Master of the Osservanza, possibly the the young Sano di Pietro

Art Market, Monaco;
Where acquired by the present owner. 

The following condition report has been provided by Karen Thomas of Thomas Art Conservation LLC., 336 West 37th Street, Suite 830, New York, NY 10018, 212-564-4024, info@thomasartconservation.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. The figure of this small panel is in remarkably good condition in light of the panel's having been removed from its original setting. Originally the figure would likely have been set against a gold ground; remnants of the gold leaf can be seen in the recesses of the punchwork while oxidized silver has been identified on the borders along the top and bottom edges of the panel. To knit the worn areas into a cohesive background, retouching has been applied to create a neutral dark brown field. The Madonna appears to be very well preserved. Tiny losses in the headcovering and the hand on the right have been expertly retouched and are visible with ultra-violet illumination. Some contours have been reinforced to improve legibility. The colors remain bright and apparently free of wear, and a normal age-related craquelure is visible but not visually disruptive. The varnish is even and glossy and adequately saturates the pigments. The wood support displays a mild convex vertical warp. In raking light, a planar deformation following the horizontal wood grain can be seen crossing through the center of the figure. This corresponds to a repair visible on the reverse of the panel, where wedges were inserted to rectify a crack in the panel. Exposed wood worm tunneling has been filled with putty. Wide wood inserts on the right and left sides (verso) were probably added to fill areas where vertical crossbars originally existed as part of the altarpiece construction. Strips of wood have been attached to the perimeter, presumably to assist in framing. This painting, with its recent restoration, displays no need of conservation intervention at this time and may be displayed in its current state.
"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 yet highly emotive figure of The Virgin once formed part of an altarpiece predella, flanking an image of the Crucifixion or Pieta in the center, with a depiction of Saint John the Evangelist at the left. Its author, The Master of the Osservanza, has been described as ‘unquestionably one of the outstanding Sienese artists of the second quarter of the fifteenth century’.¹ The name of the painter derives from a triptych in the Basilica of the Osservanza outside Siena.² The triptych, which was painted for San Maurizio, Siena, has on it an inscription and a date of 1436, which refers to the date of the chapel's foundation rather than the year it was painted. Roberto Longhi and Alberto Graziani were the first to group together works by the Master, drawing together paintings formerly given to Sassetta and Sano di Pietro, among 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 Bartolomeo Alfei.⁵ Graziani's rather tentative proposition that the Master of the Osservanza might be identified with Ludovico (Vico) di Luca, a documented assistant of Sassetta, was seen as the most likely hypothesis until recently.⁶ In 2011, however, documentary evidence relating to an altarpiece of the Nativity of the Virgin at Asciano was published by Maria Falcone identifying its creator – the Master of the Osservanza – as the young Sano di Pietro.⁷  While a complete reconstruction of the original polyptych for which this panel was created remains elusive, two works from the same predella have been identified: the aforementioned Saint John the Evangelist (sold in these rooms this past January 2018 for $975,000; fig. 1), and a slightly wider (21.6 by 36.5 cm) panel depicting Saint Donatus of Arezzo encountering and taming the Dragon (sold Christie’s London, 23 June 1967, Lot 69). In each of these works, along with others by the artist from the 1450's, the halos are patterned using punched dots to create a repeated oval-shaped design. Their upper and lower edges are gilded in oxidized silver, tooled with a row of round hole punches. 

An entry written by Andrea De Marchi endorsing the attribution to the Master of the Osservanza accompanies this work.

1. 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.
2. Reproduced in C. Alessi and P. Scapecchi, ‘Il Maestro dell’Osservanza: Sano di Pietro o Francesco di Bartolomeo?’, Prospettiva, vol. 42, 1985, p. 18, fig. 9, and a detail on p. 24, fig. 16. The predella is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.
3. R. Longhi, ‘Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio’, in La Critica d’Arte, vol. 5, nos 3–4, 1940, pp. 188–89. 
4. C. Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi, Milan 1949, pp. 69–87.
5. Alessi and Scapecchi 1985, pp. 13–37; Alessi and Scapecchi substantially postdate his activity.
6. Graziani 1948, pp. 75– 88. Christiansen tentatively agreed with the identification put forward by Graziani, seeing it as the most likely solution (see Christiansen in New York 1988–89, p. 100) but Machtelt Isräels has more recently noted that Vico is an unlikely candidate on the basis of documentary evidence (see M. Isräels, Sassetta’s Madonna della Neve. An Image of Patronage, Leiden 2003, p. 29, note 75).
7. M. Falcone, ‘La giovinezza dorata di Sano di Pietro: un nuovo documento per la Natività della Vergine di Asciano’, in Prospettiva, 138.2010, 2011, pp. 28–48.