This work came to Palazzo Venezia after the sale in 1925 of part of the Congregazione della carità di San Lorenzo Nuovo (Viterbo), active between 1870 and 1937. The large work, which was perhaps the uppermost part of an altar dedicated to the Virgin, depicts a rare subject in wooden sculpture, the Assumption of Mary. The Virgin is seated, inside an almond shaped frame, with her hands joined in prayer; on top of the almond is a half-length figure of God the Father, giving a blessing and with the globe in his left hand. It has been worked in the round and is also painted on the reverse, but its style is difficult to discern, in part due to its poor condition and in part because it has been separately assembled: the head and the hands do not, in fact, belong the the rest, as tests carried out in 2009 by IVALSA-CNR in Florence confirmed; the wood used for these parts was identified as alder, while the rest is made from poplar. Santangelo (1954) saw the hand here of a ‘late Sienese artist’ and dated it to around 1520. The reference to Siena seems correct not only from a stylistic point of view (in the arrangement of the drapery for example) but also compositionally: the Assumption is an image of civic identity for the Tuscan city, and was particularly widespread in 14th and 15th century painting, above all in replica versions of the famous large fresco by Simone Martini on the front of the Porta Camollia from the early 1330s, made both for domestic settings and church altars, due also to the preaching of Benardino degli Alizzaschi who held great affection for Martini’s image of Mary.

Grazia Maria Fachechi