Madonna and Child with angels, St. Julian (?) and a martyr saint

The painting, in shape and size, belongs to the type of altarpiece intended for private devotion.
In the center of the archaic tablet is the monumental figure of a standing Virgin wearing a dark blue cloak edged in gold from which only her face and hands emerge.
Mary, absorbed in her thoughts, turns her head to the left without engaging in any visual conversation either with the viewer or with her Son who, in her hands, almost seems to escape his mother’s control.
The two figures are placed in front of a red mantle decorated with a gold pattern of pine cones within which there are phytomorphic decorations or pairs of birds placed back to back. The mantle is held by two angels clad in green robes decorated with gold. Mary is flanked on her right by a saint in an orange chivalric robe over which he is wearing a broad, fur-trimmed mantle which is also orange; Mary is also holding a long sword with a golden hilt. Although there are no other iconographic attributes or inscriptions that would make the identification of the saint certain, art-historical scholars have reasonably assumed the saint is Julian the Hospitaller. To the left of the Virgin is another saint wearing a green robe and a long mauve cloak. She is a martyr, as can be inferred from the palm she holds in her right hand. Apart from her young age, the few iconographic attributes also present are a book she is clutching in her left hand and a crown. All these elements have led to a very cautious hypothesis that she is Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Zeri 1955, p. 7), despite the fact that her traditional attribute, namely the spiked wheel, is not present. At the feet of the Virgin, between the two saints, are two kneeling angels—the angel on the left is intent on playing a viella, while the one on the right is playing a psaltery.
Antonio Santangelo (1947, p. 36) informs us that the painting was in the collection of Giulio Sterbini, a trusted man of Pope Leo XIII. The rich collection of medieval paintings was then inherited by the Lupi family and was later acquired by the banker Giovanni Armenise. Armenise donated it in 1940 to the Italian state (Pacia 1988), and the painting in question entered the collection of works in the Palazzo Venezia museum.
The work has not often been studied by art history scholars. It is first mentioned by Santangelo (1947, p. 36) in his catalog of paintings in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia, attributing it to Lorenzo di Bicci or his son Bicci di Lorenzo and drawing stylistic parallels with another work for the altar—also in the collections of the Museo di Palazzo Venezia—depicting the Madonna and Child among Four Saints, which was also traced to the activity of Lorenzo di Bicci. Later critics almost exclusively attribute the work to Lorenzo di Bicci (Zeri 1955, p. 7; Boskovits 1975, p. 336).
The Florentine painter Lorenzo di Bicci, who was active between the 1470s and the first two decades of the following century, headed a generation of artists. His workshop was inherited by his son Bicci di Lorenzo and, later, by his nephew Neri di Bicci. Strongly influenced by Orcagna, in the last period of his activity he partly revamped his style by introducing late Gothic stylistic features even though he remained faithful to the late Giottesque pictorial tradition (Baldini 2010, p. 64 with earlier bibliography). 
In the small painting under scrutiny there is a glazed coloring in the complexions, with softened shadows tracing the outlines, a firm and compact modeling, and statuesque figures that forcefully occupy their space. All this suggests great indebtedness to Jacopo di Cione especially, which would date the work to the first phase of the artist’s activity, around the middle of the 1370s.

Valentina Fraticelli

Entry published on 12 February 2025

Good.

Rome, Palazzo Sterbini, Collezione Giulio Sterbini;
Rome, Collezione Lupi;
Rome, Collezione Giovanni Armenise;
Rome, Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, 1940.

Museo di Palazzo Venezia. Catalogo. 1. Dipinti, Santangelo Antonino (a cura di), Roma 1947, p. 36; 
Zeri Federico, Catalogo del Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, 3, I dipinti del Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Roma, Roma 1955, p. 7; 
Boskovits Miklós, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento 1370-1400, Firenze 1975, p. 336; 
Pacia Amalia, La collezione Sterbini, in Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Storici di Roma (a cura di), Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, Roma 1988; 
Baldini Federica, Lorenzo di Bicci, in Boskovits Miklós, Parenti Daniela (a cura di), Cataloghi della Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze. Dipinti. II. Il Tardo Trecento. Dalla tradizione orcagnesca agli esordi del Gotico internazionale, Firenze 2010, p. 64.