Matteo di Pacino

Saint Ivo with a supplicating donor

Auction Closed

January 27, 09:38 PM GMT

Estimate

80,000 - 120,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property of a Private Collector

Matteo di Pacino

Florence documented 1359 - 1374

Saint Ivo with a supplicating donor

tempera on panel, gold ground, shaped top, in an engaged frame

panel: 16⅜ by 8⅛ by 1⅞ in.; 41.6 by 20.6 by 4.8 cm.

painted surface: 11⅜ by 5⅞ in.; 28.9 by 14.9 cm.

Rinuccini collection, Florence;
Thence by descent to Marianna de Pier Francesco Rinuccini, Florence;
Thence through marriage to her husband, Giorgio Tedoro Trivulzio, Florence, 1831;
Thence by descent to Prince Luigi Alberico Trivulzio (1868-1938), Milan;
Christopher Norris, Polesden Lacey, England, circa 1935-1953;
Victor D. Spark, New York;
From whom acquired through Marco Grassi by Robert Edsel, July 2001;
By whom sold, New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2007, lot 37;
Where acquired by the present collector.

Cambridge, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, on loan, July 1940 - December 1945.

G. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy, Florence 1978, p. 438, cat. no. 140a, reproduced fig. 548 (as Bolognese School, late 14th Century);
A. Lenza, "Alcune novità su Matteo Pacino," in Arte Cristiana 93 (2005), pp. 34, 37, reproduced fig. 10 (as Matteo di Pacino);
S. Chiodo, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Paintings, sec. IV, vol. IX, Painters in Florence after the 'Black Death': The Master of the Misericordia and Matteo di Pacino, Florence 2011, pp. 380-381, 460, reproduced in color plate 71 (as Matteo di Pacino).

This exquisite work of private devotion from the fourteenth century is remarkably well preserved, even retaining its original frame and triangular gable. The Florentine painter Matteo di Pacino depicts a genuflecting donor, almost certainly the original patron, and Saint Ivo of Kermartin, a thirteenth-century canon lawyer and the patron saint of judges, notaries, and lawyers. Matteo took great care to render each man's highly particularized physiognomies and the almost ogival folds of their elegant attire.

Matteo di Pacino was previously known as the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, so christened by Richard Offner because of the painter's execution of a fresco cycle in the eponymous chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. Luciano Bellosi first connected the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel to Matteo di Pacino, an artist working in the ambit of Bernardo Daddi and the Cione brothers.

The panel once formed part of the celebrated Milanese Trivulzio collection, which the work likely entered through the 1831 marriage of Marianna Rinuccini and Feorgio Teodoro Trivulzio.