FRA ANGELICO
Saint Anthony Abbot
(Vicchio di Mugello c.1395 – 1455 Rome)
Tempera on gold ground panel, arched top - 35 x 13 1/4 inches (89 x 33.8 cm)
PROVENANCE -
Purchased from Horace Buttery, London, in 1956.
LITERATURE -
M. Boskovits, ‘Appunti sull’Angelico’, Paragone, XXVII, no. 313, March 1976, pp. 43 and 52-3, note 27, pl. 13.
K. Baetjer, European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by artists born before 1865, New York, 1995, p. 15.
C. C. Wilson, ‘Fra Angelico: new light on a lost work’, The Burlington Magazine, CXXXVII, no. 1112, Nov. 1995, pp. 737-40, fig. 26.
C. C. Wilson, Italian Paintings XIV-XVI Centuries in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, 1996, pp.139 and 144, notes 45-6, fig. 10.5 (colour).
E. P. Bowron and Mary G. Morton, Masterworks of European Painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Princeton, 2000, p. 9.
This panel was first published by Professor Miklós Boskovits, who knew it from a photograph he found in the Angelico file in Berenson’s photograph archive at I Tatti (an accompanying note indicated incorrectly that it had been purchased in 1955 by J. Paul Getty). He suggests that it may originally have been a lateral component of the same polyptych as predella panels, datable to the second half of the 1430s, at Antwerp (Saint Romuald appearing to the Emperor Otto III), Chantilly (Saint Benedict in Ecstasy), Cherbourg (The Penitence of Saint Julian) and Houston (Saint Anthony Abbot tempted by Gold). All were considered by Sir John Pope-Hennessy (Fra Angelico, 2nd ed., London, 1974, pp. 220, 222-3 and 227, figs. 66-8 and 80) the work of an imitator of Fra Angelico, incorrectly in Boskovits’s opinion, especially in the case of the Houston panel. Katharine Baetjer suggests, loc. cit., that a panel of The Nativity in the Metropolitan Museum of Art may also have been part of the same predella.
Carolyn Wilson points out that, while the association of the Houston panel with the other three predella panels has not found general acceptance, loose copies of both this panel and the Houston panel are incorporated in a Florentine engraving of c.1460-70 depicting Saint Anthony Abbot surrounded by eleven Scenes from his Lifepreserved in the Museo Civico, Pavia (Wilson, op. cit., 1995, fig. 27; Wilson, op. cit., 1996, fig. 10.10). She tentatively suggests that the engraving may indicate that the two panels were originally part of an unusual form of dossal rather than a polyptych.
The attribution of this panel to Fra Angelico has been emphatically endorsed (from a transparency) by Carl Brandon Strehlke (letter of 5 April 2000); he agrees with Boskovits that it is probably a lateral panel of a polyptych and considers it possibly an early work. It has also been confirmed by Everett Fahy, who has seen the panel in the original.