IN THE SPRING of 1312 a group of leading Franciscan theologians, stung by mounting criticism over the lax observance of poverty in their Order, sought to defend the decoration of Franciscan churches: ‘. . . nor have we seen in the churches of the friars a great sumptuousness of paintings except in the church at Assisi, and these paintings were ordered by Lord [Pope] Nicholas IV out of reverence to the Saint [i.e. Francis], whose relics are buried there’. This passage has excited great interest among Assisi specialists since we drew attention to it in a short and polemical article in 2003. Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope (reigned 1288–92; Fig.1), has long been associated with the renewal of the Basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi towards the end of the thirteenth century. In particular, many scholars have seen Nicholas’s brief pontificate as the moment when the unparalleled mural decoration of the Upper Church nave (including the St Francis cycle) was devised and initiated (Fig.2). Before our publication of the extract from the document of 1312, the case rested on a raft of circumstantial evidence. Nicholas’s personal patronage is clear from his generous donations of liturgical silver, textiles and reliquaries to the basilica; his institutional support from his 1288 bull, Reducentes ad sedulae, which authorised the friars at Assisi to use alms left by the laity to fund the enlargement and embellishment of their church. But the text of 1312 is the only source to link Nicholas specifically with paintings at Assisi. Hence Luciano Bellosi’s proclamation of the passage as a ‘testimony of inestimable value’ that ‘finally permits us to have a precise and unequivocal point of reference’ for dating the fresco decoration of the Upper Church.

IN HIS PITHY article of 1956 ‘The Date of the “Legend of St Francis” at Assisi’, John White remarked: ‘So much has been written about the frescoes at Assisi that it seems to be almost foolhardy to suggest that something may have been overlooked’. White demonstrated that the scene of the Stigmatisation of St Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi was copied in Giuliano da Rimini’s altarpiece (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) dated 1307, and so must have been painted earlier. Although it did not establish when the Assisi frescos were begun, or their chronological relationship to Giotto’s frescos at Padua, White’s conclusion that the Assisi image must have been painted ‘by 1307 at the latest’, though not unchallenged, is widely accepted. However, the present article suggests that something else may, in fact, have been overlooked in the Assisi frescos: internal evidence of date and patronage, which may prove that they were painted over ten years before the Boston panel.

THE BRONZE PASCHAL candlestick, nearly four metres high, created by the goldsmith and sculptor Andrea Briosco (1470–1532), nicknamed ‘il Riccio’ (the curly-haired), was acknowledged as a masterpiece immediately upon its completion in 1516 (Fig.5). Commissioned by the authorities of the Basilica di S. Antonio in Padua, known as the Santo, the candlestick assured Riccio’s fame throughout northern Italy and provided him with a vast range of motifs and forms on which he drew throughout the rest of his career.

THE EARLIEST PUBLISHED reference to Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a man, known as The condottiere (Fig.20), is in an article on the paintings in the collection of Count James-Alexandre Pourtalès-Gorgier, published shortly before its sale in Paris in 1865, when it was purchased by the Musée du Louvre for the enormous sum of 113,500 francs. Some time later, the count’s granddaughter, Baroness Elisabeth de Berckheim, commented in her journal that Pourtalès-Gorgier had bought this painting, during one of his frequent trips to northern Italy, for the risible sum of 750 francs, from ‘un vieux curé’. However, the baroness neither named the curé nor specified when and where the transaction had taken place. This article brings to light unpublished letters that show that the elderly cleric was the abbé Luigi Celotti, and provides new information on the provenance of The condottiere as well as of Antonio de Solario’s Virgin and Child with St John (Fig.21).

LIKE MANY ‘old mistresses’ Marietta Tintoretto has enjoyed a reputation dependent more on the words of others than on any work she may have made. From Borghini’s and Ridolfi’s brief accounts we learn that she assisted her father, Jacopo Tintoretto, that she was universally known as ‘la Tintoretta’, that she dressed as a boy in order to accompany her father on his various projects, that she was an accomplished musician and that she painted many portraits. Of these last the sources specify the sitters of only four: herself; her maternal grandfather Marco dei Vescovi; Marco’s ‘figliolo’ Pietro and Jacopo Strada.

AFTER HIS DRAMATIC rediscovery of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ in a Jesuit house in Dublin, Sergio Benedetti published a detailed account of the painting’s provenance in this Magazine. Benedetti demonstrated how the painting came to be misattributed to Gerrit van Honthorst by its original owners, the Mattei family in Rome, before being sold in 1802 to a Scottish gentleman, William Hamilton Nisbet. He was then able to show that the misattributed painting remained in Nisbet’s family (hung at Biel mansion-house, East Lothian; Fig.43) until the death of Nisbet’s last direct descendant, Constance Nisbet Hamilton Ogilvy, in 1920, and was included in an auction of her estate held in Edinburgh by Dowell’s Ltd. on 16th April 1921. However, Benedetti was forced to admit that ‘what happened to the painting immediately after this sale is not known’ and that he could only deduce that ‘it was transferred to Ireland, and soon passed, in the 1920s, into the ownership in Dublin of Dr Marie Lea-Wilson’, who presented the painting to the Jesuit com munity some time in the 1930s.

RARE IS THE author whose books on a specialised subject are published and republished over the course of fifty-eight years, and rarer still is the fact that an author’s voice and analytical method in such a publication should speak to a field and its specialists, not infrequently with enormous persuasion, more than a century after it was first heard. Bernard Berenson’s The Drawings of the Florentine Painters is such a work, first published in two volumes in 1903 and reissued in greatly revised, expanded editions of three volumes in 1938 and 1961 (in Italian). It is without doubt his most remarkable and lasting contribution as an art historian and remains ‘the basis of all our knowledge [. . .] undertaken when the subject was virgin soil’, to quote the then editor of this Magazine in 1955, words still valid today. While the prestige of connoisseurship was said to have been in decline by 1932, being superseded by iconographical studies, this was certainly not true of the field of old-master drawings, for until even two decades ago, connoisseurship was the exclusive analytical tool in the study of Italian drawings, and continues to be one of the dominant methods today. Berenson died on 6th October 1959 aged ninety-four, before the publication of the third Italian edition, I disegni dei pittori fiorentini, in 1961. In its preface, he recounted his joyful emotion on being asked by Dario Neri and Paola Moroni of Electa Editrice in Milan to produce this Italian edition of his magisterial opus, written at his beloved Villa I Tatti in Settignano, on 10th April 1958: ‘Wrongly or rightly, I believe that these volumes contain some of the happiest and most lasting fruits of my work; the thought saddened me that these should remain so little known in a country where my books are read and appreciated more than elsewhere, and not only by art historians, but also by educated general readers’. He conceded with touching honesty that his thinking had evolved towards the side of caution, particularly in regard to the issue of quality as the sole criterion of authorship which he, and other connoisseurs, often upheld as paramount: ‘And with Horace, I am ready to admit that even Homer occasionally sounds shrill. Today, I would be less certain that the inferior quality of some drawings is sufficient proof to exclude the possibility that they were executed by Castagno, or by Pollaiuolo, or by Michelangelo himself. I would be more inclined today to doubt that that formidable genius always possessed certain good taste’.