Paris, 1928: n.p., pls. 59, 60. The bill of sale for the Kress Foundation’s purchase of fifteen paintings from the Lehman collection, including this pair, is dated 11 June 1943; payment was made four days later (copy in NGA curatorial files). The documents concerning the 1943 sale all indicate that Philip Lehman’s son Robert Lehman (1892–1963) was owner of the paintings, but it is not clear in the Lehman Collection archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, whether Robert made the sale for his father or on his own behalf. See Laurence Kanter’s e-mail of 6 May 2011, about ownership of the Lehman collection, in NGA curatorial files. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2245.
- Rights: CC0
- Medium: tempera on panel
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