Page 17 - Jacobello del Fiore - His Oeuvre and a Sumptuous Crucifixion

proved highly attractive and found
immediate assent from Andrea De Marchi,
who treated the subject once again, adducing
further support for identifying Francesco del
Fiore as the Master of the Giovanelli
Madonna, to whom he attributed a further
painting of extraordinary formal quality, a
grand Crucifixion with Mourners and Saints in a
French private collection, perhaps originally
the central panel of an altarpiece triptych.14
Francesco del Fiore therefore became a
significant connecting link between the
Trecento culture of the followers of Jacopo
Avanzi and Altichiero and the more modern
style of his son Jacobello.
Conversely, what follows – the result of
reconsidering the whole question – agrees
with those who followed Coletti in
recognizing the artist as responsible for a
stylistically homogenous group attributed to
the young Jacobello del Fiore: among these
special mention should be made of Keith
Christiansen, who has for some time (as I
have been informed by Patrick Matthiesen)
verbally expressed himself in favour of this
hypothesis.The succession of scholarly views
on the Matthiesen panel is thus a good
demonstration of how our convictions
regarding old master paintings wax and
wane, and of the importance of reading and
rereading a work according to the relative
emphasis we give to one painter or another.
Even if the chronology of his known works
18
has been completely revised and if our basis
for judging him has become considerably
broader thanks to the appearance of new
paintings, Jacobello still suffers – especially
in Italy – from the narrow evaluation given
by Longhi in his Viatico, itself based on the
understandable idiosyncracies of scholarly
approaches in his day.15This is precisely what
Christiansen notes in his book on Gentile da
Fabriano: ‘Jacobello del Fiore suffers from a
greater critical misunderstanding than any
other early Venetian artist. R.Longhi judged
him a lesser personality than Niccolò di
Pietro or Zanino because his works seemed
deeply linked to Venetian painting rather
than of the mainland. In fact, Jacobello was
the greatest local artist of his generation’.16
After being placed in such limbo,17 it is
perhaps time to restore Jacobello del Fiore
to the special rank he held in the
development of Venetian painting between
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
eee
FRANCESCO DEL FIORE:
A PROBLEMATIC IDENTITY
Francesco del Fiore – the object of recent
scholarly attention with regard to the
present painting – remains the starting-point
for any discussion, and it should be stated at
the outset that the works assembled under