The Master of the Lazzaroni Madonna Active in Florence in the last third of the 14th Century

M.A. Duchange, Roubaix;
His sale, Brussels, Fiévez, 25-26 June 1923, lot 158 (as Anonymous Sienese, 14th Century), for 23,000 Francs;
Dr. A.E. Philips, Eindhoven, 1923;
Thence by descent.

R. Offner, in H.B.J. Maginnis (ed.),  A Legacy of Attributions. Supplement to the Corpus of Florentine Painting, New York 1981, p. 37, reproduced fig. 66.

This fully intact small triptych was first attributed (with some reservations) to The Lazzaroni Master by Richard Offner, and published in the posthumous Supplement to his Corpus of Florentine Painting, compiled by various art historians from his notes.¹  His attribution was kindly confirmed recently on the basis of photographs by Miklós Boskovits, to whom we are grateful.  This anonymous Florentine painter was first christened The Master of the Two Madonnas by Richard Offner, who however subsequently accepted Klara Steinweg’s naming of the Master after a Madonna formerly in the Lazzaroni collection in Paris.²  The  Master of the Lazzaroni Madonna was active in Florence in the last three or four decades of the 14th Century, and was influenced by Andrea Bonaiuti and Cenni di Francesco.  The majority of the twenty to twenty-five works attributed to him are small portable triptychs like this one, or fragments of dismembered triptychs.

Flanking the Coronation of the Virgin in the central panel are Saints Anthony Abbot, Lucy, Peter, Catherine(?), Julian, Paul, a deacon saint, a young saint and two music-making angels.

1  See Literature.
2  See M. Boskovits, Pittura Fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370-1400, Florence 1975, p. 128, note 169 (pp. 239-40).  For examples of the Master’s work, see figs. 413-416.