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NEW YORK, 10 November 2004—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today
the purchase of a rare and uniquely important early Renaissance masterpiece by
the 14th-century Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died
1319). The painting, in tempera and gold on wood, shows the Madonna and Child
behind a parapet. The work—the last known Duccio still in private
hands—is known as the Stroganoff Madonna, after its first recorded owner,
Count Grigorii Stroganoff, who died in Rome in 1910.
While the Museum
declines to discuss the price of the acquisition, experts estimate the American
museum paid the owner somewhere between $45 and $50 million for the work. The
sale was handled through Christie's in London. To purchase the painting, the
Metropolitan Museum has committed a substantial portion of long-held funding
earmarked for acquisitions, to be supplemented by targeted fundraising for the
purchase of this work. Mr. de Montebello noted that the funding tapped for the
purchase will not draw on funds raised and specifically set aside for either
Museum operations or capital construction and maintenance.
"Like our
glorious diptych of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment by Jan van Eyck, or our
Saint Jerome by Botticelli, this marvelous painting, small in size but immense
in achievement and influence, will become one of the signature works at the
Metropolitan Museum," said the director Philippe de Montebello. "Filling a gap
in our Renaissance collection that even the Metropolitan had scant hopes of
ever closing, the addition of the Duccio will enable visitors for the first
time to follow the entire trajectory of European painting from its beginnings
to the present.
Duccio di Buoninsegna
Italian, Sienese (active by 1278, died 1319)
Madonna and Child,
ca. 1300
11 x 8-1/8 inches (28 x 20.8 cm)
Tempera and gold on wood, with
original, engaged frame
Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of
Art
Together with Giotto, Duccio is considered
one of the two principal founders of Western European painting. His works are
of extreme rarity: only a dozen or so are known, including his famous
altarpiece, the Maestà in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in
Siena. In fact, most of the paintings by this artist in non-Italian museums are
fragments from this great and complex altarpiece, which included almost 60
individual narrative scenes (it was cut apart in the 18th century and parts of
it dispersed). However, unlike these, the Metropolitan's newly acquired
painting is a complete and independent work, not a fragment of a larger one.
Painted circa 1300, the Stroganoff Madonna is
the opening page of the most glorious chapter of Duccio's art, culminating in
his great Maestà altarpiece (1308-1311), a milestone of Western
art that is comparable only to
Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in
Padua.
Commenting on Duccio's achievement, Keith Christiansen, the
Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings, remarked: "In certain respects,
we might say that Duccio was to Giotto what Matisse was to Picasso. Giotto is
the master of the grand statement—grave, weighty figures acting out the
human drama on a spatially cogent stage. Duccio is the great colorist. The
space of his pictures is more perceptual than rational, and he explored a more
lyrical, tender emotional range."
Scholars have drawn an analogy between
Duccio's infusion of life into time-worn, Byzantine schemes, and the popular
devotional poetry of the Franciscans, on the one hand, and the exalted love
poetry of Dante, on the other. As in the writing of Dante and the painting of
Giotto, religious subjects are treated in terms of human experience, thereby
marking a fundamental change in Western culture.
"So profound is the
change that animates Duccio's art during these years," said Mr. Christiansen,
"that art historians understandably presume an external stimulus. This must
have been a trip to Assisi, where Duccio studied the recently completed fresco
cycle of the life of Saint Francis by Giotto and a large équipe of
assistants. It has now been demonstrated that this celebrated fresco cycle was
completed prior to 1295-96. What impressed Duccio were the illusionistic
devices Giotto introduced to frame the individual scenes as well as his ability
to create a cogent, pictorial space inhabited by figures possessing weight and
density. It was an art that embraced the complex and varied world of human
experience, rather than one based on codified types, as had been the case with
medieval and Byzantine painting. Duccio responded by exploring in his own art
this new world of sentiment and emotional response, but with a lyricism and
sensitivity to color that became the basis
of Sienese painting. This new, complex vision attains its first clear
statement in the Stroganoff Madonna and Child, and it is for this reason that
this small panel intended for private devotion is so revolutionary."
In
his 1979 monograph on Duccio, British scholar John White characterized the
Stroganoff painting as "the first, lonely forerunner of that long line of
Italian Madonnas with a parapet which achieved its finest flowering almost two
centuries later in Giovanni Bellini's splendid variations on the theme."
The Duccio painting will be put on view in
Gallery 3 of the Metropolitan Museum's European Paintings
Galleries.
Related Interview:
Early Italian Painting: How to buy a
Masterpiece
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