Somewhat unusually for 14th-century Venetian art, this busy Crucifixion scene includes the crosses of Dismas and Gestas. With their last breaths, the thieves consign their souls respectively to an angel, who takes it up to heaven, and to a devil, who pulls it out of the sinner’s mouth to drag it down to hell. The various figures beholding the tragic drama of Christ’s death include the grief-stricken angels who collect the blood pouring copiously from His wounds, the pious women holding the swooning Virgin, Mary Magdalene kneeling at the foot of the cross, the weeping St John and the Roman centurion and soldiers. 

Attention can also be drawn to the gory detail of the executioners breaking the legs of the two thieves as written in the Gospel of John (19, 32-34): “The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” 

This panel was purchased on the antiques market in Udine and comes from a private collection in Friuli. It is square in shape, appears slightly warped and has been sawn along the top and bottom edges. Given the narrative approach adopted to the representation of the episode, this suggests that it was originally part of an ornamental screen at the back of an altar with a Madonna and Child or Coronation of the Virgin in the centre and scenes from the life of Christ laid out at the sides in two vertical arrays of panels. 

The author is the prolific painter reconstructed by Miklós Boskovits and named the Master of the San Silvestro Polyptych after the work in the Venetian church of that name comprising the Madonna and Child, St John the Evangelist (?), St Nicholas and Scenes in the Life of St James (fig. 1).¹ Andrea De Marchi subsequently added various works to the artist’s catalogue and identified him as Marco, the third child of Paolo Veneziano and author of the Madonna of Humility and a Donor formerly in the collection of Augusto Alberici in Rome and now in the Museum of Western Art in Kiev, signed “Marcus filius d(omini) magistri Pauli pincxit ohc (sic)opus”.² Probably still too young when his brothers Luca and Giovanni worked together with their father on the cover for the Pala d’Oro in 1345, Marco is documented for the first time in Venice in 1362. He lived in Padua from 1372 to 1390 but is also recorded as resident in Venice in December 1377 in the district of San Luca, where Paolo lived. A series of notarial deeds drawn up between 1391 and 1393 also document a period in Treviso, for which there is as yet no evidence in the artistic sphere.³ The painting under examination here is from the early 1360s, when the influence of the young artist’s father is still evident in elements of technique like the bold shadows, the accentuated greenish-brown grounds of the flesh tones, the touches of pure white lead on the faces to highlight the nose and chin, and the lively, dot-like eyes. The elongated proportions of the figures and the densely creased drapery emphasised by sinuous gilded outlines also look to the late, lofty work of Paolo Veneziano, especially works like the Sanseverino Marche polyptych (1358). The early dating is borne out by comparisons with other paintings from the beginning of Marco’s career (the attribution of which is reciprocally confirmed by their similarities to the more characterised and recognisable Crocifissione), when he was probably still an assistant in his father’s workshop. These include the Storie di San Martino, originally parts of one of the two polyptychs produced by Paolo for the cathedral of Chioggia to flank the image of the titular St Martin in relief on a wooden panel (Chioggia, Museo Diocesano d’Arte Sacra),⁴ and two similar altarpieces, showing the Madonna and Child in the centre and various saints or scenes on either side, now in the National Gallery in Split and the Crespi Collection in the Museo Diocesano of Milan (fig. 2).⁵ 

[Cristina Guarnieri]

1 Tognoli Bardin 1985, pp. 94-96.

2 De Marchi, “Una tavola nella Narodna Galeria di Ljubljana e una proposta per Marco di Paolo Veneziano”, in Höfler 1995, pp. 252-254. 3 Moschini 1826, p. 9; Gloria 1878 p. 41; Sartori 1976, p. 419; Gargan 1978, p. 298. See also the artist’s “Biography” and “Catalogue” in Guarnieri 2008, pp. 52-54. 

4 V. Poletto, in Padua 2011, pp. 162-163.

5 A. De Marchi, “Marco di Paolo Veneziano”, in London 1996, pp. 66-71; C. Guarnieri, “Problemi di attribuzione e classificazione tipologica nella pittur veneziana del Trecento, a partire da tre tavole della Collezione Crespi”, in I Fondi oro 2009, pp. 34-38; C. Guarnieri, “Il polittico di Marco di Paolo per la chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo a Fermo”, in Cleri, Minardi 2017, p. 129.