Michele Ciampanti, also identified as The Stratonice Master

Edoardo Villa & C., Genoa;

His sale, Genoa, Galleria d'Arte Vitelli, 15–22 December 1923, this lot on 21 December, lot 727, reproduced (as Mainardi);

Colville collection (according to Pope-Hennessy 1943, p. 65), possibly Capt. Norman R. Colville, M.C. (1893–1974), Penheale Manor, Launceston, Cornwall;

Possibly his sale et al., London, Christie's, 24 February 1939, lot 110 (as Florentine School, Madonna and Child with Saints, circular panel, D. 17½ in.);

Sir John Pope-Hennessy (1913–1994), inv. no. 17, by 1943;

Acquired by the present owner in February 2013.

J. Pope-Hennessy, 'Some aspects of the Cinquecento in Siena', in Art in America, vol. XXXI, April 1943, pp. 63, 65–66, reproduced p. 72, fig. 6;

‘Review of Reviews’, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1943, vol. 24, p. 252;  

E. Fahy, 'Some notes on the Stratonice Master', in Paragone, no. 197, July 1966, pp. 17–18, reproduced pl. 13; 

B.B. Fredericksen, 'The Earliest Painting by the ‘Stratonice Master’', in Paragone, no. 197, July 1966, p. 54, no. 7, reproduced pl. 13; 

B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools, vol. I, London 1968, p. 257; 

M. Tazartes, 'Anagrafe lucchese, II. Michele Ciampanti; il Maestro di Stratonice?', in Ricerche di Storia dell'arte, no. 26, 1985, p. 24 n. 11; 

C. Baracchini, M.T. Filieri, G. Ghilarducci and C. Ferri, 'Pittori a Lucca tra ’400 e ’500 -1- Annotazioni in margine', in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series III, vol. 16, no. 3, 1986, pp. 758–59;

W. Angelelli and A.G. De Marchi, Pittura dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento nelle fotografie di Girolamo Bombelli, Milan 1991, p. 216, no. 428, reproduced (with incorrect dimensions); 

R. Massagli, 'La bottega dei Ciampanti: il Maestro di Stratonice e il Maestro di San Filippo', in Propozioni, vols II–III, 2001–2, p. 78;

T. Pepper, Beaton Portraits, New Haven 2004, p. 188, reproduced pl. 108;

M. Tazartes, Fucina lucchese: maestri, botteghe, mercanti in una città del Quattrocento, Pisa 2007, pp. 50 and 52, reproduced fig. 45;

E. Fahy, ‘Some notes on the Stratonice Master’, in Studi sulla pittura toscana del Rinascimento. Studies in Tuscan Renaissance Painting, vol. I, Scritti scelti, A. De Marchi and E. Sambo (eds), Bologna–Roma 2020, p. 23, reproduced vol. II, pl. 284 (as Michele Ciampanti [Maestro di Stratonice]).

This tondo was once owned by Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the eminent scholar of Renaissance art, illustrious director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum in London, and later head of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Traditionally considered to be by Sebastiano Mainardi, the work was first attributed by Pope-Hennessy to the Stratonice Master – a name coined by Berenson in 1931 around a nucleus of two cassone panels preserved today at the Huntington Museum, San Marino, California, which depict the story of Antiochus and Stratonice.¹

This anonymous master was regarded as a follower of Francesco di Giorgio, formed in Siena and later active between about 1475 and 1490 in Florence, where he was able to synthesize motifs from works by Botticelli and early Filippino Lippi. Everett Fahy, writing on the Stratonice Master in 1966, posited a possible connection to Lucca. In his analysis of the master, Fahy aptly pointed out the 'mysteriously lyrical temperament' of this unusual artistic personality. The master has since been identified as Michele Ciampanti by Maurizia Tazartes, whose archival research has determined he was indeed a citizen of Lucca and is documented there off and on until the second decade of the sixteenth century. She proposes a dating for the present work in the mid- to late 1480s, slightly after Ciampanti's Christ crowned with Thorns (private collection, Monte Carlo), a work whose principal figure shares similar characteristics with the Virgin, in particular the slant of the eyes and head and distinctively large hands.

Examination with an infrared camera reveals some interesting changes to the design of the Virgin. The artist originally had different ideas for how to position her hands. He drew her proper left hand in a blessing gesture beside the Christ Child’s head; he also tried out her left hand resting by the Christ Child’s thigh, low down, close to the frame edge. Both of these were abandoned for the final solution as painted, in which she gently holds the Child’s wrist while he clutches one of her fingers. 

¹ Reproduced in Berenson 1968, vol. II, pls 835 and 837; https://emuseum.huntington.org/objects/13052/antiochus-and-stratonice