Saint Paul (?) and Saint John the Baptist tempera and gold on panel, arched top, with remains of an engaged frame 44 1/4 x 16 5/8 in. (112.4 x 42.3 cm.)
London, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition, 1879, no. 174, as 'Florentine School'.
Literature
A. Graves, A Century of Loan Exhibitions, London, 1913, vol. I, p. 347, no. 174. M. Boskovits, Corpus of Florentine Painting, The Works of Bernardo Daddi, section III vol. IX, 1984, 71, p. 344 (The Miniaturist Tendency) and pls. CLXX, CLXXI. A. Tartuferi, 'Corpus of Florentine Painting', Revue de l'Art, p. 45, fig. 11, illustrated, as 'Bernardo Daddi'. R. Offner, Corpus of Florentine Painting, The Works of Bernardo Daddi, section III, vol. III, a new addition with additional material, notes and bibliography by Miklòs Boskovits, 1989, pp. 53 n.78 and p. 85. E. Neri Lusanna, The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, vol. 8, pp. 441-2, as 'SS John and Paul' and dated to after 1330. O. Garnett, 'The Letters and Collection of William Graham - Pre-Raphaelite Patron and Pre-Raphaelite Collector', in The Walpole Society, LXII, Leeds, 2000, p. 314, no. d103, fig. 170.
Provenance
William Graham, by 1879, listed as no. 273 in his 1882 inventory as 'Florentine School', valued at 80 pounds; Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 10 April 1886, lot 334, as 'Giotto', Grindley (46 shillings). Lady Desborough. Hon. Lady Salmond; Christie's, London, 7 July 1972, where acquired by the late owner.
Notes
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF EDWIN L. WEISL, JR. (lots 28-34 and 62)
Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. was among the last of a generation of collectors passionate about the arts of the early Italian Renaissance. His acquaintance with Robert Lehman, his father's close friend and confidant, and through him with Bernard Berenson, were formative experiences that determined his own, almost obsessive preoccupation with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Siena, Florence, and Venice. Throughout a busy life in legal and public service, he invariably preferred debating artistic discoveries or obscure attributions (about which he was astonishingly well-informed) to political or economic principles (about which he was scarcely less well-informed), and the news he wished to hear was of his friends in the art world rather than from Wall Street or in Washington. He and his wife Barbara - who had herself emerged from the art world as a critic and friend of such modern masters as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning - furnished their homes on the model of Berenson's Villa I Tatti. More than anything else, it seemed they enjoyed, to a degree rarely encountered today, the company of their paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and above all books, and the urgency, honesty, and integrity of their feelings for these things with which they surrounded themselves was utterly infectious.
A former United States assistant attorney general for land and natural resources (1965-7) and the civil division (1967-9), and the director of the New York State Democratic Campaign in 1964, Ed Weisl was also the Commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs for the City of New York under the Beame administration, from 1973 to 1975. After graduating from Yale in 1951 and Columbia Law School in 1956, he began his legal career at Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett, the firm, to which he returned after his time in Washington. His artistic interests later led him to become the president of the International Foundation for Art Research and to serve on the board of directors of the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Villa I Tatti Council (Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies), and the visiting committee of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Given his claim to have spent his entire law-school career looking at pictures in Columbia University's Art History Library, these events hardly seem surprising. Although the art world was his great and abiding love, he was also intensely proud of his naval service as a lieutenant (j.g.) on the Destroyer the U.S.S. Beatty in the Korean War, as well as of his prominent if 'behind-the-scenes' role in Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights program in Mississippi and Alabama in the late 1960s. His generosity to the Metropolitan Museum and his unfailing, enthusiastic commitment to the activities of the Robert Lehman Foundation remain a permanent contribution to the cultural life of the one city he loved even more than his spiritual home in the Tuscany of the Renaissance.
Angela J. Weisl and Laurence B. Kanter
'After Giotto, who, among painters had no peers, Bernardo Daddi was certainly the greatest master in the Florence of his day. If we base our judgment on what has survived, Daddi maintains a level of quality from his triptych in the Uffizi to his late St. Stephen predella which, with the above exception, is unsurpassed in his period. He enjoyed unusual success in his lifetime and, speaking for Florence alone, attained the highest degree of unity and poetic feeling in a Gothic polyptych despite the fact that he stood almost at the beginning of its evolution.' So wrote Richard Offner in 1958 and it was a viewpoint which was to generate a lively exchange of views in the years to come, with Offner's detractors claiming that he had excluded autograph works of lesser merit by Daddi merely to promote a figure who was undoubtedly a major force in Florentine painting until he died of the Black Death in 1348.
Though only recently attributed by Zeri to Bernardo Daddi, this remarkable panel evidently formed part of a polyptych that would have stood, perhaps immediately, to the right of the central panel which may have represented a Madonna proffering an object to the saint on the right (whose arms are outstretched as if to receive something) or, as both Offner and Tartuferi have suggested, Christ in Majesty. Next to the figures of Saint Paul adoring a figure clearly to his left and Saint John the Baptist, the end of a trumpet is clearly visible. It is presumably the end of a long-stemmed trumpet played by an angel of the type that Daddi included in the central panel of a triptych now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Lusanna, referring to this panel, describes it as illustrating one of 'the wide variety of spatial solutions used by Daddi to extend the limits imposed by the wooden structure of the polyptych'. To the right there would have been a further panel in which one of the protagonists sounds a trumpet. Daddi's innovation is to have the attributes of his saints cross the formal compartments of the altarpiece. As Boskovits (op. cit., 1984, p. 71) writes, 'This right-hand lateral representing two full-length saints introduces a new idea by placing them in full profile. Above them part of a trumpet is clearly visible, showing that the outermost panel to the right of the polyptych must have included a trumpeting angel, probably with one or two other saints. This extension of the scene to create a unified space comprising both laterals, which would have been counterbalanced by a similar arrangement on the other side, must have seemed revolutionary at the time. The fact that the trumpet was only used on particularly solemn occasions and the gestures of the two saints (Saint John as witness or commentator, Saint Paul in an attitude of adoration) suggest that the central panel represented Christ in Majesty, which in conformity with traditional iconography, would require the Virgin in the inner left lateral, presumably with a kneeling saint beside her.'
Bernardo Daddi probably started his career working in the same Giottesque milieu, possibly even as a fellow pupil, as his contemporary Taddeo Gaddi. Like Taddeo he worked as a fresco painter at the Franciscan church of S. Croce, Florence where, in about 1326, he painted frescoes representing the martyrdom of Saints Stephen and Lawrence for the Pulci-Berardi Chapel. Two years later Giotto left Florence for Naples, an event that perhaps hastened an already inevitable reaction to the severe, classicizing idiom of Giotto in favor of a taste for sweeter, more decorative panels painted on a smaller scale. The presence of the Sienese painters Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti in Florence as early as 1319 hinted at what was to come. But it was Bernardo Daddi whose lyrical, precious images, be they elements from a triptych or narrative predella panels, popularized a new Florentine product: the portable altarpiece of which the Bigallo Triptych (Museo Bigallo, Florence) dated 1333 is an archetype. Contemporaries such as Taddeo Gaddi responded to Daddi's innovations and clearly Daddi himself established a thriving workshop to cater to this new demand. But while establishing this new form, Daddi, who after 1326 would never paint another fresco, continued to paint polyptychs on a larger scale. These paintings are now largely dismembered but elements from Daddi's mature altarpieces, often painted on a large scale with more than one register, are to be found in the Uffizi and the Courtauld Collection, where a Crucifixion with saints anticipates Orcagna. The Uffizi altarpiece, painted for the S. Pancrazio, includes an intensely moving Saint John the Baptist (fig. 1) which, though less elegantly drawn, echoes the figure of the same saint in the Weisl panel.
This Saint John and Saint Paul, while dated by Lusanna to circa 1333, has parallels to the polyptych painted in 1348 for S. Giorgio, Ruballa (London, Courtauld Collection). In the San Giorgio Polyptych, the lateral panels each contain two male saints and measure 121.5 cm high. But the way the massive saints of the Courtauld picture fill the panels, combined with the aggressively sumptuous surface detail of their vestments which gives a two-dimensional effect to the altarpiece unexpectedly makes the Weisl panel, though earlier, the more modern and more daring of the two. And it was surely by pictures like this that the masters of the succeeding generation, most notably Orcagna in pictures such as the Strozzi Altarpiece (fig. 2) painted 1354-7 (S. Maria Novella, Florence), were most profoundly affected. Boskovits remarked that 'the [Weisl] painting is proof of Daddi's inventiveness' explicitly proposing that 'it was he, not Orcagna, who first conceived the polytych as an open arcaded structure forming a unified space in which all the figures are part of a single scene.' The fact that Orcagna's polyptych is unique both in its composition and iconography could indicate that Daddi's lost altarpiece was also of Dominican inspiration and may therefore also have been painted for the same church. Tartuferi, in his review of the 1984 edition of the Corpus by Boskovits, also singles out this painting, writing 'Among the new works (given to Daddi) the most interesting is incontestably the panel with Saint John and Saint Paul now in a private collection in New York. This extraordinary painting, attributed for the first time to Daddi by Federico Zeri shows us one of the peaks achieved by the Florentine painter towards the middle of the 30s. It allows also - or at least as a hypothesis to attribute to him the honor of being the first - after the antecedent of Giotto in the Baroncelli polyptych - to conceive of the polypych as an open structure'.
Of particular interest is the nineteenth-century provenance, belonging as it did to the Scottish cotton magnate William Graham. Graham, a devout Presbyterian, moved to Manchester where perhaps the 1857 Art Treasures exhibition kindled an enthusiasm for the collecting of Old Master paintings. In addition to his Old Master collection Graham was an important patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Burne-Jones and Rossetti, who advised him on Old Masters as well. His principal period of activity was the 1860s and 1870s during which time he was a frequent visitor to Italy. Graham's driving motive as a collector was religious subject matter. As Francis Horne recalled, 'a dealer only had to murmer to him "Virgine-intatta-sulla tavola" to lure him any distance'. As a result his collection was eclectic and included examples by Fra Angelico (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), Cosimo Tura (Metropolitan Museum, New York) and Fungai (London, National Gallery). At the time of his sale he had amassed 380 Old Master paintings. In 1884 his friend the prime minister William Gladstone secured his appointment as trustee of the National Gallery, London.
