Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
- Artist
- Bernardino Fungai
- Artist Dates
- 1460-1516
- Artist Nationality
- Italian
- Title
- Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
- Date
- c. 1510-15
- Medium
- tempera on panel
- Dimensions
- diameter: 123.2 cm (48-1/2 in)
- K Number
- K1341
- Repository
- Lowe Art Museum
- Accession Number
- 61.023.000
- Notes
Provenance
Possibly in the collection of Prince Orloff, Paris. Private collection, London. (sale, Sotheby’s, London, 18 May 1938, no. 103). (Wildenstein, New York); sold to Samuel H. Kress [1863-1955] on 31 December 1942; gift 1952 to the National Gallery of Art; deaccessioned 1957 and returned to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; gift to the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, no. 61.023.000.
Catalogue Entry
Bernardino Fungai
Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
K1341
Coral Gables, Fla., Joe and Emily Lowe Art Gallery, University of Miami (61.23), since 1961.(1) Wood. Diameter, 48 1/2 to 49 1/4 in. (123.2 to 125.1 cm.). Very good condition except for a few restorations. Probably painted about 1510/15,(2) this tondo is related, in both landscape and figures, to the altarpiece of the Madonna and Saints in the Pinacoteca, Siena, which is signed, and dated 1512.(3) The tondo is saved, however, from the mediocrity of the artist's late style by a playful freedom of composition, by the motive, for example, of the Christ Child borne by angels on a flower-decked litter and clinging to the head of one of the angels to steady Himself. Mary of Egypt, whose prayer for clothing in her desert life was answered by a miraculous growth of her hair, kneels at the right. Two other saints who experienced life in the desert, John the Baptist and Jerome, stand behind a parapet at the left; Franciscans, among whom St. Francis is receiving the stigmata, are shown in the distance at the right; and a little to their left St. Christopher, carrying the Christ Child, fords a stream. Provenance: Said to have come from the collection of Prince Orlóff, Paris (could it be the tondo of Fungai's 'Madonna and Child and Saints bought in Siena in 1827 by my friend Fauslinere (or Faushnere),who went to London,' as reported by E. Romagnoli in his early-nineteenth century manuscript on Sienese artists?(4)). Private Collection, England (sold, Sotheby's, London, May 18, 1938, no. 103, as Fungai; bought by the following). Wildenstein's, New York (Italian Paintings, 1947, list in Introduction). Kress acquisition, 1942 –exhibited: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (800), 1945-55, as Fungai.
References
(1) Catalogue by F. R. Shapley, 1961, p. 28, as Fungai. (2) R. van Marle (Italian Schools of Painting, vol. XVI, 1937, p. 476) classifies this as a late work by Fungai, c. 1510/12. B. Berenson (in Dedalo, vol. XI, 1931, p. 760; Intemational Studio, vol. XCVIII, 1931, p. 22), while attributing it to Fungai, notes the influence of Signorelli in the figure of St. Jerome, and of Umbrian painting and Sodoma in the landscape. (3) This altarpiece is reproduced by P. Bacci, Bernardino Fungai, 1947, fig. 17. (4) Ibid., p. 120. M. Davies (National Gallery Catalogues: Earlier Italian Schools, 1961, p. 207) suggests that this quotation may refer to no. 1331 in the National Gallery, London; the description suits K1341 better.