Bartolomeo di Giovanni

Bartolomeo di Giovanni trained under Domenico Ghirlandaio, with whom he became a close associate, and was a sometime-collaborator of Sandro Botticelli. This lyrical work displays all the hallmarks of fifteenth-century Florentine painting: the draperies are rendered with a combination of geometric precision and material attention; the figures are differentiated by their particularized facial expressions; and the background is defined by a naturalistic landscape that conveys depth through both linear and atmospheric perspective. Indeed, even the particular iconography, combining a miraculous vision of the Trinity and a sacra conversazione, was widespread in Florence during the last quarter of the quattrocento. 

The present composition's upper register corresponds closely with two other works, both painted lunettes atop decorative frames, by Bartolomeo di Giovanni. One is situated above Sandro Botticelli's Last Communion of Saint Jerome (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 14.40.642)¹ and the other adorns Benedetto da Maiano's polychrome relief of the Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 5-1890). All three of Bartolomeo's works are based on two preparatory drawings in the Christ Church Picture Gallery that delineate the figures of the crucified Christ and God the Father emerging from the empyrean almost exactly as they appear in the present painting. 

We are grateful to Dr. Nicoletta Pons for endorsing the attribution to Bartolomeo di Giovanni and to Christopher Daly for his assistance cataloguing this lot and suggesting a date in the early 1490s.

¹ Bartolomeo copied Botticelli's composition on at least two occasions. See K. Christiansen, "Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 1988-1989," in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 47 (Fall 1989), p. 36.