Master of the Osservanza

Verburgt collection, The Hague, by the late 1920s;
From which acquired by the father of a private collector, The Netherlands, in whose collection it remained until the mid-1980s.

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a poplar panel that has not been thinned, with a certain amount of past worm damage but this was never serious, and the wood has long been entirely stable. Narrow saw marks can be seen by the side edges behind, presumably from the moment of its removal from the altarpiece. There is an regular overall craquelure throughout. The restoration is recent with minute retouching of two filled cracks that ran down to the right of the forehead by the side of the eye to the cheekbone. There is little other sign of damage with any other retouching mainly confined to a fairly narrow band around the outline of the figure. A little retouching is also seen under UV at the central edges of the cloak and by the lower edge of the embroidered collar, where an incised line shows a slight pentiment, and there are one or two touches on the thumb. The martyr's palm is also retouched where the tarnished silver leaf has been lost in places, but it is well preserved in the dish. Retouching around the silhouette is often due to the flaking of paint overlapping the gold leaf. However in this painting the gold appears to have been replaced right up the outline of the figure at some point long enough ago for the underlying craquelure to now continue throughout. Some older damages can just be seen in the uneven surface at the upper left and by the halo on the right. There seems to be another layer of thin gesso and bole under the later gold leaf, and old ground can just been seen in the chinks of the craquelure. It can only be supposed that the halo was copied from the pendant panel of St. John the Baptist or that the regilding was done before the general dismemberment of the altarpiece. The minute traditional "tratteggio" build up of the flesh painting (which has been carefully matched in the retouched cracks on the forehead) is in exceptional condition, as is the figure throughout. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This extremely refined figure of Saint Lucy once belonged to a larger altarpiece or polyptych. A reconstruction for the altarpiece has been put forward by Prof. Andrea De Marchi, and the Saint Lucy would originally have stood just to the right of the central panel of the Madonna and Child enthroned, now in the Lehman collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.¹  Another panel from the same complex showing Saint John the Baptist, formerly in the collection of Frederick Mason Perkins (by 1939), was sold in these Rooms on 6 December 1989, lot 88, and is now in a private collection (Fig. 1). Other panels belonging to De Marchi's reconstruction include Saint Francis (formerly Carlo de Carlo, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena) and Saint Ansano (private collection, Turin) on the upper register; and Stories of the Passion of Christ in the predella (Flagellation in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome; Calvary in the John G. Johnson collection, Philadelphia; Crucifixion in Kiev; Resurrection in the Detroit Institute of Arts; and Descent into Limbo in the Fogg Art Museum). The altarpiece must have been dismembered well before 1939 for the Saint Lucy was in the Verburgt collection, The Hague, by the late 1920s when it was said to have been seen by Van Marle, who attributed it to Sano di Pietro.

The Master of the Osservanza has been described as 'unquestionably one of the outstanding Sienese artists of the second quarter of the fifteenth century'.²  Roberto Longhi was the first to group together works by the Master, drawing together paintings formerly given to Sassetta and Sano di Pietro, amongst others.³  The artist has variously been identified as Sassetta (by Pope-Hennessy, Cavalcaselle and initially Berenson); as the young Sano di Pietro (by Brandi, Berenson, Boskovits and more recently De Marchi);⁴ and least convincingly of all as Francesco di Bartolommeo Alfei (by Alessi and Scapecchi, who also substantially post-date his activity).⁵  Furthermore Graziani first proposed, rather tentatively, that the Master of the Osservanza might be identified with Ludovico (Vico) di Luca, a documented assistant of Sassetta, and until recently this was seen as the most likely hypothesis.⁶  Incontestable is the influence of Sassetta on the Master's works: decorative details found in the former's paintings reappear in the latter's, and the use of pure colours and decorative patterns are present throughout both artists' œuvres.

The Master of the Osservanza's eponymous work is his triptych showing The Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Ambrose, which is dated 1436, in the Basilica di San Bernardino all' Osservanza, outside Siena.⁷  The head of the Madonna is very similar to that of Saint Lucy here: both heads are tilted in the same manner, their noses are elongated, eyebrows marked, and both are characterised by dignified and somewhat severe expressions. Other parallels can be found in the Master of the Osservanza's Birth of the Virgin altarpiece in the Museo d'Arte Sacra, Asciano, where the female figures wear their hair in exactly the same way; wavy at the front and the rest bound up with ribbons.⁸

Saint Lucy (or Lucia) is shown holding a dish which would originally have been covered in silver-leaf and which contains a pile of eyeballs. Lucy is normally shown holding only one pair of eyes but the unusual iconography adopted here is found elsewhere in Sienese Renaissance works: one such example is Sano di Pietro's signed and dated triptych of 1447 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena (inv. 232). The composition was copied by a 20th-century painter, working in the circle of Federico Joni, and adapted from Saint Lucy to a Saint Dorothea by replacing the dish full of eyeballs with one of roses.

1. A. De Marchi, "Sano di Pietro prima della pala dei Gesuati e il Maestro dell'Osservanza: aporie di una doppia identità", study presented at the Convegno Sano di Pietro. Qualità, devozione e pratica nella pittura senese del Quattrocento, organised by A. Angelini, G. Fattorini, A.M. Guiducci, and W. Loseries, in Siena and Asciano, 5-6 December 2005 (a copy of which will be made available to the purchaser). Everett Fahy also agrees with De Marchi's proposed reconstruction and the Master of the Osservanza's identification as the young Sano di Pietro. For the Lehman Madonna and Child see L.B. Kanter, The Robert Lehman Collection. I. Italian Paintings, New York 1987, p. 110.
2. K. Christiansen, in Painting in Renaissance Siena 1420-1500, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 20 December 1988 – 19 March 1989, p. 99.
3. R. Longhi, "Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio", in La Critica d'Arte, vol. V, nos. 3-4, 1940, pp. 188-89.
4. C. Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi, Milan 1949, pp. 69-87.
5. C. Alessi & P. Scapecchi, "'Il Maestro dell'Osservanza': Sano di Pietro o Francesco di Bartolomeo?", in Prospettiva, no. 42, 1985, pp. 13-37.
6. A. Graziani, "Il Maestro dell'Osservanza (1942)", in Proporzioni, vol. II, 1948, pp. 75-88. Christiansen tentatively agreed with the identification put forward by Graziani, seeing it as the most likely solution (see Christiansen, op. cit., p. 100), but Machtelt Isräels has more recently noted that Vico is an unlikely candidate given that on the basis of documentary evidence he "emerges as a painter of a lesser stature" (M. Isräels, Sassetta's Madonna della Neve. An Image of Patronage, Leiden 2003, p. 29, footnote 75).
7. Reproduced in Alessi & Scapecchi, op. cit., p 18, fig. 9, and a detail on p. 24, fig. 16. The predella is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.
8. Reproduced in Alessi & Scapecchi, ibid., the whole on p. 23, fig. 15, and a detail on p. 17, fig. 6.