SCHOOL OF PISTOIA, CIRCA 1350 | Saint Catherine of Alexandria

The authorship of the present panel, depicting the elegant full-length figure of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, remains at present a mystery. However, there can be no doubt that the unknown author was active in Tuscany, but in all likelihood not in one of the three major artistic centers: Florence, Siena and Pisa (although he must have been responsive to the artistic developments in these major cities, particularly to those in Florence).

Saint Catherine’s broad and rounded face and the slightly distracted, yet sensitive facial expression resulting from the finely drawn slit eyes, as well as the pale flesh tones, are traits that seem to have been born from a tradition initiated by the early Pistoian painters such as the so-called Master of 1310(1) and the Master of 1336(2) The anonymous painter responsible for this Saint Catherine appears to have tried here to soften the incisive drawing of the above mentioned Pistoian masters in order to attain a somewhat softer appearance, as if he aimed at a harmonization of his art with the Florentine tendencies of Bernardo Daddi's late works of around 1347-48. It is to Bernardo Daddi’s invention of the depiction of Saint Catherine of Alexandria that the composition of the present panel is indebted; the author of our Saint Catherine followed Bernardo Daddi’s unique placement of the saint between two wheels that are arranged as if they are the thorny arms of a throne - the throne of her martyrdom.

We are grateful to Gaudenz Freuler for his assistance in cataloguing this lot, and for dating the panel to the 1350s, and for noting that the artist created here an image which seems to anticipate artistic solutions noticeable only considerably later, in the late gothic paintings in Siena and Florence towards the turn of the century.

1 See, for example, his Saint Irene, in the panel with scenes from the life of St. Irene, New York, private collection; G. Freuler, Künder der Wunderbaren Dinge, Frühe Italienische Malerei in der Schweiz und Liechtenstein, Lugano 1991 p. 184, cat. no. 68, reproduced p. 185.

2 G. Freuler 1991, p. 186, cat. no. 69.