ANNUNCIATION, BY ANDREA VANNI, IN THE COLLECTION OF COUNT FABIO CHIGI, SIENA

ANNUNCIATION, BY SIMONE MARTINI, IN THE UFFIZI GALLERY, FLORENCE

In the preceding pages I have tried to prove—the reader can best judge with what success—Vanni’s claims to the authorship of a certain group of pictures, so closely related in style, quality, and spirit, as clearly to belong to the same period of his activity as that which produced the polyptych of S. Stefano. As we know, this period was one of a comparatively old age. Yet it would seem as if Andrea had turned, during the later years of his life, with a renewed activity, to the practice of his art, after the busy public career of his prime. Judging from the scarcity of documents of an official nature connected with his name after 1384, it would seem that, somewhere about that year, he retired from active participation in political affairs and devoted himself wholly to his painting. That he was inactive as an artist, however, during all his earlier years, is not to be believed. We have, in fact, a line of documents to prove that this was not the case. Still, these written records help us very little in the tracing of his earlier artistic development. Evidently in origin a pupil of the school of Lippo Memmi, I should place in the period of his ascendance a somewhat hard and gaudy, but not uninteresting, triptych, representing St. Michael between St. Anthony the abbot and the Baptist, No. 67 of the Siena gallery. This work, which is in a remarkable state of preservation, is attributed to Lippo Memmi himself, and clearly shows the characteristics of his school. There is much in the figures which bears a close similarity to Andrea’s later types. Another panel—a Virgin and Child in the priest’s house, next to S. Pietro Ovile—having close affinity to Simone and Lippo Memmi in technical treatment, in colour, and even in style, seems to presage in a far more definite manner the works of Vanni which we now know, and already shares many of his peculiar characteristics in detail. But, apart from these two paintings, I can call to mind no works of these early years which I can with any confidence give to him. The first notice of Andrea as a painter is one of 1353, in which year he was associated with Bartolo di Fredi, whether as partner or assistant is not quite clear. The last records of his activity are dated 1400. Milanesi, upon some unnamed authority, gives the probable date of his death as 1414. ¶ It would prolong this article unduly if the questions of Vanni’s influence upon Sienese art, and of his possible pupils and apparent successors, were entered into with the fullness which the subject demands. We must limit ourselves here to a brief mention of the closest of the followers of Vanni in those later years in which chiefly we have been studying him, a painter less known even than himself, Paolo di Giovanni Fei. An apparently early work by him, the Madonna del Rosario of S. Domenico, suggests that he was actually the pupil of Vanni. By him, also, are three pictures in the Siena gallery, one in the chapel of S. Bernardino just outside the Porta Camollia, another in the Saraceni collection, and yet another in the Minutolo chapel of Naples cathedral.

EARLY PAINTERS OF THE NETHERLANDS AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE BRUGES EXHIBITION OF 1902

❧ WRITTEN BY W. H. JAMES WEALE ❧

ARTICLE V

GERARD DAVID worked in Bruges from the commencement of 1484 until his death, August 13, 1523, yet he does not appear to have taken a single apprentice during all that period, at least the register of the gild of St. Luke contains no entry of any such. It is, however, certain that he had several assistants; one of these, Adrian Isenbrant, I was able to rescue from oblivion in 1865. He came to Bruges in 1510, was admitted as free master into the gild on November 29, and continued working there for more than forty years, until his death in July 1551. He acquired a reputation for skill in painting the nude and the human countenance, and executed many pictures for Spain, which as a rule he sent by Antwerp to Bilbao. Although no document has as yet been discovered connecting his name with any particular picture, yet there is hardly any doubt that he is the author of a number of works certainly painted in Bruges between 1510 and 1551, the figures in which are remarkable for their careful execution and sweetness of expression, characteristics attributed to the works of Isenbrant by old writers. Several of these works are still in Spain, others have been brought from the Peninsula within the last fifty years. Of these I purpose to treat later on; at present I shall confine my remarks to the works included in the exhibition. The most important of these is a large diptych given to the church of Our Lady at Bruges by Barbara Le Maire, widow of George Van de Velde, a wealthy cloth merchant, who had held many offices in the communal council. The dexter panel (178) represents the Blessed Virgin seated with clasped hands, overwhelmed with grief, in a niche of Renascence architecture. Around her, set in architectural framework, are seven little pictures representing the seven dolours; in some of these are motives borrowed from the engravings of Martin Schongauer and Albert Dürer. The sinister panel (179), which disappeared from the church about 1832, came into the possession of the duke of Arenberg, who in 1874 sold it to the Brussels museum. On the face are pictured George Van de Velde in the costume of a brother of the confraternity of the holy Blood, and his wife, protected by their baptismal patrons, and accompanied by their nine sons and eight daughters, all kneeling in prayer. The subject on the dexter panel is repeated on the reverse of this in grisaille but with differences, so that whether the diptych was shut or open, on festivals or ferias, the figure of the sorrowful Mother, to whom the widow Van de Velde was very devoted—multum affectata—was always exposed to the veneration of the faithful. George Van de Velde died on April 28, 1528; his second son, John, who in the picture wears a surplice, was ordained priest and said his first mass in the church of Our Lady in 1530—31, about which date his mother presented the picture. ¶ The Blessed Virgin and Child seated in a landscape with SS. Katherine, Barbara, Dorothy, Margaret and Agnes (145), lent by Count Arco-Valley, is a charming early composition, of which there is a weak repetition in the academy of St. Luke at Rome. The prototype of this picture is doubtless the dexter panel of the diptych painted by Memlinc for John Du Celier, now in the Louvre at Paris, whilst variations are in the gallery at Munich, at Geneva, and at Buckingham Palace. A triptych lent by M. Lotman, of Berne (177), represents the Blessed Virgin and Child and two angels playing a mandoline and a harp; and on the exterior, St. Jerome praying before a crucifix. The carpet here is from the same model as that under the Virgin’s feet in 145.