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Dimensions: measurements note each: 91 by 54 cm.; 35 3/4 by 21 1/4 in.
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Provenance: Biondi Collection, Florence;
Henri Chalandon, La Grange Blanche, Parcieux, France;
Chalandon family, from whom acquired directly by the present owners probably in the mid 1950s.
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Literature: R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, The Fourteenth Century. Workshop of Bernardo Daddi, Section III, Volume VIII, New York 1958, p. 86 (as following of Daddi), reproduced plate XIXa,b;
R. Offner, ed. M. Boskovits and E. Nerli Lausanna, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. The Fourteenth Century. The Works of Bernardo Daddi, Section III, Vol. III, Florence, 1989, p. 85.
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Notes: Bernardo Daddi was one of the most important Florentine artists of the first half of the fourteenth century. He probably matriculated in the Florentine Painters Guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali around 1320. He is generally thought to have been been a pupil or associate of Giotto, to whose sculptural and monumental style he added his own sweet and more expressive line and greater refinement of colour. His own workshop emerged in its own right in the 1330s in response to the growing demand for panel paintings on both a monumental and private devotional scale, and in this latter category he played an important role in the pioneering of portable miniature tabernacles. These two panels would originally have formed two leaves of a polyptych. No other panels have yet been identified as having come from the same complex, but it is probable that the central panel would have featured the Madonna and Child, and that St. Francis would have been placed on her right side and Saint John to her left. In their simple unadorned style and their concise rendering of volumes, they are most probably mature works from the mid to late 1330s, and may reflect the influence of Maso di Banco, who is thought to have trained in Daddi's workshop. The pattern decorating the hem of Saint John's red tunic had by this date become a distinctive feature of Daddi's paintings. A very similar pattern can be found, for example, on Daddi's Madonna and Child with a finch which is part of the Berenson Collection at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, which probably also dates to the 1330s.υ1 The Saint Francis may have evolved from the very similar design for a panel in an earlier polyptych of The Madonna and Child with Saint Francis, Bartholomew, Barnabas and Catherine, that is now in the Galleria Communale, Prato, probably from around 1328-30. Here the saint is similarly depicted with his hands crossed at his breast and occupying a position in the altarpiece similar to that which the present panel perhaps might originally have had. We are grateful to Everett Fahy who, based on first hand inspection, believes these panels to be early works by Bernardo Daddi dating to the 1320s. He notes that the halo of the Saint Francis has been decorated with a free hand foliate design, rather than with punch marks as on the panel of Saint John. 1. B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine School, London 1963, vol. !, p. 54, reproduced plate 182.
