MATTEO DI GIOVANNI DI BARTOLO, CALLED MATTEO DA SIENA | The Madonna and Child

Professor Paolo Paolini, Rome;
His sale, New York, American Art Association, 10–11 December 1924, lot 44, for $650 to H. Henderson;
Mary T. Cudahy, New York;
By whose Estate sold, New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 11 January 1958, lot 452 for $1,600 to Dr. W.M. Serri;
Thence by descent within a private collection, New York, until sold
Anonymous sale ('Property of a New York Collector'), New York, Christie's, 26 January 2005, lot 10.

The attribution to Matteo di Giovanni was first proposed by F. Mason Perkins and Professor G. de Nicola, Director of the Bargello Museum, Florence, who linked the physiognomy of the Madonna in the present composition with that of a Saint Barbara in San Domenico, Siena.¹ The attribution was most recently re-endorsed by Dr. Laurence Kanter prior to the 2005 sale (see Provenance).

Matteo di Giovanni, one of the greatest and perhaps the most progressive of the remarkable series of painters of Siena in the fifteenth century, produced many devotional images of the Madonna and Child throughout his long and prosperous career. The simplicity of the present image is, however, more unusual within the artist's œuvre for its omission of the attendant angels or saints usually incorporated into his compositions, and is all the more intimate and devout in feeling for it.

1 Signed and dated 1479; see B. Berenson, Italian pictures of the Renaissance, Central Italian and North Italian school, vol. I, London 1968, p. 260, reproduced vol. II, fig. 811.