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CATALOGUE ENTRY

Madonna and Child

about 1300–1310
Badia a Isola Master
Italian, active about 1280–early 1320s
egg tempera and gilding on wood panel
25 × 21-5/16 in.
(63.5 × 54.2 cm)
The Clowes Collection
2009.52
SEE TECHNICAL EXAMINATION REPORT

Marks, Inscriptions, and Distinguishing Features

None

Entry

This Madonna and Child was created in Siena between the late 1200s and the early 1300s, one of the most consequential places and times in the history of European art. Siena and Florence, located within 60 miles of each other in Tuscany, were at the center of a turning point in Western art. While the Florentine painter Giotto (1260s–1337) is usually credited with the shift from medieval stylization to pictorial realism, his contemporary, the Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (1245–1319), also contributed crucial elements to the new realism, from spatial exploration in the picture plane to conveying a believable and intensely felt psychological dimension to his figures (fig. 1).1 While some scholars have suggested that “[i]t is impossible to distinguish Duccio’s assistants, pupils, and followers,"2 a substantial body of research has arisen in the attempt to identify all the Ducciesque works.

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Figure 1: Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, about 1255–1319), Madonna and Child (Stoclet Madonna), about 1290–1300, tempera and gold on wood, 11 × 8-1/4 in. (framed). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Rogers Fund, Walter and Leonore Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Annette de la Renta Gift, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, Louis V. Bell, and Dodge Funds, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, several members of The Chairman’s Council Gifts, Elaine L. Rosenberg and Stephenson Family Foundation Gifts, 2003 Benefit Fund, and other gifts and funds from various donors, 2004, 2004.442.

The Clowes panel, which clearly belongs in Duccio’s orbit, was a keen acquisition for Dr. G.H.A. Clowes, and the work has generated a good amount of scholarly opinion. Three letters of attribution to Duccio from William Suida,3 Giuseppe Fiocco,4 and Raimond van Marle5 were included in the presentation folder on the panel compiled by E. and A. Silberman Galleries. A letter of interest from Osvald Siren6 to the Silberman Galleries referred to the panel as a Duccio. A note dated 17 December 1935, from Robert Harshe, then director of the Art Institute of Chicago, congratulates Clowes on his purchase of “the Duccio” from the Silberman Galleries.7

Raimond van Marle, the first to publish the panel as part of the Clowes Collection, described the work as a Duccio closely related to a Madonna and Child in Perugia,8 while Hilde Weigelt reported the view of her late husband, Duccio scholar Curt Weigelt, that the panel is by Segna di Bonaventura.9 William Suida affirmed in an undated statement (sometime shortly after April 1939)10 that the panel is a Duccio, agreeing with the careful analysis of Allen Clowes, the son of Dr. Clowes. (Allen’s report, while championing the panel’s proximity to Duccio’s works, actually finishes with the statement, “We do not feel that we can attribute the picture wholly to Duccio, but must conclude that it is the work of an unknown member of the master’s immediate shop, directly inspired by Duccio”).11

Sienese specialist Gertrude Coor attributed the Clowes panel to the Badia a Isola Master,12 and further suggested that the scale of the panel and its similarity to panels she attributed to the Badia a Isola Master in Utrecht and Cologne indicates that it was the center of a pentaptych, an early form of polyptych.13 An exchange with Dr. Clowes from 1953 to 1954,14 and with his son Allen from 1960,15 indicates that Coor wished to publish an article in the Art Bulletin or Burlington Magazine on the panel, with an attribution to the Badia a Isola Master, but the Clowes family did not grant permission. Noted scholar of early Italian art James Stubblebine concurred with Coor’s attribution, dating the panel to about 1320.16 With an aggregation of thirteen attributed works, Stubblebine’s study of the Badia a Isola Master allocates the largest group of works to this master. Mark Roskill’s unpublished “Clowes Collection Catalogue” of 1968 labeled the work as Sienese school, but within the entry he supported Coor’s attribution to the Badia a Isola Master.17 The most recent catalogue of the Indianapolis collection, by A. Ian Fraser, maintained Coor’s attribution to the Badia a Isola Master and dated the work to 1310. Fraser notes a 1970 discussion with the Sienese specialist Enzo Carli, who “emphasized that the painting is certainly by a pupil of Duccio."18

The Badia a Isola Master was active during the late 1200s to early 1300s. Not only was he was strongly influenced by Duccio, but Coor identifies the Badia a Isola Master as one of the two artists closest to the master. Stubblebine attributes to him substantial sections of the famed Rucellai Madonna, produced in 1285 by Duccio and his workshop for a confraternity in Florence. The major exhibition on Duccio and his era held in Siena in 2003 categorized the Badia a Isola Master as a member of the first of three generations of Ducciesque painters.19 The works attributed to the Badia a Isola Master indeed reveal him to be one of the more conservative artists in Duccio’s circle. He was not a product of the fully formed style of Duccio, from the period of his great Maestà for Siena Cathedral (1308–1311) to his death by 1319, as was Ugolino di Nerio (active early fourteenth century) in the 1320s; instead, he appears to be influenced more by the works of Guido da Siena (active late thirteenth century) and Duccio’s formative period. The central work assigned to this painter, a Madonna Enthroned formerly in the church of Sts. Salvatore e Cirino in the hamlet of Badia a Isola—hence the artist’s name—seems to date from the 1290s, and it is likely an early independent work (fig. 2).

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Figure 2: Master of Badia a Isola (Italian), Madonna Enthroned, about 1290, tempera on panel, 8-1/32 × 4-59/64 in. Museo Civico e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra, Colle Val d’Elsa, Tuscany, Italy. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY.

Several features of the Clowes panel point to a date early in the fourteenth century. For example, Mary’s cloak has gold highlighting, or chrysography, a feature omitted in most of Duccio’s paintings of Madonnas by 1310. The halos are incised freehand, not stamped, indicating a date before 1319, when Simone Martini’s (about 1284–1344) Pisa Altarpiece introduced the extensive use of punching. Patrons, of course, could stipulate the use of an older format well into the 1320s; nevertheless, these indicators speak to the conservatism of the artist and suggest a date somewhere between 1300 and 1310.

The Clowes Madonna and Child shows passages of great refinement and excellent preservation; Mary’s surviving hand is in excellent condition, as is the Christ child’s hand over her shoulder. Though the paint for the skin tones has thinned or been altered chemically to reveal the terra verde layer beneath the pink hues, the faces, for the most part, are well preserved. However, the panel has received numerous alterations to reach its present condition. As Coor noted, the large scale of the Madonna and Child suggests that it was not made as a private devotional panel but rather as the centerpiece of a larger complex, probably a Madonna and Child framed by panels of half-length saints, like the pentaptych attributed to Duccio in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena (fig. 3). At some point, the central panel was removed and cut down into an oval format, possibly to make it more attractive for display in a private setting but likely also to remove heavily damaged sections of the lower portion. Extensive woodworm damage is plainly visible on the back of the panel. Efforts were made at an undetermined later date to restore the original rectangular format of the bottom portion of the panel, including reconstruction of the lost torso of the Virgin, her right hand, and surface gilding. The first published photograph of the work shows this phase of the panel’s appearance (fig. 4).20 The Clowes family seems to have acquired the panel shortly after it was freed from these modern reconstructions—sometime before the sale of the work in 1936—and what we see today largely reflects what is preserved of the original painting surface. The latest intervention made an effort to be sensitive to fourteenth-century panel construction practices by applying cloth over the reconstructed areas of the panel and imitating the layer of terra verde, which was used to underlay areas where skin tones were to be painted. This pre-1936 restoration, however, indiscriminately used the terra verde across all the reconstructed sections of the panel. This, combined with the abrading and/or increasing translucency of the pigments used for the skin tones, has left the panel with an overall greenish cast. Originally, the complexions of the figures would have been much more vibrant in the color and modeling of the faces and the body of the child. Mary’s azurite cloak would have been a more vivid blue to offset the still brilliant vermilion of the child’s tunic. Most of the gold striation on her cloak is original, though some of the application to the shoulder and upper arm bearing the child is a modern reconstruction.

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Figure 3: Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, 1245–1319), Polyptych No. 28, with Madonna and Child, with Saints Augustine, Paul, Peter, and Dominic, about 1300–1305, tempera on wood, 56-19/64 × 95-9/32 in. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy.73507261
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Figure 4: Master of Badia a Isola’s Madonna and Child from an article by Hilde Weigelt, “Madonna mit Kind von Segna di Bonaventura,” Pantheon 18 (1936): 258.

Despite these losses and alterations, the most important aspect of the panel endures: the beautifully intimate compression of the faces and the sweet embrace of the child, whose arm encircles his mother’s neck. The warm, unmistakably human tenderness of the mother and child is what makes this such an important document of the time. The panel shares with Duccio’s Madonna and Child (Stoclet Madonna) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that human intimacy that places this work on the threshold of the new art (see fig. 1).

Many factors have been proposed as influences on the new humanity seen in this Madonna and Child and others of this time from the Ducciesque school. Hans Belting has proposed that the loving intimacy is a response to the new sweet style (dolce stil nuovo) of Tuscan love poetry of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.21 Thirteenth-century French ivories show a similar intimacy in the mother-child relationship, and Siena—a major stopover for northern pilgrims on the Via Francigena, the route south to Rome, and a burgeoning financial center with merchant and banking outposts in Paris—would have been responsive to the latest developments in Gothic France. Indeed, Giovanni Pisano (about 1240–died before 1320), a sculptor responsible for the design of the facade of Siena Cathedral, almost certainly traveled to France and brought back the new emotionalism of French sculpture to Italy.22 The newly formed mendicant orders, chief among them the Dominicans and Franciscans, also played an enormous role in promoting the new humanity of these images by insisting that the worshiper have a direct, personal experience and empathy with the stories related in the scriptures.23 One of the most popular devotional treatises of the time, the thirteenth-century Franciscan Meditations on the Life of Christ, even exhorts worshipers to hold the baby Christ child in their own arms: “Pick Him up and hold Him in your arms. Gaze on His face with devotion and reverently kiss Him and delight in Him."24

But the specific motif of the Madonna and child shown embracing cheek to cheek, the infant Christ’s right arm slung over his mother’s shoulder, derives from a distinct Byzantine precedent, the Virgin Eleousa, an iconographic type representing tenderness.25 The type is known since at least the twelfth century in Byzantium and was widespread across the Byzantine world, from Constantinople to Russia. A famous thirteenth-century Eleousa mosaic is found in Athens. The Eleousa became popular in thirteenth-century Italy, as well, for a miracle-working Madonna of the type is found in Rome, and several post-1250 altarpieces in Tuscany follow the format. The Eleousa type is known to have been appropriated by Duccio’s school. In the Clowes panel, the Christ child’s gesture of embracing Mary so that his right hand is visible from behind her neck and the close proximity of his face to hers is shared with a work often attributed to Duccio, the Maestà in Bern (fig. 5).

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Figure 5: Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, 1245–1319), Maestà, about 1290–1295, tempera on poplar wood, 12-13/32 × 9-11/64 in. Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, Legat von Adolf von Stürler, Versailles, 1902, G 0873.

A growing body of scholarship finds symbolic meaning in the pose and dress of the Christ child in the Eleousa theme as portrayed in Byzantine and Italo-Byzantine art.26 Virtually every Madonna and Child image from the Renaissance suggests Mary’s foreknowledge of the sacrifice of her child through the sadness expressed in her face. The Christ child in the Eleousa theme acknowledges this, as he seems to be trying to distract or console the Madonna from her sorrow. At the same time, however, his pose alludes to his future death on the cross—his feet are placed together, and the extension of the arms suggests the moment of the Deposition—the bearing of Christ’s body down from the cross. Contemporaneous Deposition scenes frequently juxtapose the dead Christ’s face with Mary’s, so that a viewer of the time familiar with Deposition portrayals would recognize the end in the beginning.27

Rather than the more formal chiton and himation worn by the Christ child seen in most contemporaneous Madonna and Child Enthroned imagery, the Clowes panel presents the child in a simple tunic, a more intimate clothing appropriate for this half-length Madonna and Child format. The tunic exposes his shoulder and bare legs, emphasizing his physical incarnation and increasing his vulnerability. The Clowes panel, along with other Sienese variants on the Eleousa theme of this period, further underscores the human aspect of Christ’s dual nature by eliminating the chrysography on his tunic seen in Byzantine models. The brilliant vermilion coloring of his clothing could evoke the blood of the Passion as well. Interestingly, an extant group of Madonna and Child panels by Segna da Bonaventura, another Ducciesque painter, features this same juxtaposition of Mary in traditional chrysography and the Christ child in a red or vermilion tunic.28 Further investigation may reveal that this represents a distinct type with an iconography appropriate to a particular religious order or class of patrons. These aspects of pose and dress parallel the advances toward naturalism made in Duccio’s painting, the effect of which was to draw the viewer into a more intimate relationship with the Madonna and Child and emphasize the human, accessible nature of Christ's Incarnation.

So far, attributions of this panel have been based on connoisseurship, as an artist’s mark, the manner in which forms are modeled, or the way a hand or eye or drapery is rendered have long been understood as being major clues to authorship. The opinions of Suida and Van Marle speak of an almost spiritual dimension to the works of Duccio that do not come through in the more wooden pieces of his followers, but they claim to find that spark in the Clowes panel. The analyses of Coor and Stubblebine delve deeply into how such particulars as the hands, eyes, nose, and the hem of Mary’s veil are rendered, and how these match similar elements in the Badia a Isola Master’s oeuvre.

Though a cornerstone of the discipline of art history, connoisseurship is notoriously subjective, and as Suida points out in his assessment of the Clowes panel, it is complicated by the fact that no workshop production was purely the creation of a single hand.29 At some point, technical analyses of the works of the Badia a Isola Master and across the wider circle of Duccio and his associates may reveal some commonality in procedural technique or use of materials that may lead to the discovery of the artist’s identity.

Author

Gustav Medicus

Provenance

Possibly Francis V, Duke of Modena (1819–1875);30

Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’Este (1863–1914), Konopiště Castle near Prague, today Czech Republic, probably by 1914.31

Count Sighard von Enzenberg, Schloss Tratzberg, Austria.32

(E. and A. Silberman Galleries, New York) in, or by, 1935;

Dr. George Henry Alexander Clowes, Indianapolis, in 1935;33

The Clowes Fund, Indianapolis, from 1958–2009, and on long-term loan to the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1971 (C10031);

Given to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, now the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, in 2009.

Exhibitions

E. and A. Silberman Galleries, New York, 1957, Art of the United Nations, no. 1 (reproduced);

John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis, 1959, Paintings from the Collection of George Henry Alexander Clowes: A Memorial Exhibition, no. 21 (reproduced);

The Art Gallery, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 1962, A Lenten Exhibition, no. 14;

Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, 1962, Italian and Spanish Paintings from the Clowes Collection, no. 1.

References

Raimond van Marle, “Two Unknown Paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna,” Apollo 24 (October 1936): 213–214, figs. III–IV;

Hilde Weigelt, “Madonna mit Kind von Segna de Bonaventura,” Pantheon 18 (1936): 258;

Art of the United Nations, exh. cat. (New York: E. and A. Silberman Galleries, 1957), no. 1;

Paintings from the Collection of George Henry Alexander Clowes, exh. cat. (Indianapolis: John Herron Art Museum, 1959), no. 21;

A Lenten Exhibition, exh. cat. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Art Gallery, 1962), no. 14;

Italian and Spanish Paintings from the Clowes Collection, exh. cat. (Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, 1962), no. 1;

Mark Roskill, “Clowes Collection Catalogue” (unpublished typed manuscript, IMA Clowes Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, 1968);

A. Ian Fraser, A Catalogue of the Clowes Collection (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1972), 2–3;

James H. Stubblebine, Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 1:83, 2: fig. 180.

Notes

  1. To put the importance of Duccio’s revolutionary approach into perspective, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired the Stoclet Madonna in 2004 at the highest price it had ever paid for a work of art, because it was a universally accepted piece by the master, and the collection had no signal work by that artist. ↩︎

  2. Dillian Gordon, s.v. “Duccio,” Dictionary of Art, Grove Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com. ↩︎

  3. Letter from William Suida, 26 September 1935, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  4. Letter from Giuseppe Fiocco, October 1935, declaring the panel exceptional for its dramatic intensity. File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  5. Raimond van Marle, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  6. Letter from Osvald Siren, 26 November 1935, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  7. Robert Harshe, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  8. Raimond van Marle, “Two Unknown Paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna,” Apollo 24 (October 1936): 214. ↩︎

  9. Hilde Weigelt, “Madonna mit Kind von Segna de Bonaventura,” Pantheon 18 (1936): 258. ↩︎

  10. William Suida, sometime shortly after April 1939, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  11. Allen W. Clowes, “The Attribution of Two Italian Paintings,” April 1939, p. 28, unpublished manuscript, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  12. Gertrude Coor, “A Further Addition to the Oeuvre of the Badia a Isola Master,” unpublished manuscript, File CL10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, and Gertrude Coor, “The Missing Panel from a Dispersed Polyptych by the Badia a Isola Master,” Art Bulletin 38 (1956): 119n3. ↩︎

  13. Gertrude Coor, “A Further Addition to the Oeuvre of the Badia a Isola Master,” unpublished manuscript, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 4–5, suggests the Clowes panel is the central part of a lost altarpiece. She tentatively connects this panel with Siena Pinacoteca polyptych laterals no. 22 of Sts. John the Baptist and Peter, with angels in pinnacles, but the condition of the panels prevented Coor from making a definitive declaration (p. 7n12). ↩︎

  14. Gertrude Coor and G.H.A. Clowes, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  15. Gertrude Coor and Allen Clowes, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  16. James Stubblebine, Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 1:83, 2: fig. 180. ↩︎

  17. Mark Roskill, “Clowes Collection Catalogue” (unpublished typed manuscript, IMA Clowes Archive, Indianapolis, IN, 1968), Duccio di Buoninsegna—Sienese school, 2009.52. ↩︎

  18. A. Ian Fraser, A Catalogue of the Clowes Collection (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1972), 2. ↩︎

  19. Alessandro Bagnoli, ed., Duccio: Alle origini della pittura senese (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2003), 279–285. ↩︎

  20. Hilde Weigelt, “Madonna mit Kind von Segna di Buonaventura,” Pantheon 17 (1936): 258. ↩︎

  21. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 370. ↩︎

  22. Studies of Giovanni Pisano regularly point out parallels of his works with sculptures found on the French Cathedrals of Laon and Reims and with French ivories. Two major periods of documentary silence in Giovanni’s career have led to speculations on northern sojourns, but Giovanni could have also gained a great deal of knowledge of Northern Gothic practice from the importation of ivories, sculptures in precious metals, illuminated manuscripts, and drawings from the North. See John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), 132–133. ↩︎

  23. The mendicants, especially the Dominicans, founded by Dominic de Guzmán (1170–1221), and the Franciscans, founded by Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226), pushed for making the teachings of the Church accessible and relevant to all members of society, especially the uneducated and poor. Alongside charitable activities for the orphaned, the sick, and the needy, mendicants commissioned artworks and produced treatises, manuals, and edifying exempla aimed at strengthening the faith of the lay parishioner. Jacopus de Voragine’s immensely popular collection of saints' lives, the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) of 1260, and Jacopo Passavanti’s 1354 Lo specchio di vera penitenza (The Mirror of True Penance) are two influential Dominican productions. The Meditationes Vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ) is an early thirteenth-century Franciscan work of unknown authorship that survives in more than 200 thirteenth- to fourteenth-century manuscripts, underscoring its popularity. See Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, “Dominican Order” in Christopher Kleinhenz, ed., Medieval Italy, an Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1:303–305, and Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). ↩︎

  24. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 38. ↩︎

  25. While references to the Virgin Eleousa can be found in contemporaneous Byzantine treatises, later, post-Byzantine scholarship further defined the category Glykophilousa—“of the sweet kiss”—within the Eleousa type. See Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “Virgin Eleousa,” Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3:2171, and discussions of the Virgin Eleousa in Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). ↩︎

  26. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), especially Evelina K. Guseva, 166–167; and Rebecca W. Corrie, “Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna del bordone and the Meaning of the Bare-Legged Christ Child in Siena and the East,” Gesta 35, no. 1 (1996): 43–65. ↩︎

  27. Examples are seen in the Deposition from Coppo di Marcovaldo and his son Salerno’s Crucifixion with Scenes of Christ’s Passion, Pistoia Cathedral, 1274–76; The Master of Faenza Deposition in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, about 1275; and the Master of Saint Francis Deposition from his Double-Sided Polyptych of about 1272 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. ↩︎

  28. See, for example, the Madonna and Child from Segna da Bonaventura’s Polyptych of Saint Agatha, Museo di Palazzo Corboli, Asciano, Italy; a Madonna and Child in the Minneapolis Institute of Art; a Madonna and Child in the Museo Civico e d'Arte Sacra di Colle di Val d'Elsa, Italy; and a Madonna and Child in Wawel Castle, Poland. Other works by Segna feature a similar red robed Christ child held by a Madonna lacking the older style chrysography (e.g., the Madonna and Child, Yale University Art Gallery; Madonna and Child, Honolulu Museum of Art; and Madonna and Child, North Carolina Museum of Art). ↩︎

  29. “It is a mistake to pretend that what we call ‘an original by Duccio’ should be painted exclusively by his own hand. Such a concept contradicts the working system of that as well as of many other periods. It goes without mentioning that everyone, especially of the larger works of a master like Duccio, is actually the product of a cooperation of several people, not only the gilder and leading master.” W. Suida, letter of assessment of Clowes panel, undated (shortly after April 1939), p. 2, File C10031, Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎

  30. Tentative indications suggest that this work may have been part of a group of “23 quadri di pittura greca” that were displayed in the Chiesetta of the Castello del Catajo at Battaglia Terme, near Padua, belonging to Francis V, who willed his entire estate to his cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. See Luigi Rizzoli, “Il Castello del Catajo nel Padovano e il testament del Marchese Tommaso degli Obizzi,” Archivio Veneto-Tridentino, 4 (1923): 7–8, 127–146, 138n1, citing Document IV in the appendix. ↩︎

  31. This information is included in Art Unites Nations, exh. cat. (New York: E. and A. Silberman Galleries, 1957), no. 1 (reproduced). Correspondence with Franz Ferdinand’s heirs in 2009 notes that, following the monarchy’s collapse, items from the archduke’s collection may have been sold to support his children; see correspondence in IMA Provenance File (2009.52). ↩︎

  32. See Paintings from the Collection of George Henry Alexander Clowes: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. (Indianapolis: John Herron Art Museum, 1959), cat. no. 2 (reproduced). It is identified as having been in the von Enzenberg collection by Hilde Weigelt, “Madonna mit Kind von Segna de Bonaventura,” Pantheon 18 (1936): 258 (reproduced). ↩︎

  33. Expertises by several art historians were issued in fall 1935; see File C10031 (2009.52), Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Dr. Clowes was complimented on his purchase by the Director of the Art Institute of Chicago in December 1935; see letter from Robert Harsche to G.H.A. Clowes, December 1935, File C10031 (2009.52), Clowes Registration Archive, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. ↩︎