One of the most beautiful and engaging works in the Straus Collection is the tondo titled The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (c. 1470–75). Its circular shape has always been associated with the original function as a birth tray (desco da parto), a tray presented to a mother in anticipation of or immediately following the birth of a child. Numerous such trays still exist, including the one celebrating the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1449 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), firmly attributed to Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi (called Scheggia), who was Massacio’s younger brother.¹ Unsurprisingly, not all painters are known, and despite ongoing research into the authorship of the Straus tondo, the identity of this artist has remained unresolved. Bernard Berenson, who wrote to Percy S. Straus in 1927 that he had known this work for more than forty years, believed it to be by the Florentine painter Domenico Veneziano.² He failed to see the tondo’s non-Florentine qualities, despite that fact the he attributed a very similar tondo in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, also a Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (fig. 15.1), to a Ferrarese artist close to Franceso del Cossa.³ Richard Offner, Percy Straus’s close adviser on Italian Renaissance paintings, verbally expressed his belief that Cossa was the author of his tondo in 1931 and suggested a date of around 1470.⁴ Indeed, in Cossa’s celebrated fresco in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (fig. 15.2), which depicts the highly refined style of the Ferrarese court, the figures bear close resemblance to those of both the Straus and the Boston tondi. The resemblance extends from the facial features and treatment of the hair to the elaborate courtly garments and lively poses. The architectural elements on another work by Cossa, his Annunciation in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (fig. 15.3), also show a remarkable similarity with those of the Straus tondo, further strengthening the argument of his authorship. The tondo’s Ferrarese rather than Florentine origin is widely acknowledged today, but the attribution to Cossa has not been universally accepted. Joseph Manca, for instance, has proposed that Gherardo d’Andrea Costa, active in Ferrara during the middle of the fifteenth century, may have been the author, an argument made difficult to uphold due to the lack of any surviving documented works by this artist.⁵

Although the definitive attribution is still unresolved, there have never been any doubts about the remarkable quality of this work. It delights in its overall complexity as well as in the manifold architectural details and beautifully rendered figures in sumptuous and exotic costumes, as well as in its charming depictions of animals that animate the scene. The story of the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon as told in the Old Testament (1 Kings 10:1–13) is illustrated here as taking place in the forecourt of an ornately decorated building. This building, its main facade pierced by multiple arched doorways and crowned with two cupolas and a central pavilion, is an elaborate imaginary Renaissance church representing the Temple of Solomon. The coffered ceiling of the architectural baldachin, the checkered floors, the marble arches, and the columns and pilasters with their gilded capitals are all carefully rendered in a tour de force of linear perspective whose vanishing point is the golden chalice on the highly decorated altar in an apse, the physical and symbolic center of the composition. The complexity of the architectural setting is balanced by a panoply of elegantly dressed figures. The two protagonists at the center are slightly larger in scale than the members of their retinues. They are also the most exotically dressed in long gilded robes, carefully patterned in sgraffito, that recall garments of antiquity, believed appropriate for biblical figures, while their extraordinary headgear conjures up the fashions of the East. The beautiful young ladies attending the Queen of Sheba are dressed in the Italian fashions of the day, their cloth-of-gold dresses, horned hennins, and prominent jewelry reflecting the extraordinary wealth of their queen. The three elderly men standing directly behind King Solomon wear long robes similar to those of the king, but the group of younger men farther to the left sports the fashionable short capes and colorful legwear of the mid-fifteenth century. A number of incidental figures—a woman leading a child away in the distance at left, a falconer and a man on a balcony at right—are painted on an even smaller scale than these figures. It is unclear whether they are merely decorative or whether they have deeper meaning. The monkeys and dogs, prominently placed in the foreground, are not only wonderfully observed, but certainly have symbolic value: the dogs represent fidelity, while the monkeys allude to man’s baser instincts, which in this case are shown chained up. The two female figures emerging from the pavilion at top are easily recognizable as Justice and Temperance by their traditional attributes and represent two virtues closely associated with King Solomon.

In the overall arrangement of the figures within a grandiose architectural setting, this work closely follows Lorenzo Ghiberti’s illustration of the same story on a bronze panel of his celebrated Gates of Paradise doors for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. Installed in 1452, these masterpieces have been widely acknowledged as highly influential.⁶ The stories of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon and the Judgment of Solomon were often used to decorate cassoni (marriage chests), as well as deschi da parto, since they illustrate marital bliss and motherly love. It has been suggested that, because of the high quality of gilding, the Straus tondo may have been made by an artist skilled in decorating cassoni. This speaks for Manca’s argument that the artist may have been Gherardo d’Andrea Costa, whose father was a Ferrarese maker of these chests who would presumably have trained his son.⁷ However, Manca’s suggestion that the Straus tondo and the Boston tondo (see fig. 15.1) are both by Gherardo d’Andrea Costa has not been taken up by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which attributes its tondo to Francesco del Cossa. While Carolyn C. Wilson agrees with Manca that the tondi are from the same hand, she leans toward the Cossa attribution, pointing out that the less lively handling of the figures and simpler architectural forms as well as more sparing use of gilding of the Boston tondo may have been determined by the commission. A tondo in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts depicting the Judgment of Solomon is another example with remarkable stylistic similarities in respect to the figures and architectural setting, as well as to the profusion of gold used throughout. This work, however, has recently been ascribed to Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi (called Scheggia),⁸ the Florentine painter who painted the desco da parto for the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The frequent reattributions by scholars in the field underline the difficulty in pinpointing the actual masters who created these tondi that fall into the realm between exquisite decorative objects and masterpieces of painting.

—Helga Kessler Aurisch