Immediately after purchasing this small painting from the collection of Henry Harris of London in late 1931, Percy Straus sought the opinion of Bernard Berenson, who replied in March 1932, “The St. Catherine [sic] saving a child from the wolf is of course by Giov. Di Paolo.”1 Despite the misnamed saint, this attribution has never been in doubt, upheld by early scholars from John Pope-Hennessey and Richard Offner to more recent art historians like Patrice Marandel; Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri; and Carolyn C. Wilson.2 Giovanni di Paolo’s date of birth is not documented, but he was active in Siena from 1417 on, both as a miniaturist and painter. Recognized as a highly original artist, whose works reflect the late Gothic tradition of Gentile da Fabriano as well as the early Renaissance innovations of Fra Angelico, Giovanni was at the height of his creative powers in the 1450s, when he painted the Saint Clare of Assisi Altarpiece (fig. 12.1), which incorporated the present panel in the predella.
Although the commission of this altarpiece has not yet been pinpointed, it was most likely made for one of the convents of the Poor Clares in Siena, as it shows Saint Clare, standing immediately to the left of the central scene of the Enthroned Madonna and Child, and the predella consisted of scenes from the life of the saint. Besides the Houston panel, three more panels of this predella are extant: Saint Francis Investing Clare with Her Habit (fig. 12.2), Clare Rescuing the Shipwrecked (fig. 12.3) (the whereabouts of both unknown, formerly in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie), and A Miracle of Saint Clare (fig. 12.4) in the Yale University Art Gallery.3 All of them are of high quality, but the Houston panel is particularly striking, due to the drama of the scene and the unusual landscape in which it takes place.
Like Clare Rescuing the Shipwrecked (fig. 12.3), the Straus panel illustrates a posthumous miracle performed by Saint Clare, who appears in a large golden halo to the woman praying for help for her poor child, mauled by a wolf, seen at the center of the composition. Following a medieval painterly tradition called “simultaneous narration,” the wolf that attacked the child is seen twice, once alive with the child’s arm in his mouth, and again struck dead in the foreground.4 The story represented here follows the biography of the saint attributed to Tommaso da Celano (c. 1185–1260), but it has been reduced to a minimum of elements. The dramatically gesturing figures with their flowing, wavy hair are characteristic of Giovanni di Paolo. Janneke Panders, who has studied the underdrawings of many of his paintings, concluded that Giovanni used certain facial types repeatedly, varying them as he built up his paint layers.5 Here, the architectural elements, as well as the grid of crisscrossing roads, are not simply drawn outlines, but incisions, probably made with a straightedge. Both the strictly geometric organization of the landscape and the truly bizarre rock formations, arranged like figures on a chessboard, are a recurrent feature of Giovanni’s works.6 These aspects show him to have been a painter who understood linear perspective as developed by his Florentine colleagues, but who, in a quintessentially Sienese manner, applied this scientific approach to landscape with a more mystical vision of the natural world.
—Helga Kessler Aurisch
Notes
1. Bernard Berenson to Percy S. Straus, 3 March 1932, the Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection, MS 15, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, archives.
2. Carolyn C. Wilson, Italian Paintings, XIV–XVI Centuries, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in association with Rice University Press and Merrell Holberton, 1996), 166. See also John Pope-Hennessey, Giovanni di Paolo, 1403–1483 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 7880, 173; Richard Offner, “The Straus Collection Goes to Texas,” Art News 44, no. 7 (May 15–31, 1945): 18–19; J. Patrice Marandel, in The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: a Guide to the Collection (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), 1981, 26; Burton B. Fredericksen and Fernando Zeri, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 89.
3. Keith Christiansen, Laurence B. Kanter, and Carl Brandon Strehlke, Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 204. Strehlke assumes that the central panel was a Crucifixion, which has been lost.
4. Edgar Peters Bowron and Mary G. Morton, Masterworks of European Painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2000), 14.
5. Janneke Panders, “The Underdrawing of Giovanni di Paolo, Characteristics and Development” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1997), 94–98.
6. Similar landscapes appear in the background of the Nativity, Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum (inv. no. 1943.112), the Adoration, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no. 1982.60.4), and the Ecce Agnus Dei, Art Institute of Chicago (inv. no. 1933.1011), all dated around the same time as the Houston panel.
Saint Clare Rescuing a Child Mauled by a Wolf
Frame: 9 15/16 × 13 5/16 × 2 1/8 in. (25.2 × 33.8 × 5.4 cm)
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ProvenanceSir John Peter Boileau, Baronet, Ketteringham Hall, Norfolk, England, by 1854; his grandson Sir Frederick Raymond Boileau (d. 1942), Baronet; Henry Harris, London, by 1930; Edward Hutton; Percy S. Straus, December 28, 1931; bequeathed to MFAH, 1944.Comparative Images
Fig. 12.2. Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Francis Investing Saint Clare with Her Habit, n.d., painting on panel, whereabouts unknown, formerly Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photograph bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY
Fig. 12.3. Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Clare Rescuing the Shipwrecked, n.d., painting on panel, whereabouts unknown, formerly Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photograph bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Art Resource, NY
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