This painting is not in an excellent state of preservation, with a widespread craquelure covering the painted surface. There are also areas of loss affecting the figure of the Virgin and the edges of the panel, evidently damaged when it was cut down to its current size. A photograph (fig. 1) shows its condition prior to restoration, which perhaps took place when the work, in the Ventura Collection in 1948, found its way back onto the antiquarian market before being purchased by Cerruti between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, when it was still attributed to Segna di Bonaventura.¹

The gold decoration in the background was also added to during this interval and has a rougher appearance in the better-preserved areas. The fabric covering the throne must originally have featured a pattern similar to that in the triptych in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (inv. no. 18.117.1, fig. 2), unanimously attributed by critics to the Master of Monte Oliveto, like the Madonna in the Cerruti Collection. The Master of Monte Oliveto was a follower of Duccio, whose style of painting blended Byzantine art with the new gothic style, creating a spiritual and majestic art that characterised Sienese figurative art in the first decades of the 14th century. This lesser-known master developed his own personal blend of the teachings from Duccio and the innovations introduced by some of his most important pupils, including Simone Martini and Segna di Bonaventura. As seen in the work of these painters, Sienese painting has a lyrical and decorative quality, with two-dimensional forms and rich colours, conveying a spiritual, even mystical aura, with less focus on realistic human form, volume and proportions than the Florentine school, for example. Work to reconstruct his career began in the early 20th century thanks to Giacomo De Nicola (1912),² who linked the panel from the abbey of Monteoliveto and the diptych now in Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, assigning them to a follower of Duccio, who was renamed the Master of Monte Oliveto by Cesare Brandi.³ The first and only monographic study - never published - was written by Esther Mendelsohn (1950), who added other works to the corpus, including the attractive Cerruti Madonna. The catalogue was subsequently revised and extended by Gertrude Coor- Achenbach (1955), Luisa Vertova (1970),⁴ and James Stubblebine (1979). More recent studies have left the reconstruction of the master’s career unchanged, with the exception of Gaudenz Freuler who attributed the artist with the Christ Blessing in the Salini Collection (Asciano), documenting the extreme development of his stylistic path during the 1330s.⁵ The scholar rightly suggested a chronological shift in the painter’s activity, which, given the absence of temporal references, is usually thought to have started in the first decade of the 14th century. However, he was not convinced by the date of c. 1305 assigned to his earliest works: the working of the gold with the extensive use of punches suggests a later date, in the third decade of the 14th century.6 A similar date, of around 1320, as also proposed by Stubblebine (1979),7 seems correct for the Cerruti panel too, which uses a single punch, almost identical to that in the Maestà of Monteoliveto.⁸ A comparison between the two works reveals close ties: there is a strong similarity between the physiognomic types adopted, with their oval heads and clearly outlined features, with the hair of the Christ Child depicted in a typical fashion, while there is still no trace of the marked chiaroscuro that characterises the painter’s final phase. The colouring is also typical of the master, who favours a loaded brush (a blending technique that works by loading two different paints onto the brush), with a limited range of colours, as demonstrated by the comparison with the Metropolitan Museum triptych from just a few years later. A pleasing painter with undisputed technical ability, the master helped to spread Duccio’s painting style throughout the province of Siena,⁹ interpreting it with more popular accents, leading to results comparable during his more mature phase to the work of the more talented Niccolò di Segna. His production is limited almost exclusively to small panels, such as paintings of the Crucifixion and Madonna and Child, which formed tabernacles or diptychs destined for private devotion. As suggested by traces of marbling on the back, the Cerruti painting must also have belonged to this latter type. It was once larger, perhaps enhanced by the presence of angels on either side of the Virgin’s throne, and almost certainly incorporated a righthand wing showing the Crucifixion. However, although there are various small Crucifixions in the painter’s catalogue, none of them is compatible in stylistic terms. 

[Gaia Ravalli]

1 The painting was still in the Ventura Collection in 1959 (Corpus della Pittura Fiorentina, photographic archive). 

2 De Nicola 1912, p. 147. 

3 Brandi 1933, pp. 176-177. 

4 Vertova 1970. 

5 G. Freuler in Bellosi 2009, pp. 120-123, cat. 12. 

6 Kronman 2009. 

7 Stubblebine 1979, pp. 92-102. 

8 Frinta 1998, p. 442, cat. Ka119b. 

9 Following an axis that extended from Siena to the Arezzo area (as demonstrated by the Maestà for the abbey of Monteoliveto and the presence of the panel in a collection in Asciano, before it passed into the Knoedler Collection), probably even reaching Umbria, from where the Madonna and Child formerly in the Biblioteca Arcivescovile in Nocera Umbra (now the Pinacoteca comunale) and the Crucifixion in the Cincinnati Art Museum (inv. no. 1953.220), purchased in Umbria in 1840, may originally have come.