Giovanni dal Ponte is one of the most intriguing and recognizable painters of early 15th century in Florence. He likely trained under Spinello Aretino, joining the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali in 1410 and the Compagnia di San Luca in 1413, thus establishing himself as an independent artist. Known from documents as Giovanni di Marco, his sobriquet derives from the location of his workshop at Santo Stefano a Ponte in Florence, close by the Ponte Vecchio. Giovanni’s oeuvre is impressively varied, as his career mirrored the transition of Florentine art from late Gothic to early Renaissance painting. He was greatly influenced by the rapid progression in style in Florence introduced by the next generation of artists, particularly Masaccio and Fra Angelico. Giovanni dal Ponte’s career was recently the subject of a major monographic exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence in 2016, which featured the Madonna and Child Enthroned presented here.
This stunning independent panel depicts the Virgin and Child against a masterfully tooled gold ground. The protagonists of the painting are accompanied by two saints standing at the foot of the Virgin’s throne. At the left is Saint Anthony Abbot, with his traditional emblems of a staff in the shape of the Franciscan Tau and a diminutive pig at his feet (referring to his role as patron saint of farm animals). Saint James the Greater is at the right, one of Christ’s apostles, identifiable by his staff and book. The central action of the composition, the Virgin being crowned by two angels floating on clouds, was clearly a favorite motif of the artist and was one to which he returned in several works. Despite its considerable size, our painting was likely intended for private devotional use, and would been set on a small altar in a domestic setting. Seen closeup, the original viewer would have been able to fully appreciate the details in the tender exchange of the Virgin and Christ Child: the child reaches out and touches his mother’s chin while she delicately wraps him in an exquisitely-rendered cloth, which shifts in color from red to gold in the play of light.
Dr. Angelo Tartuferi has dated our painting to the early part of Giovanni dal Ponte’s career, ca. 1410–1415. At this point in his activity, the artist was still working within the visual language of his training and was just on the cusp of responding to the nascent pictorial idioms emerging from the studios of Masaccio and his contemporaries. The luminous colors, elongated forms, and the elegant lines of the drapery are typical of Giovanni’s works in this early mode. Also characteristic of this moment are the format, compositional arrangement, and framing elements—an arched gable with gilt floral motifs and twisted columns on the lateral edges.
After emerging on the art market in the 1960s without an attribution, the painting has since been universally recognized as a high-quality work by Giovanni dal Ponte. The unpublished opinions of Roberto Longhi and Miklós Boskovits, who each attributed the work fully to Giovanni dal Ponte, are recorded on photographs of the painting conserved in the photographic archive of the Villa I Tatti.
