ANTOINE DE LOHNY
Saint Vincent Ferrer preaching
(active in Autun, Toulouse, Barcelona and Piedmont 1446 – c. 1490)
Tempera on gold ground panel - 41 ¾ x 16 3/8 inches (106 x 41.5 cm)
PROVENANCE -
Francesco Molinari, Milan; his sale, Giulio Sambon, Milan, 30 November 1885.
Private Collection, France.
LITERATURE -
G. Romano, ‘Sur Antoine de Lonhy en Piémont’, Revue de l’Art, 85, 1989, p. 36, fig. 8.
H. Nieuwdorp in B. Cilento and M. Caldera, eds., Catalogue of the exhibition Napoleone e il Piemonte: Capolavori ritrovati, Fondazione Ferrero, Alba, 29 October 2005 – 27 February 2006, pp. 182-3, illustrated.
This recently rediscovered panel, previously only known from a photograph taken in 1885, has been published in its absence as the work of Antoine de Lohny, ‘un artiste de premier plan, totalement plongé dans l’oubli jusqu’en 1989’.[i] It was in that year that François Avril[ii] and Giovanni Romano[iii] published their realisation that the Antoni Llonye active in Toulouse and Barcelona in 1460-2 is the same artist as the Master of Saluces, named after the Saluzzo Hours in the British Library, and as the Master of the Turin Trinity, whose work had been assembled in 1972 by Charles Sterling[iv] around the superb eponymous panel in the Museo Civico, Turin.[v] The painter’s remarkable career thus took him from working for Chancellor Nicolas Rolin in Burgundy in 1446 via Toulouse and Barcelona to Avigliana in Piedmont, where he settled in 1462.
[i] D. Thiébaut in the catalogue of the exhibition Primitifs français: Découvertes et redécouvertes, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 27 February – 17 May 2004, p. 83.
[ii] François Avril, ‘Le Maître des Heures de Saluces: Antoine de Lohny’, Revue de l’Art, 85, 1989, pp. 9-34.
[iii] See under Literature above, pp. 35-44.
[iv] C. Sterling, ‘Études savoyardes II: Le Maître de la Trinité de Turin’, L’Œil, 215, November 1972, pp. 14-27.
[v] See Thiébaut, loc. cit., fig. 50.
Purchased from Charles Beddington Ltd in February 2011 by the Reunion des musées de France for the Musée national du Moyen Age – Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny