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A Crowned Virgin Martyr (Saint Catherine of Alexandria?)

ca. 1334–1338

Bernardo Daddi was among the eminent painters of the early Renaissance. He developed a graceful, naturalistic language to represent holy figures. This half-length image of a crowned saint demonstrates his characteristically subtle modeling of the face. The saint’s rosy cheeks and lips contrast with faint shadows that articulate the contours of her nose and the slight squint of her eyes. The palm frond and bejeweled crown identify her as a martyr, possibly Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a scholar persecuted for her Christian faith, according to legend. This panel once formed part of a large altarpiece, most likely for a church in Florence.

Artist: Bernardo Daddi (Italian, active ca. 1280–1348)
Title: A Crowned Virgin Martyr (Saint Catherine of Alexandria?)
Date: ca. 1334–1338
Place of Creation: Florence
Object Type: Painting
Medium: Tempera and gold leaf on wood panel
Dimensions: 24 1/4 x 12 in. (61.6 x 30.5 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Accession Number: 61.44.1

Private collection, Florence, by c. 1910–1930. [1]
[Sold to Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi (1878–1955), Florence, c. 1932]; [2]
Sold to Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), New York, March 4, 1932; [3]
Gift to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 1939;
Returned to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1952;
Gift to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1961;
Administrative transfer to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1972.
[1] From an expert opinion written by art dealer and historian Frederick F. Mason Perkins in the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive, c. 1930s–1940s: “This panel … first became known to me over twenty years ago, when it was at the property of an ancient Florentine family.”
[2] Offner 1991, p. 150: “The panel is said to have passed through the Florentine art market in 1932–1933 and to have been sold to America in the latter year.”
[3] Bill of sale, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Archive.
Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture, cat. (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1941), no. 196, pp. 151–152.
Book of Illustrations, cat. (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1941), no. 196, repr. p. 94.
Davenport, Millia, The Book of Costume, cat. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1948), vol. 1, no. 614, pp. 220–221, repr.
Suida, William E., The Samuel H. Kress Collection: M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, cat. (San Francisco: M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1955), p. 28, repr.
Frankfurter, Alfred, “The Kress Gift to San Francisco,” Art News 54, no. 2 (April 1955), p. 58.
Larsen, Erik, “The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco,” Apollo 61, no. 364 (June 1955), p. 174.
Comstock, Helen, “De Young Museum: Gifts from Kress,” The Connoisseur 136, no. 547 (August 1955), p. 71.
Neumeyer, Alfred, “The Samuel H. Kress Collection of the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco,” The Art Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1955), p. 274.
“Kress Collection Gift to San Francisco,” Hobbies 60, no. 2 (April 1955), p. 41.
Emerson, Guy, “The Kress Collection: Gift to the Nation,” National Geographic 120, no. 6 (December 1961), p. 832.
“Accessions of American and Canadian Museums,” The Art Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Summer 1962), p. 166.
Berenson, Bernard, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works With an Index of Places, Florentine School, cat. (London: Phaidon, 1963), vol. 1, p. 57.
Rusk Shapley, Fern, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, cat. (London: Phaidon, 1966), vol. 1, p. 27, repr. fig. 59.
European Works of Art in the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, cat. (Berkeley: Diablo Press, 1966), p. 18, repr.
Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri, Census of Pre-nineteenth-century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections, cat. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 62, 633.
Offner, Richard, The Fourteenth Century: The Works of Bernardo Daddi, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, cat. (Florence: Giunti Editore, 1989; repr., 1930), section 3, vol. 3, p. 86.
Offner, Richard, The Fourteenth Century: Bernardo Daddi, His Shop and Following, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, cat. (Florence: Giunti Editore, 1991; repr., 1930), section 3, vol. 4, pp. 19, 149–150, repr. pl. 17a, 17a1.
Skaug, Erling S., Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting: With Particular Consideration to Florence, c. 1330-1430 (Oslo: ICC Nordic Group, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 100, 114; vol. 2, pp. 5.3, 114.
Ishikawa, Chiyo, Lynn Federle Orr, George T. M. Shackelford, and David Steel, eds., A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, exh. cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 18.
Sciacca, Christine, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), no. 7, pp. 46–48, repr.
“Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance,” Getty Publications (Fall 2012), p. 1, cover, repr.
“Visionary Leadership: A Gift to Conservation,” Fine Arts Magazine, (Summer 2013), p. 25, repr.
Hall, Rachel, and Helene E. Roberts, eds., Iconographic Index to New Testament Subjects Represented in Photographs and Slides of Paintings in the Visual Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University: Christian Devotional Paintings of the Italian School, (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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