Jacopo del Sellaio, Virgin and Child with Angels

James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Florence, by 1859

The panel support, of a vertical wood grain, has been thinned to a depth ranging from 5 to 9 millimeters and cradled. It is composed of two planks with a seam approximately 24 centimeters from the left edge and has been slightly truncated across the top and trimmed to within the picture field on all sides; no barb is apparent along any edge. Two prominent knots, one below the angel on the right and the other above the cherub head on the left, interrupt the paint surface, as do several partial splits, the most prominent of which runs at a slight angle approximately on center to the left of the Christ Child, through the Virgin’s right eye and knee. The paint surface has been severely abraded throughout, a state exacerbated by a harsh cleaning of 1968–69 that left exposed losses along the seam and splits at the upper edge of the panel (fig. 1). This cleaning also removed areas of shadow in the folds of the blue robes between the Virgin’s knees and especially to the left of her right leg. The mordant gilt decoration of haloes, wings, and hems is much damaged. Most local losses were touched back in a treatment by Irma Passeri in 2018.

Thought by James Jackson Jarves and the earliest writers to discuss it to be a work by Cosimo Rosselli,¹ this imposing panel was recognized by Osvald Sirén to be a typical work of Jacopo del Sellaio, an opinion that has not since been questioned seriously.² Charles Seymour, Jr., added a qualification that it might be by a close follower of Sellaio, based on an observation made to him by Everett Fahy, who later suggested that this follower could be the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, an artist sometimes identified as Sellaio’s documented studio partner, Filippo di Giuliano (1449–1503).³ Nicoletta Pons adduced the image as a possible indication of the appearance of a missing fragment of Sellaio’s altarpiece for the chapel of the Compagnia di Santa Maria Assunta e San Sebastiano in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, presumably painted after 1486, the year in which the confraternity was awarded patronage rights to the chapel.⁴ Pons had discovered a fragmentary Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Sellaio that included, cropped at its upper edge, the feet of a Virgin in Glory and compared it to the drapery and clouds at the bottom of the Yale panel. Christopher Daly pushed this analogy further but suggested a different paradigm for the Virgin in the missing fragment of the Carmine Altarpiece.⁵ He noted but rejected Fahy’s attribution of the painting to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, restoring it to the status of an autograph work by Sellaio.

The general lines of the composition of the Yale panel broadly resemble those of a larger painting in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (fig. 2), that Daly and others also attribute to Sellaio, while the cartoon for the two principal figures corresponds exactly to a painting of the Virgin and Child Enthroned, formerly in the Ricasoli collection in Florence, subsequently in the Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware (fig. 3). The ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel had been grouped by Federico Zeri with four others—in the Acton Collection at Villa La Pietra, Florence;⁶ formerly in the Bernheimer collection, Munich; formerly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;⁷ and in the Musée Tessé, Le Mans, France (fig. 4)—that Fahy later attributed to an artist he dubbed the “Argonaut Master.”⁸ These paintings, which have all come to be recognized, along with other works by the Argonaut Master, as efforts from the early career of Jacopo del Sellaio,⁹ share among them certain details of figure types or poses, but only one of them—the painting in Le Mans—is of a level of quality at all comparable to the ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel. It was argued by the present writer, however, that while the Le Mans painting is an outstanding early work by Jacopo del Sellaio, showing his typical palette and shorthand notations for drapery textures and landscape details, the ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel is by a different artist, one more committed to realism and of a higher order of conceptual imagination than Jacopo del Sellaio.¹⁰ That this artist might have been Andrea del Verrocchio, as was tentatively suggested at that time, cannot be demonstrated or disproven except by reference to varying theories of Verrocchio’s development as a painter, none of which rests on documentary evidence (see Andrea del Verrocchio(?), The Adoration of the Child with the Stigmatization of Saint Francis, Tobias and the Archangel, Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness, and the Penance of Saint Jerome). That the ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel—whoever its artist may have been—is likely to have been painted in the late 1460s is less problematic.

In addition to the Yale panel, two other derivations from the cartoon of the ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel are known. One, formerly attributed to Biagio d’Antonio, employs the cartoon in reverse and crops it to half-length (fig. 5).¹¹ Daly presumed that this and the Yale painting probably dated to the period of Sellaio’s collaboration with Biagio d’Antonio, documented in 1472. The other derivation, not noted in the previous literature on this problem, was formerly in the collection of Lord Lee of Fareham and was last recorded for sale in Berlin in 1927 (fig. 6).¹² Fahy attributed this last work to Jacopo del Sellaio’s son, Arcangelo di Jacopo del Sellaio, and therefore thought that it was unlikely to date earlier than ca. 1490. The circumstances under which the cartoon for the ex-Ricasoli/Alana panel might have become Sellaio workshop property, when this might have happened, or the reasons why the cartoon might have been deployed at so late a date are unclear, but the fact that Sellaio made repeated use of this cartoon over time cannot be disputed. The Yale painting, too, is a mature work by Sellaio, probably painted within the last decade of his career. The quality of the central figures is high, despite the harsh cleaning to which they have been subjected, and is typical of Sellaio’s autograph work after his flirtation with the styles of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi in the late 1470s and early 1480s. The angels and cherub heads surrounding the Virgin are instead mechanically conceived and rendered and can at best be considered evidence of workshop participation in an essentially commercial product. —LK

1. Jarves 1860, 52; Sturgis 1868, 67; and Rankin 1895, 149. ↩︎

2. Sirén 1916a, 129–30; van Marle 1931b, 409; Berenson 1932a, 527; Berenson 1963, 1:123; and Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 599. ↩︎

3. Seymour 1970, 184. Fahy attributed the painting to the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany in correspondence with the Yale University Art Gallery (curatorial files, Department of European Art) and later clarified his ideas on this artist in Fahy 2001–2, 17–29. See also Daly 2024. ↩︎

4. Pons 1990a, 7–8. ↩︎

5. Daly 2014, 54–55. ↩︎

6. Sale, Sotheby’s New York, February 5, 2026, lot 20. ↩︎

7. Sale, Christie’s, New York, January 29, 2014, lot 101. ↩︎

8. Zeri and Gardner 1971, 116–17; Dalli Regoli 1988, figs. 57–62, 64; and Fahy 1989, 292, 296, where the painting in Le Mans is removed from the group. ↩︎

9. See Daly 2014, 58n11; and Dury 2016, 76–78, for a summary of scholarly opinions related to this group of paintings and to the Argonaut Master. ↩︎

10. Kanter 2018b, 93. ↩︎

11. Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, January 28, 2022, lot 381 ↩︎

12. Sale, Lepke, Berlin, March 29, 1927, lot 105C. See Borenius 1926a, no. 76. ↩︎