A major rediscovery by one of the most innovative painters of the Italian Renaissance, this panel was first recognized in the year 2000 by Laurence B. Kanter as possibly Paolo Uccello’s masterpiece in the genre of cassone painting. At the time, it was known only from old black and white photographs and was considered lost since the Second World War, when it formed part of the celebrated collection of Fritz Gutmann. In a striking feat of perspectival painting, the artist composes the scene on the banks of a river. Encamped on either side, two hostile armies bristling with lances confront one another. Numerous eye-catching details enliven the narrative: tents of dazzling richness; horses in all manner of poses; and intricately drawn figures, such as the crossbowmen in the foreground, viewed from different angles.

Bernard Berenson was the first to associate this battle scene with Uccello, connecting it to works such as the Hunt in the Forest (Ashmolean, Oxford) and to his predella The Profanation of the Host of about 1468 for the altarpiece of the Institution of the Eucharist (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino), though he stopped short of attributing it to the master. It was exhibited as a work by the school of Uccello in 1934 when it still belonged to Gutmann. In 1990 Everett Fahy identified the panel as one of the earliest works by Biagio d’Antonio (1446–1516), a Florentine artist celebrated in the field of cassone painting;¹ and a few years later, Roberta Bartoli included it among Biagio’s earliest works in her monograph on the artist, dating it to the 1460s, a view she now no longer maintains. At the time of Bartoli’s publication, which reproduces a poor black and white photo, the painting’s whereabouts were still not known. Having now inspected high-resolution images, Laurence Kanter has recently confirmed his opinion, first published in 2000, that it is an extremely beautiful cassone by Paolo Uccello. Fahy, who had previously identified it as an early work by Biagio d’Antonio, changed his mind and concurred with Kanter’s re-attribution to Uccello. As well as the visual references within it derived from works such as the Ashmolean Hunt, Kanter points out its connection to Uccello’s Urbino predella for the church of Corpus Domini, placing it very close in date. On the basis of high-resolution images, Keith Christiansen is also in full agreement with the attribution to Uccello and dating c. 1468.

Painted great chests, commonly referred to as cassoni, were among the most magnificent and costly items of furniture found in Florentine palaces. Uccello, who is recorded by Vasari as working in this field, certainly painted cassone and spalliera panels. Like other examples by him to have survived, this battle scene once formed the front panel of a cassone and is not, as was previously thought, a spalliera. The principal reasons for this is its smaller dimensions that accord better with cassone paintings and the vestiges of daily wear on the surface typical of cassone fronts but not spalliera panels, which were designed to be viewed at shoulder height, whether as a backboard of a decorated chest or set into the wainscoting of a room, such as Uccello’s Hunt at Oxford.²

From the second half of the fifteenth century, scenes of Roman battles and triumphs were frequently adopted as subjects for panels decorating Florentine patrician palaces. Their subject matter was chosen to underscore civic virtue, political might or military prowess. Florentine painters were familiar with accounts of celebrated battle campaigns, if not from the ancient texts themselves, then from retellings by contemporary humanists. In the case of this battle scene, two opposing armies are encamped on either side of a river.³ On the right are the Romans, their banner marked with the letters SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). Crossbowmen aim at their adversaries; infantrymen cluster together, while behind them armoured cavalry hold lances at the ready. Separate contingents head off to the right. On the opposite bank under a standard that bears a gold crescent on a red ground, the enemy advances on foot and on horseback, seemingly unaware of the danger posed by the young soldier midstream who pushes forward on a raft armed with cannon. In the middle distance, next to a bend in the river, a group of men fire arrows across the water.

Bernard Berenson identified the subject as illustrating the siege of Veii, an episode recounted by Livy in his history of early Rome, Ab urbe condita (V, 21), in which the Romans, led by Marcus Furius Camillus, attack the Etruscan city on all sides to distract them from the mine they had built to the citadel. Only very recently has an alternative identification been proposed.⁴ Novella Lapini, Ph.D in Ancient History, has put forward the interesting hypothesis that the panel represents the Battle of the Metaurus, one of the decisive battles in the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, which took place in 207 BCE near the Metaurus River in Italy. The episode is recounted by the Greek historian Polybius in his Histories (XI, chapter I, 2–12) and by Livy (XXVII, 47–51). The Carthaginians, under the command of Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s brother, are fighting the Romans, who are led by two consuls, Marcus Livius Salinator and Gaius Claudius Nero. The final phase is shown here, when after the defeat of Hasdrubal, Claudius Nero orders his head to be thrown into Hannibal’s camp, so that when faced with the sight of his own dead brother’s head Hannibal capitulates. In the distance at the centre of the scene a rider on a white horse holds the decapitated head.

In conception and execution Laurence Kanter draws an analogy between this work and Uccello’s predella at Urbino, The Profanation of the Host. He points out as markers of the battle scene’s authorship: ‘its detailed construction of a fortified hill town in the upper left corner[…]; the carefully projected shadows cast diagonally along the ground by the legs of the horses and men in delicate counterpoint to the fence of lances held above their heads; and […] crisp folds and undulating billows of the elaborately decorated tents’.⁵ The design is worked up with a considerable amount of preliminary drawing visible in the infrared reflectogram (fig. 1). Careful attention is paid to the horses, articulated armour and riding equipment. The subtlety of observation is evident in minute details, for example the pegs that mark the taut edge of the white fanned canvas tent; an array of helmet designs (see for instance the first idea – later abandoned – for a crested helmet worn by the principal rider on the left bank); and the running soldiers in the distance. The rhythm created by the verticals that punctuate the picture surface, the dramatic abstraction of the horses and the impact that the composition derives from its perspectival setting evoke the ideals achieved by the Florentine Renaissance master in his much larger and considerably earlier masterpiece The Battle of San Romano, its three parts now divided between The National Gallery, London, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Combining a taste for colour and decoration within an expansive setting, this impressive battle-piece occupies an important place in the field of cassone painting and is a major addition to the œuvre of this pioneering figure.

We are grateful to Dr Laurence B. Kanter, Dott. Roberta Bartoli and Dott. Novella Lapini for their generous help in cataloguing this lot.

Note on Provenance

Born in Berlin, Fritz Gutmann (1886–1944) was the youngest son of Eugen Gutmann, who in 1872 founded the Dresdner Bank. Until 1914, Fritz was Managing Director of the bank’s London branch but at the outbreak of World War I he was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. At the end of hostilities between Britain and Germany, Fritz left England for Amsterdam. There he established a private bank and with his wife Louise (née von Landau) settled in a beautiful home named Bosbeek, just 20 miles west of the city. The renowned Dutch painter Jacob de Wit had decorated its interior in the 1750s.

Immediately after WWI Fritz began collecting paintings in earnest. One of his first acquisitions was the impressive cassone panel offered here, which he bought from Count Trotti at his gallery on Place Vendôme in Paris. By the time Eugen Gutmann’s famed collection of Renaissance gold and silver arrived at Bosbeek, following his death in 1925, the house was already becoming a living museum. The Gutmann family had always been passionate about Italy and all things Italian. For much of the nineteenth century Eugen had been busy collecting Italian renaissance jewelry, bronzes and maiolica. In 1893 he founded his own bank in Milan, the Banca Commerciale Italiana. The family’s ties to Italy were further strengthened by the marriage of Eugen’s eldest daughter to a scion of the famous Orsini family.

Meanwhile Fritz did not stop with the acquisition of the Florentine cassone panel and was soon adding to the collection works by Italian masters such as Fra Bartolomeo, Ercole de’ Roberti, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli and Paolo Veronese, as well as works by later artists such as Rosalba Carriera, Marco Ricci (two), and as many as four by Francesco Guardi. Eventually the collection comprised not only Italian masterpieces but also works of the German renaissance, the early Netherlandish period, the Dutch Golden Age and eighteenth-century French painting, up to and including a few Impressionists.

The halcyon days at Bosbeek came to an abrupt halt with the advent of Nazism. Within weeks of the invasion of the Netherlands agents representing first Göring and then Hitler were knocking at the door. By the time Fritz and Louise Gutmann were arrested and taken to Theresienstadt, over a thousand artworks and antiques were removed from the Gutmann estate. Sadly Fritz and Louise never returned.

Fritz and Louise’s daughter Lili survived in Italy; their son Bernard, meanwhile, had joined the British Army. After the war, Bernard and Lili did their utmost to recover what they could of the collection. After Bernard’s death Simon Goodman, with the help of his brother Nick, took over their father’s life’s work and over the last twenty years many pieces, including the present painting, have been traced and recovered. The fate of the Gutmann collection and family is powerfully reconstructed and portrayed in The Orpheus Clock by Simon Goodman (Scribe 2015).

Today many important works from the Fritz Gutmann collection can be found in several major museums, such as: the Alte Pinakothek, Munich; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

¹ Private correspondence with Roberta Bartoli, August 1990. An annotation by Bernard Berenson dated 15 March 1956, on the reverse of a photograph from when the panel was offered to Wildenstein by Piero Tozzi, records his opinion on the attribution as: ‘by a late follower of Paolo Uccello. Possibly by GB Utili’, a painter to whom Adolfo Venturi assigned a group of works now recognized as being by Biagio.

² Although there is no evidence of the presence of a central lock near the top margin of this panel, as might be expected when it was still an integral part of a chest, it must have been in the outer frame moulding rather than cut into the picture field.

³ A similar arrangement is found in a cassone panel depicting the Battle of Magnesia (private collection), shown in the exhibition Virtù d’amore, Florence 2010, no. 28, described as one of Biagio d’Antonio’s early masterpieces.

⁴ In her monograph on Biagio d’Antonio Roberta Bartoli describes it as ‘Battle on the banks of a river (Siege of Veii)?’, suggesting some doubt over the identification of the subject; Bartoli 1999, p. 179, no. 2.

⁵ Kanter 2000, p. 15.