Object details
Object number
P15n10
Creator(s)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
(Italian, 1285 - about 1348)
Title
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary
Date
1319-1347
Medium
Gold and tempera on panel
Dimensions
36.5 x 25 cm (14 3/8 x 9 13/16 in.)
Provenance
Gift from the essayist and poet John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) and his wife Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler Chapman (1866-1937), in memory of his son Victor, to Isabella Stewart Gardner on 12 November 1917. (as attributed Andrea Vanni)
Commentary
Elizabeth (1207–1231), daughter of the king of Hungary, renounced the world to devote herself to caring for the sick and the poor. This painting formed one of the pinnacles (triangular points) of a dismantled altarpiece made for a church in Massa Maritima, Italy. In 1917, Isabella Stewart Gardner received it as a gift from the essayist and poet John Jay Chapman and his wife Elizabeth in memory of his son Victor who was the first American pilot to die in World War I. She placed the painting on an easel before a French chasuble (a priest’s stole) so that the floral pattern of the chasuble echoes the flowers the saint holds in her cloak.
Bibliography
Raimond van Marle. "An Early and a Late Work of Andrea Vanni." Art in America 10 (1922), p. 232 (as attributed to Andrea Vanni)
Raimond van Marle. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 2 (The Hague, 1924), p. 448 (as Andrea Vanni)
Philip Hendy. "Two Sienese Paintings at Fenway Court." The Burlington Magazine (Sept. 1929), pp. 109-110. (as attributed to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, as a companion panel to St. Agnes at Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum inv. no. 1953.203)
Philip Hendy. Catalogue of Exhibited Paintings and Drawings (Boston, 1931), pp. 204-205. (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
G. Sinibaldi. I Lorenzetti (Florence, 1933), p. 185
Gilbert Wendel Longstreet and Morris Carter. General Catalogue (Boston, 1935), p. 95 (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
Morris Carter. "Mrs. Gardner & The Treasures of Fenway Court" in Alfred M. Frankfurter (ed.). The Gardner Collection (New York, 1946), p. 62.
Rollin Hadley. “Notes, Records, Comments.” Gardner Museum Calendar of Events 7, no. 10 (3 Nov. 1963), p. 2.
Bernard Berenson. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Central and North Italian Schools, vol. 1 (London, 1968), p. 441 (as Andrea Vanni)
Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, 1972), p. 109 (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
Philip Hendy. European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1974), pp. 139 (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
Everett Fahy. "Italian Paintings at Fenway Court and Elsewhere." The Connoisseur (May 1978), pp. 31 and 36 (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
Laurence Kanter in Hilliard Goldfarb et al. Italian Paintings and Drawings Before 1800 in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Unpublished manuscript. (Boston, 1996-2000). (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti)
Emanuele Zappasodi. Ambrogio Lorenzetti "Huomo di grande ingengo." Un polittico fuori canone e due tavole dimenticate. Nuovi Studi 19 (2013), pp. 12-13 and 20-21 (as Ambrogio Lorenzetti, as possibly a fragment of the Massa Marittima Maesta)
Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald. Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (Boston, 2022), pp.128-129, fig. 70.
Gallery
Early Italian Room
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