Catarino di Marco da Venezia

The surviving documents and signatures show Catarino di Marco as a Venetian painter active between the 1360s and 1390. He worked first in partnership with the older master Donato. From 1374–75 he signed works independently, and he specialised in Coronations of the Virgin and Madonnas of Humility for Venetian, Adriatic and Marchigian patrons. Beyond a small core of signed works, much of the catalogue still rests on stylistic attribution.

Name, identity and the problem of homonyms

The painter appears in the sources under a cluster of forms: Caterino, Catarino, and in the Latin of his signatures Chatarinus or Catarinus. The modern patronymic form “Catarino di Marco da Venezia” is the one the Gallerie dell’Accademia use on their current collection pages, where the painter is described as “Documentato a Venezia dal 1362 al 1390”. The Italian state catalogue of cultural heritage indexes him as “Catarino di Marco da Venezia detto Cattarino Veneziano (1362/1390)”. The Treccani entries use Caterino, the Dizionario Biografico headword being “Caterino (Catarino)”. This scheda follows the museum form and the signatures, Catarino, and keeps Caterino for the namesakes and for the passages that report the older literature; the file name keeps the form of the earlier scheda.

According to the Pinacoteca di Faenza’s biographical note, the patronymic comes from the Zadar document of 1386. That note adds that it has been hypothesised, on this basis, that Catarino was the son of the painter Marco di Martino, brother of Paolo Veneziano. The note presents this explicitly as a hypothesis. The Dizionario Biografico entry on Paolo Veneziano complicates it further: it records a “magister Marcus pictor” who was Paolo’s brother, and also a son of Paolo named Marco, still alive in 1362. With two painters called Marco in the family, the patronymic alone cannot establish Catarino’s parentage. It should not be repeated as fact, and the 1386 document itself should be checked for the exact wording of the patronymic.

The question of homonyms is more secure. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale entry states that Laudedeo Testi, in his “Storia della pittura veneziana” of 1909 (pp. 236–237), settled the identity question from the archival record. Testi distinguished the painter from two namesakes active in Venice at nearby dates. One was a Caterino described as an “intaiator” (carver), dead by 1430. The other was a Caterino pittore recorded in 1455, who could hardly be the man already working in the 1360s.

The author of the Querini and Accademia panels is the oldest of the three. The DBI entry on the Moranzone family, written in 2012, describes the carver in detail. Caterino di Andrea Moranzone is first recorded in 1399, as a witness to a will alongside the painter Pietro di Nicolò. Between 1400 and 1413 he appears in deeds concerning his wife Moretta di Simone, and he was dead by her will of 22 October 1430. His one certain surviving work is the gilded and painted wooden altarpiece from the Corpus Domini in Venice, now in the Museo Correr. It bears his signature together with that of the painter Bartolomeo di Paolo, who did the polychromy. An inscription also records that in 1404 he made the lost frame of Nicolò di Pietro’s Crucifix for Sant’Agostino at Verucchio.

This settles a confusion that persists in some summaries. The partnership with Bartolomeo di Paolo on the Corpus Domini altarpiece belongs to the carver Caterino Moranzone, not to the painter Catarino di Marco. So does the 1404 Verucchio frame. The distinction was already clear to the 1931 Enciclopedia Italiana entry, which warned that the painter “non va confuso con Caterino di Andrea Morazzone, intagliatore in legno”. The two Caterini are nonetheless linked through the carver’s father. Andrea Moranzone was a witness to the 1367 receipt issued by Donato and Catarino, and he worked with them in 1386 on the Zadar commission. The two homonyms therefore belong to the same professional circle across two generations, which explains why they are so easily confused.

Mid-twentieth-century criticism, noted in the DBI, raised a different identity problem: whether two painters called Caterino were active in the 1370s. The idea goes back to the Thieme-Becker lexicon and was revived by Rodolfo Pallucchini in La pittura veneziana del Trecento (1964). It arose from the striking stylistic gap between the refined 1372 Coronation and the harder 1375 panel. The DBI entry, written in 1979 by Francesca Flores d’Arcais, judges this hypothesis unconvincing, and later criticism has not adopted it.

The documentary record

The record is short, and it is best set out chronologically. Here the sources begin to disagree. The DBI gives the first mention as 1362, relying on Thieme-Becker. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale specifies that in 1362 Catarino appears as a witness to a deed. The Pinacoteca di Faenza’s note instead dates the earliest documentation to 1365. It describes the first document mentioning him as a receipt for the dowry of his wife, Franceschina di Nicoletto Garzoni. These may be different documents, or the dating may differ. Without the archival references the conflict cannot be resolved here, and it should be checked against Testi and the original notarial record.

In 1367 Catarino and Donato issued the receipt for a painted wooden Cross for the Venetian church of Sant’Agnese, now lost. According to the DBI entry on Donato, the work was commissioned by Nicoletta, widow of Marco Berengo, and the document was published by Cecchetti in 1887. As already noted, Andrea Moranzone witnessed the receipt. This makes it plausible, though the documents do not say so, that the carver was involved in the Cross’s woodwork. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale calls the 1367 document an “atto di allogazione”, a contract of commission, while the DBI entries describe it as a receipt for payment. This should be checked against Cecchetti.

In August 1372 Donato and Catarino jointly signed and dated the Coronation of the Virgin now in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Donato’s DBI entry describes the panel as the central fragment of a polyptych whose other parts are lost. The 1931 Enciclopedia Italiana gives the signature as “Donatus e Caterinus”. Wikimedia captions occasionally read the date as 1382, an error. The scholarly sources agree on 1372, and the precise transcription, including the month, should be checked on the panel or in the 1979 Querini Stampalia catalogue.

The record for 1374 again shows divergence. The DBI says Catarino alone executed a large painted and carved ancona, now lost, for San Giorgio in Venice. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale is more cautious about the source. It says nineteenth-century sources, cited by Testi (p. 245), describe a great ancona originally in San Giorgio Maggiore, now dispersed, signed by Catarino alone and dated December 1374. Later in the same entry, apparently by a slip, it calls this “the lost ancona of the Venetian church of Sant’Agnese”. The safer reading is that a lost signed work of December 1374 for San Giorgio (Maggiore) is known only from secondary nineteenth-century descriptions, not from a contract.

In 1375 Catarino signed and dated the Coronation of the Virgin now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In 1386 the Dominican convent of San Platone at Zadar (later San Domenico) commissioned work from Venetian artists. The document was published by the Croatian scholar Kruno Prijatelj in Arte Veneta in 1962. The sources do not agree on its content. The DBI on Caterino speaks of a crucifix and two anconas requested of Catarino, Donato and others. The DBI on Donato is more precise: a polyptych, now lost, was entrusted to Donato and Catarino, another polyptych to Pietro di Nicolò (father of Nicolò di Pietro), and a wooden crucifix to the carver Andrea Moranzone.

The DBI on Moranzone likewise speaks of a cross and two anconas, with the work shared among the two masters, Pietro di Nicolò and Andrea. The Italian Wikipedia’s further claim, that in this document only Donato is styled “magister”, needs verification in Prijatelj’s article before it can be used. In 1965–66 the Croatian art historian Ivo Petricioli found in Zadar a painted Crucifix from the same convent. He proposed, with a question mark, that it was Catarino’s work, in an article titled “Jedno Catarinovo djelo u Zadru?” (“A work by Catarino in Zadar?”) in Peristil. If accepted, it would be the only witness to Catarino’s late production. That attribution, too, remains tentative.

The last document is Trevisan. On 25 October 1390, according to the Faenza note, Catarino is mentioned as restoring the painted Cross of Santa Maria Maggiore in Treviso. The DBI, citing Gerolamo Bampo’s manuscript of documents on painters in Treviso, adds that he was then living in Venice in the parish (contrada) of San Luca. The museum records do not all agree on his working dates. The Walters and Cleveland records give “active 1362–1382”, following an older terminal date also found in the 1931 Enciclopedia Italiana. The Accademia, the state catalogue and the Faenza note give 1390. The 1390 Treviso document supersedes the older limit. I found no documented membership of a scuola or guild for Catarino himself. Donato’s DBI entry does record Donato’s own enrolment in the Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Carità in December 1371, alongside a painter “Marco”. Whether that Marco is connected to Catarino is not known.

Formation and the relationship with Donato

Criticism almost unanimously holds that Donato was Catarino’s master. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale calls this “ipotizzato unanimemente”, unanimously hypothesised. It is a hypothesis drawn from the partnership and from age, not a documented apprenticeship. Donato is documented in Venice from 1353, in the parish of San Luca, and from 1367 to 1386 in San Vidal. His widow Margherita’s will of 11 August 1388 shows he was dead by then. Catarino was therefore the younger partner in an association documented at three points: 1367, 1372 and 1386.

The division of hands within the Querini Coronation has been debated since the early twentieth century. The panel’s most refined passages show the long gold filaments, burnished flesh and lacquered draperies of Paolo Veneziano’s tradition. The view going back to Lionello Venturi, in 1907, reported in the DBI on Donato, is that Donato played the larger role. For Pallucchini, Donato’s personality as master would simply overwhelm the pupil’s in a joint work. An alternative reading, credited in the DBI to Dazzi, is reported by both Treccani entries. It finds a difference between the elegant central group and the angels around the throne, which are painted more roughly and heavily, and assigns the angels to Catarino. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale adds that these angels already show an openness to late Gothic novelties. It links them to the decisive project Guariento began in 1366 in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Doge’s Palace. A third possibility is raised by the Faenza note: the double signature may name the workshop, not the hands that actually painted the panel. None of these positions can be proved from the documents. The honest conclusion is that the Querini Coronation is a signed workshop product of the partnership, and the division of hands within it is a matter of connoisseurship.

Earlier attributions to the joint workshop extend this problem. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale reports a proposal by Viktor Lazarev in 1954, accepted and refined by Pallucchini, that a triptych in the Hermitage is a joint work of Donato and Catarino. It shows the Madonna and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and Nicholas of Tolentino, and the two saints are given to Catarino. The same entry would add an early Madonna of Humility in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, as possibly the first of Catarino’s long series on that theme. These remain attributions, and the second is explicitly an alternative to earlier attributions of the Moscow panel to other painters.

Coronation of the Virgin, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

The panel is the only surviving work signed jointly by Donato and Catarino. It is the one visual document of a partnership otherwise known from the receipt of 1367 for a lost Cross and from the Zadar commission of 1386. The biographical dictionary entry on Donato describes it as the central element of a polyptych whose other parts are lost, which accounts for its tall proportions and strongly axial design. The gilded frame with its bead moulding and hanging ring follows the mixtilinear arch of the panel. Whether it is original has to be established from the museum’s catalogue.

The picture is organised in three superimposed zones against a gold ground whose edge is tooled with a punched border. At the base three small angels kneel before a pale lobed step outlined in red, on a rose-coloured floor. Above them the Virgin and Christ sit on a wide throne with stepped architectural flanks, their feet on red cushions, and their figures fill almost the full breadth of the panel. A blue arc sown with gold stars curves over the throne-back, and the head of the arch is packed with a choir of angels.

In the central group Christ turns towards the Virgin with his right arm raised, his fingers still on the crown he has set on her head. His left hand holds a long sceptre that crosses his body diagonally. He wears a red tunic with a rectangular embroidered panel at the breast, and a blue mantle. His halo is cruciform. Mary bends her head deeply and answers with one hand on her breast and the other opened towards her son. Her face is pale with marked spots of red on the cheeks, while his is long, dark and heavily shadowed.

The drapery is the panel’s most distinctive feature. Both blue mantles and Christ’s red tunic are covered with long, close-set gold filaments that follow every fold. This is the chrysography of the Byzantine tradition, which Paolo Veneziano had made a hallmark of Venetian painting. The gold describes the fall of the cloth and binds the figures to the ground behind them. The hems carry broad gold borders set with small blue and red motifs. Between the figures hangs a cloth of honour with gold foliage on red, and beneath it a seat-cushion striped in blue, red and white.

The angelic court is very large. About thirty angels can be counted, all haloed, with braided fair hair and a small jewel at the brow. Five look out from behind the throne between the two principal heads. Others lean over its sides, and one at the left grasps the edge of the hanging. In the choir above, a central angel plays a portative organ with tall blue-grey pipes, flanked by a vielle with its bow, two lutes or gitterns, and what appears to be a psaltery at the far right. The encyclopedia entry on Catarino relates this crowded heaven to the Paradise that Guariento had begun in the Doge’s Palace in the 1360s.

The three angels at the foot of the throne are painted on a smaller scale than the rest. The one in the centre, dressed in red, kneels with a second portative organ on his knee. The winged angels at either side kneel in prayer, the left in a blue robe streaked with gold and the right in a golden one. They are placed in front of the step, so that they occupy the nearest plane of the picture. Their position, directly below the principal figures and beside the signature, gives the base of the panel the character of a separate register.

The inscription is written in gold on two dark cartouches flanking the central angel.

The left one reads

MCCCLXXII / M[E]XE A[V]GVSTI.

The right one reads

DONATV[S] ⁊ CAT/ARINV[S] · PICXIT

with a sign for et between the two names and abbreviation marks for the endings. This confirms the date of August 1372 given by the scholarly sources against the reading 1382 found in some online captions. The word mexe is Venetian vernacular and recurs in Catarino’s signature of March 1375. There his name is spelt Chatarinus, here without the h.

How the two painters shared the work cannot be settled from documents. The older view gives the larger part to Donato as the senior partner, and Pallucchini agreed, arguing that the master’s personality would absorb the pupil’s. A second reading assigns the more heavily painted angels around the throne to Catarino. A third takes the double signature as the mark of a workshop. What the image does show is how much of this design Catarino kept in 1375: the throne, the starry arc, the angels at the sides of the throne, the organ at the apex, Christ’s sceptre and breast panel. He dropped the chrysography, the large choir and the kneeling angels, a reduction Flores d’Arcais read as a turn to a more popular idiom.

The signed independent works

The Coronation of 1375 in the Gallerie dell’Accademia (cat. 16) is the cornerstone of Catarino’s independent work. According to the gallery’s record, it is a wooden panel measuring 89 × 58 cm, purchased from Count Vincenzo Galli in 1877. Its inscription supplies the date. The 1931 Enciclopedia Italiana says the inscription shows Catarino painted it alone. The precise wording of the signature could not be checked online and should be read on the panel or in the Accademia catalogue. The DBI describes the picture as closely tied to Paolo’s iconographic tradition, certainly mediated through Donato. It points to the throne draped in embroidered cloth and the music-making angels behind it, but finds the interpretation “estremamente popolaresca”, above all in the expressiveness of the faces, with a hardness of contour that freezes the forms beneath the gold ornament. The older verdict of the 1931 encyclopedia, “rozza e pesante di segno, nerastra e sorda di colore”, rough and heavy in line, blackish and dull in colour, partly reflects the panel’s condition. That condition needs physical examination before such judgements are repeated.

Coronation of the Virgin, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

The panel is the earliest surviving work that Catarino signed alone, and so the fixed point from which his independent manner has to be judged. It follows by only three years the Coronation he signed with Donato in 1372 (Fondazione Querini Stampalia), and by three months the lost ancona for San Giorgio, known from nineteenth-century descriptions as dated December 1374. The gallery’s record gives its modern history only from the purchase of 1877. Its original destination is unrecorded, as is whether it stood alone or formed the centre of a larger complex.

The composition is built in shallow, stacked registers inside a round-arched field with stepped shoulders. A moulded rose-coloured platform, edged in red, carries the throne. The two figures fill almost the whole width, their mantles spreading into two broad blue masses that meet at the centre. Behind them rises an orange-gold cloth of honour, then a deep blue hemisphere sown with gold stars, and finally the ring of angels against the gold ground. Depth is suggested only by the red side-pieces of the throne, with their small Gothic panels and finials.

The action is concentrated in a single diagonal. Christ, seated at the right, reaches across with his right arm to set the crown on the Virgin’s head, while his left hand rests on his knee holding a slender sceptre. Mary inclines towards him with her hands raised before her breast in a gesture of acceptance. The subject had been a staple of Venetian painting since Paolo Veneziano, and had acquired public weight in the city through the fresco begun by Guariento in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the 1360s. Catarino does not vary the type. He restates it in the form his partnership with Donato had already used.

The starry hemisphere presents the throne as set before the heavens, and the angels lean on its rim as on a parapet. Eight can be counted in the reproduction. Five form the concert at the summit: one plays a lute or gittern at the left, one a vielle with its bow at the right, and at the apex rise the pipes of a portative organ, with an angel’s hands on what appears to be its keyboard, or possibly a psaltery. Three more stand lower at the sides, and the outer two rest a hand on the red side-pieces of the throne.

Ornament carries much of the picture’s effect. Both blue mantles are covered with a dense gold pattern of scrolling stems and pomegranate-like palmettes, applied over the paint so evenly that it flattens the folds beneath it. Christ’s rose tunic has gold bands at the sleeve and a rectangular embroidered panel at the breast, and is bound with a green sash. The Virgin’s mantle is lined in the same green. The cloth of honour bears dark, thistle-like sprigs on an orange-gold field. The haloes are tooled, and Christ’s appears to carry the arms of a cross picked out in red.

The handling of the heads explains the severity of the critical tradition. Christ’s face is long and hollow-cheeked, built with heavy dark contours and deep shadow around the eyes, a late and hardened descendant of Paolo’s Byzantine types. The Virgin’s is a smoother, paler oval. The angels have round, ruddy faces and tightly braided fair hair, repeated with little variation. Flores d’Arcais called this reading of Paolo’s formula “estremamente popolaresca”, and Pallucchini thought the panel so far from the refinement of 1372 that he considered a second painter of the same name, a hypothesis since abandoned.

The signature is painted in three lines on the face of the step.

From the image it reads:

MCCCLXXV · D[E] MEXE · D[E] / MARÇO · CHATARINVS / PINXIT.

The date is given in Venetian vernacular, “in the month of March”, and the name and verb in Latin. The spelling Chatarinus matches the signature on the Baltimore polyptych. Since the Venetian year began on 1 March, a March date needs no conversion to the modern calendar. I have expanded the abbreviations myself, so the transcription should be checked against the panel or the Accademia catalogue.

Condition bears on any judgement of quality. The gold ground is abraded in the upper margins, and losses along the edges expose the preparation, which suggests the panel was removed from an engaged frame. The darkness of the flesh shadows may owe something to wear and old restoration as well as to the painter. The colour in this reproduction also looks saturated. With those cautions, the panel shows what Catarino kept from the workshop of Donato (the type, the textiles, the angel concert) and what he changed, namely a firmer, more linear and more emphatic drawing. That is the manner which the triptych with Saints Lucy and Nicholas of Tolentino (cat. 702) then develops under the influence of Lorenzo Veneziano.

Coronation of the Virgin with Saints Lucy and Nicholas of Tolentino

The triptych is one of the few works that carry Catarino’s signature, and the only one in which a Coronation is preserved together with its lateral saints. It is undated. The Italian state catalogue places it after the Coronation of 1375 and records that its original provenance is unknown. Its documented history begins with the purchase of 1902. Pallucchini set it at the end of a sequence running from the 1375 panel through the Baltimore polyptych, as the point where the painter stands furthest from the tradition of Paolo Veneziano.

The three panels are shown without a frame, and their condition is visible at once. Broad margins of bare preparation surround each painted field and mark where the lost carved framework once covered the wood. The central panel ends in a round arch with stepped shoulders, and the laterals have chamfered upper corners around a pointed gold field. The gold ground is heavily abraded, especially in the laterals and in the upper part of the centre. Any reading of the surface has to allow for that wear, and for the loss of the frame that once joined the three panels.

The central panel repeats the type of 1375 with one important change. The cloth of honour has gone. In its place stands a throne of pink stone built like a small Gothic building, with an ogee-headed central gable, side pinnacles and a tall pierced opening of two lancets between the figures. Behind it the blue starry arc survives from the earlier scheme. Five angels lean over its rim. The outer two pray, and the three between them play a lute, a portative organ and a psaltery or similar plucked chordophone. The architecture gives the scene a depth and solidity that the textile backdrop of 1375 did not attempt.

Christ and the Virgin keep their established gestures. He reaches across to set the crown on her head, and she bows with one hand on her breast and the other raised. The colours are redistributed. Christ now wears a blue tunic banded with gold and a red mantle lined in green, and no sceptre is visible in his left hand, which rests on his knee. The Virgin’s blue mantle carries a pattern of large gold ogival motifs, much bolder in scale than the fine scrollwork of 1375. Both figures rest on a red cushion or dais, with Christ’s bare feet showing at its edge.

Saint Lucy, at the left, is the most graceful figure in the ensemble. She stands in a gentle sway, turned towards the centre, with a crown on her fair hair. Her red gown is hemmed in white and covered by a green mantle with a gold and red pattern. She holds a lamp in her left hand, her customary attribute; no other attribute can be made out in the reproduction. The state catalogue derives her elegance from Lorenzo Veneziano. Flores d’Arcais agreed on the model and described the result as Lorenzo translated into a rustic dialect.

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, at the right, is conceived quite differently. He stands frontally in the black habit of the Augustinian Hermits¹, tonsured, with a red book in his left hand and a small red cross on his breast. His face is gaunt and deeply hollowed, modelled with a strong chiaroscuro that Flores d’Arcais found without precedent in Venice and reminiscent of Padua. Nicholas died in 1305 and was not canonised until 1446, so the panel belongs to the period of his cult before canonisation. His presence suggests an Augustinian patron or church, though with the provenance unrecorded that remains an inference.

The signature is painted on the pale strip at the foot of the central panel. In the image it survives in two parts,

CHATA[…]

at the left and

PINXIT

at the right, with the middle of the line lost. The opening letters are consistent with the form Chatarinus used in the Coronation of 1375 and on the Baltimore polyptych. No date is visible. The reading depends on a small reproduction and on a damaged area, so it should be checked against the panel or the Accademia catalogue, which may also record traces of the saints’ names on the gold of the laterals.

Taken together, the three panels show where Catarino’s manner was heading after 1375. The Gothic throne and the swaying Saint Lucy show the influence of Lorenzo Veneziano. The modelling of Saint Nicholas looks towards the mainland. The stiff central pair and the hard contours remain his own. One caution applies to the literature: the state catalogue record, as transmitted online, attributes the 1375 Coronation to Paolo Veneziano by an evident slip, which should not be repeated.

Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, and Saints

Madonna and Child with a donor

The central panel (117.5 × 62.5 cm) is the largest of the ten and the only one framed by a round arch, which sets it apart from the pointed, cusped openings of the saints. It gives the altarpiece its subject and its patron. The painter’s signature lies directly beneath it on the base, which the museum describes as original. The Virgin is not enthroned. She sits low, on an orange-red cushion laid on a meadow thick with small flowers. This is the formula of the Madonna of Humility, which the DBI traces to a type derived from Lorenzo Veneziano and which Catarino repeated in many panels. Here the Child is not nursing, and the museum’s title speaks simply of the Madonna and Child.

Her head is bent towards the Child, and her gaze passes over him to the viewer’s left. She wears a blue veil and mantle scattered with small gold stars at the shoulder, lined in green, over a rose dress with a gold border at the neck and cuffs. The figure fills the arch almost to its edges, and its outline forms one broad triangle. On the breast of the dress is a small radiant face in gold and red. The Walters reads it as an allusion to the “woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12:1. The motif belongs to the same family of apocalyptic attributes as the gold rays that the Faenza museum record notes in Catarino’s Madonnas of Humility.

The Child sits across her lap, nude except for a white band wound around his body. He twists away from his mother and stretches his right arm downwards, in the direction of the donor. His left hand reaches back to her breast. The pose is livelier than anything in the Coronations. At the lower left a very small figure kneels against the folds of the mantle, hands joined, in a dark robe with a red hood or collar. The difference of scale is the conventional hierarchy of the donor portrait. According to the museum, the coat of arms that identified him was at the lower centre and is now missing. The blank shield-shaped space between the two halves of the signature marks its place.

The mantle carries large gold ogival motifs, like pine cones or pomegranates, spaced regularly over the blue. The same bold pattern appears on the Virgin’s mantle in the Accademia triptych with Saints Lucy and Nicholas of Tolentino. It is laid flat over the folds, and the modelling is left to the green lining and the darker blue of the shadows. The signature on the base reads

CHATARI/NVS · DE / VENECII / PINXIT,

in the museum’s transcription. The museum dates the work to about 1380–1389. Pallucchini placed it no earlier than 1380, in a late phase close to Jacobello di Bonomo. The museum also records treatments in 1946, 1962 and 2008, which should be kept in mind in any judgement of the surface.

The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale adds a point of provenance. The polyptych comes from the collection of Count Orsi of Ancona and was probably first in a religious house near Osimo, according to Cavalcaselle and Crowe in 1887. With the Pennabilli Madonna it indicates, in the encyclopedia’s reading, if not Catarino’s presence in the Marche, at least contact with patrons of that region.

Saint Anthony Abbot

Anthony (102.5 × 29.5 cm) occupies the outer left of the main tier. Like the other three standing saints he is set under a pointed, cusped arch between slender colonnettes, on a strip of green ground against the gold. He is shown as a very old man, bald at the brow, with a long white beard that divides at the chest. A black cloak with a hood covers most of the figure. Beneath it are a yellow tunic, a blue sash and a rose sleeve.

His attributes are complete. A blue Tau is marked on the shoulder of the cloak, he leans on a tall staff, and a small black pig stands at the lower edge of the panel. His right hand hangs open at his side. These are the signs made familiar by the hospital order of Saint Anthony, whose members wore the Tau and kept pigs. In a polyptych they identify the saint at once as the hermit of Egypt and the protector of the sick.

The figure turns in three-quarter view towards the centre, and the eyes are lowered. The stance is quiet and almost columnar, with the weight carried by the staff. The panel is the darkest of the four. The black cloak makes a single mass against the gold, relieved by the yellow and blue at the chest and by the rose lining that shows at the hem.

Anthony Abbot also appears in the triptych in the Hermitage that later criticism has given to the joint workshop of Donato and Catarino, where the lateral saints are attributed to Catarino. That remains an attribution, and the comparison would need to be made from photographs of both. The face is modelled with strong shadow at the eye sockets and cheeks, in the manner the dictionary entry by Flores d’Arcais associates with mainland painting.

Saint John the Baptist

John (approx. 102.5 × 29.5 cm) stands at the Virgin’s right hand, the place of honour beside the central panel. He is the only one of the four who addresses the centre directly. He is lean and long-limbed, with tangled hair and a dark beard. He wears a tawny hair shirt, a rose mantle wrapped around the hips, and a brown cloak over the shoulders. His legs and feet are bare.

With his right hand he points across his body towards the Child. The gesture is that of the forerunner, and it links the lateral to the central panel. In his left hand he holds a long scroll that unrolls down the side of the figure and curls at the bottom. Its text is the Baptist’s words from John 1:29, Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi.

The text is broken into nine short lines. The museum transcribes it as

ECCE / AGN / V DE / I ECC / E QVI / TOLI / PECA / TA M / VNDI.

The spelling is simplified throughout, with Agnu for Agnus, toli for tollit and pecata for peccata.

The scroll is the only passage of pure white in the main tier. Its curve answers the sway of the figure and fills the right side of the narrow field. The head is strongly characterised, with hollow cheeks and a fixed sideways gaze. It is close in type to the Christ of the 1375 Coronation, with the same long face and heavy contour.

John’s placement and gesture are standard in Venetian polyptychs of the period. The interest of the panel lies in the drawing of the bare limbs, which is more attentive to anatomy than Catarino’s draped figures usually allow.

Saint Christopher

Christopher (approx. 102.5 × 29.5 cm) stands at the Virgin’s left hand. He is the most animated figure of the main tier and the only one shown in a setting. He wears a short red tunic, a yellow mantle slung across the body and a blue sash. His legs are bare to the knee, and he stands in dark water in which several fish are painted.

The Christ Child sits on his left shoulder, dressed in blue, with a halo. The Child raises one hand in blessing and steadies himself against the saint’s head. Christopher looks up at him. In his right hand he holds a tall staff with green fronds at the top, the staff that flowered in the legend after he had carried the Child across the river.

The colour is the brightest in the polyptych. The red and yellow stand out against the gold, and the dark water closes the bottom of the panel where the other saints have green ground. Flores d’Arcais observed that this figure seems to copy the Saint Christopher by Giovanni da Bologna in Padua. It is her main evidence for Catarino’s contact with that painter. If the dependence holds, it gives a date after which the polyptych must fall and supports the placing in the 1380s. The comparison should be verified against the Paduan panel.

The transparent water over the feet and the upward turn of the head show the painter working from a model more naturalistic than his own habits. The result is the least formulaic figure in the altarpiece.

Saint James the Great

James (approx. 102.5 × 29.5 cm) closes the main tier at the outer right, as the pendant of Anthony Abbot at the left. He is a man in middle age with brown hair and a short beard. He wears a pale green tunic with a broad gold band at the neck, and over it a rose mantle that falls in long folds to the ground.

In his left hand he holds a tall thin staff, the pilgrim’s bourdon. In his right he carries a red book, the mark of an apostle. A small dark pouch with a cross on it hangs below the book, apparently the pilgrim’s scrip. He turns slightly towards the centre and looks out to the viewer’s left. The stance is frontal and still.

The rose mantle echoes the rose of the Virgin’s dress and of the Baptist’s drapery. This balances the main tier, with warm tones repeated at regular intervals across the gold. James stands beside Christopher, and both are saints of travellers and pilgrims. Whether that pairing reflects the patron’s wishes cannot be known, since the donor is unidentified.

The drapery is drawn in broad parallel folds with little variation, closer to Catarino’s habitual manner than the Christopher. The head is among the more gently modelled in the polyptych.

The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion (42 × 31 cm) stands at the top of the central axis, under the tallest gable. It is placed directly above the Madonna and Child, so that the altarpiece sets the Passion over the Incarnation. The cross is T-shaped, with a small titulus fixed above it. Christ is dead, his head fallen to his right and his body hanging slightly away from the wood.

The Virgin stands at the left, wrapped in a dark blue mantle, with her hands raised and her face turned up to her son. John stands at the right in a rose mantle over blue. He also looks up, with his hands clasped before him. Behind the figures runs a low green wall or parapet, and above it the ground is gold. At the foot of the cross is a small mound, with red visible at its base.

There are three figures and no Magdalene, soldiers or angels are visible. It is the simplest form of the subject, suited to a panel of this size. A Crucifixion in the parish church of Cadoneghe has been attributed to Catarino by Flores d’Arcais.

Saint Lucy

Lucy (38.2 × 16 cm) stands in the narrow compartment at the left of the Crucifixion, under her own gable.

She is shown full-length, turned towards the Crucifixion, on a strip of green ground.

She wears a red mantle over a lighter dress. Her head is uncovered and haloed.

In her raised left hand she holds a small footed vessel, her lamp. A thin line in her right hand appears to be a martyr’s palm.

Her name is written on the gold beside her as

S LVCIA,

in the museum’s transcription.

Lucy also appears in the Accademia triptych, there as a full-scale lateral figure holding a lamp. The saint therefore recurs in two of the signed works.

Her position beside the Crucifixion matches that of Catherine on the other side. The two virgin martyrs frame the Passion as witnesses.

The figure is too small in this reproduction for any reading of the face or drapery. The attributes and the inscription should be confirmed on the panel.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Catherine (39 × 16 cm) stands at the right of the Crucifixion, as the pendant of Lucy.

She is shown full-length and turned to the left, towards the cross.

She wears a blue mantle over a red dress, the reverse of Lucy’s colours. Her head is haloed and appears to be crowned.

A golden wheel stands at her side at the lower left, the instrument of her martyrdom. She seems to hold a palm.

Her name is written on the gold at the left of her head as

S CATARINA,

in the museum’s transcription. The saint’s name is spelt as the painter spells his own, though without the CH that opens his signature.

Catherine was among the most widely venerated of the virgin martyrs. Her presence does not by itself point to any particular church or order.

The pairing of red and blue in the two small figures repeats, on a small scale, the colours of John and the Virgin in the Crucifixion between them.

Saints Ursula and Bartholomew

This panel (approx. 32 × 59 cm) fills the upper tier above Anthony Abbot and the Baptist. It holds two half-length saints, each under a cusped arch and a gable.

The figure at the left is a young woman with fair hair and a crown. She wears a rose mantle over a green dress with a jewelled neckline.

She holds an arrow in her right hand and a red book in her left. The arrow and the crown are the attributes of Ursula, the princess killed by arrows at Cologne.

The label beside her reads

S BARBARA.

The museum notes that the labels of Ursula and Barbara have been confused, and identifies this figure as Ursula.

The figure at the right is Bartholomew. He has dark curly hair and a full beard, and wears a white mantle strewn with small blue flowers over a blue tunic.

He holds a knife in his right hand, the instrument of his flaying. His name is written on either side of his head, and the museum reads it, with a query, as

S BA…TOLI.

The dark curls and the white mantle may reflect the description of the apostle’s appearance in the Golden Legend. That is a suggestion from the iconography, which the museum’s catalogue does not make in the record consulted. The two heads turn towards the centre. They are painted more broadly than the standing saints below, as suits their height above the viewer.

Saints Clare and Barbara

This panel (approx. 30.5 × 58.4 cm) fills the upper tier above Christopher and James. Like its pendant, it holds two half-length saints under cusped arches. The figure at the left is Clare of Assisi². She wears a black veil and a white wimple, with a pale mantle crossed by dark horizontal bands. She holds a red book in her left hand and, it seems, a small cross in her right.

Her name is written beside her head as

S CHLA[RA],

with the same CH that opens the painter’s signature.

Clare is the only saint of a religious order among the thirteen figures. She may indicate a Franciscan connection, but with the provenance unknown before the nineteenth century that cannot be tested. The figure at the right is a young woman with long loose hair, in a red mantle over a green dress. She turns her head sharply upwards and outwards.

She holds a small golden object in her left hand. The museum identifies it as a monstrance, the vessel used to display the consecrated host, and recognises the saint as Barbara by this attribute. It treats the label beside her, which is fragmentary and reads

MAR…,

as a mislabelling.

The upward glance is unusual among the saints of the polyptych. It directs the eye back towards the Crucifixion at the centre of the upper tier. The inscriptions of the upper tier therefore pose two problems. The name of Barbara stands beside a figure with Ursula’s arrow, and the fragment MAR… stands beside the figure the museum calls Barbara.

Madonna of Humility, Worcester Art Museum

The panel is the one Madonna of Humility in Catarino’s catalogue that bears a complete signature. The others are attributed on grounds of style, and the related Madonna of Humility from the Franciscan convent of Pietracuta, in the Museo Diocesano at Pennabilli, preserves only the end of his name: restoration brought to light a truncated inscription ending in “-rinus” (Scassellati Riccardi, 1964). The Worcester picture is therefore the fixed term of comparison for the whole group, from the Madonnas in San Francesco della Vigna in Venice and the Museo di Palazzo Venezia in Rome to those at Faenza and Cleveland. The museum dates it to about 1380–1382, close to the date it gives for the Baltimore polyptych.

It is a small object, some forty centimetres high, made for private devotion. The painted field is set within a gilded frame with a cusped ogee arch, carried on twisted colonnettes, with dark trefoils in the spandrels and a row of small pendant arches along the base. Whether this frame is original to the panel is a matter for the museum’s catalogue. Its design matches the arches of the Baltimore polyptych.

The Virgin sits directly on the ground, on a dark meadow sown with white and red flowers. A rounded gold form behind her at the right appears to be a cushion. Her mantle spreads to either side in wide curving hems, so that the figure forms a low, broad pyramid that fills the lower half of the field. The gold ground above is left open around her head and shoulders.

She nurses the Child, which is the defining action of the Humility type. He lies across her right arm, bare to the waist and wrapped below in a cloth patterned in orange and gold. He holds the breast with both hands and turns his eyes outwards. The Virgin bends her head towards him, and her gaze drops past him to the lower left. The Baltimore central panel shows the same seated Virgin on a meadow, though there the Child is not nursing.

Three details give the image its apocalyptic sense. Fine gold rays are incised in the ground and radiate from behind the figure. A gold disc is set on the breast of her dress. A white crescent moon lies in the grass at the lower left, beside the hem of the mantle. Together they present Mary as the woman of Revelation 12:1, clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet. The Walters reads the sun-face on the Baltimore Virgin in the same way.

The mantle is covered with a fine gold pattern of scrolling tendrils. This is the delicate scrollwork of the 1375 Coronation, and it differs from the large ogival motifs of the Baltimore polyptych and the Accademia triptych. A green lining shows in the broad fold across her lap. The dress is red with gold at the neck and waist, and the halo is tooled in concentric rings. The gold ground is worn, and the red bole shows through in many places.

The signature is written on a small white scroll painted in the lower right corner, over the meadow. In the image it reads

[…]TARINVS PINXIT,

preceded by a small cross. The opening letters of the name are not legible at this size, and it is unclear whether the scroll gives the form Chatarinus, as at Baltimore and in the Coronation of 1375. The museum’s transcription should be preferred.

Several vertical cracks run through the lower part of the panel and cross the mantle. They need to be allowed for in any judgement of the surface. The head of the Virgin is softly modelled, with a long nose and heavy eyelids, and is gentler than the heads of the Coronations. The DBI traces the type to models of Lorenzo Veneziano. The panel shows Catarino adapting that model for a small devotional image, a format he then repeated many times.

Attributed works

The panels that follow are unsigned. Each rests on style, and each is weighed against the signed works above.

Madonna of Humility, Faenza

The panel carries no signature, and its place in Catarino’s catalogue depends on style alone. The museum’s record sets out the history. When it was first published in 1964 it was read as a Romagnol work. Flores d’Arcais attributed it to Catarino in 1965. From 1982 later criticism raised doubts, and the museum now allows that it may be by a follower imitating him. It dates the picture to between 1370 and 1380.

The ground is a bright red, which is unusual beside the gold of the signed works. Its upper edge is cut into broad lobes, the trace of a polylobed arch, and the areas above the lobes are dark and badly worn. Fine gold rays spread outwards from the two figures across the red, and a few small gold stars are scattered near the top. The museum record names exactly these features, the red ground, the lobed arch and the rays, as typical of Catarino’s Madonnas of Humility.

The Virgin is shown to below the knee, turned slightly to the left. She wears a blue mantle over a red dress with a gold border at the neck and a patterned gold cuff. A white cloth covers her throat, and a dark veil edged with a line of small pearls frames her forehead. The mantle is plain blue, without any gold pattern. Its ochre lining is turned out on the left side and occupies much of the lower left of the picture.

The Child lies across her right arm with his back to the viewer and twists his head round to look up at her. He raises one hand towards her breast, and the gesture shows that he was nursing. The breast itself is lost, and a neutral fill now covers the place. Below the waist he is wrapped in an orange cloth with a yellow lining and a white band. His bare feet cross at the lower right, where the Virgin’s left hand rests on the cloth.

The Virgin’s head is bent well to the left, with a long nose, a small mouth and large eyes that look out past the Child. The modelling is smooth and pale, with a little pink in the cheeks. The type is close to the Virgin of the signed panel at Worcester, where the head is inclined in the same way and the Child lies on the same side. That resemblance supports the attribution.

The setting is much barer than at Worcester. There the Virgin sits on a flowering meadow, with a crescent moon at her feet and a gold disc on her breast. Here two brown mounds rise at the lower corners, which may be the ground or a cushion, and no meadow or moon is visible. The lower edge is damaged, and the photograph does not show whether the panel has been reduced. If it has, attributes of that kind may have been lost.

The doubts raised since 1982 concern drawing and ornament. Critics have pointed to the uncertain drawing of the Child’s arm and of his foreshortened feet, and to the poverty of the decoration. The photograph bears out the second point. The Worcester mantle is covered with gold scrollwork and its halo is tooled in rings, while here the mantle is bare and the haloes are plain discs. The first point is a matter of judgement, and the twisting pose of the Child is at least ambitious.

Condition limits what can be concluded. The red ground is abraded throughout, the gold of the haloes is broken, and several losses have been filled in a neutral grey, around both heads and at the breast. Some of the apparent plainness may therefore be the result of wear. The panel is twice the height of the Worcester picture and repeats its type on a larger scale. Whether by Catarino or by a painter working from his model, it shows how widely that type circulated.

Madonna of Humility, Cleveland

The panel belongs to the group of Madonnas of Humility that criticism has gathered around Catarino’s signed picture at Worcester. It carries no signature. Its inscription names the image, not the painter, so the attribution rests on style. The museum dates it to the late 1370s, a little earlier than the Worcester panel, and records that it was cut down from a larger altarpiece. It may therefore once have been the centre of a polyptych, as the Madonna is at Baltimore.

The frame is not original to the image. According to the museum the panel was reframed in the nineteenth century. The round arch with its two cusps, the moulded colonnettes and the corner spandrels carved with foliage and small masks belong to that later setting. The painted field below the arch is intact enough to read. The gold ground is fine and even, and incised rays spread from the figure across it, most clearly at the left.

The Virgin sits low on a broad red surface that fills the lower part of the panel. Its curved edge suggests a large cushion or a raised ground, and whitish streaks run across it at the right. There is no flowering meadow of the kind seen at Worcester and Baltimore. Her mantle spreads to either side and gives the figure the wide, stable base typical of the Humility type, with the upper body rising into the arch.

She nurses the Child, who sits upright in the crook of her right arm and holds the breast with both hands. He wears a long red tunic patterned with small gold stars and has a head of tight red-gold curls. He turns his eyes up and outwards. The Virgin’s left hand lies loosely across his legs, and one bare foot shows at the lower right. The pose is the same as at Worcester, with the Child on the same side, and is more compact and frontal than the twisting figure at Faenza.

Her head is tilted to the left, with a long straight nose, a small mouth and heavily rouged cheeks. Unlike the downcast Virgins of the other Humility panels, she looks directly at the viewer. The face is smoothly modelled with soft green shadows at the temples and jaw. The blue veil is edged with a gold border, and a strand of fair hair shows at the forehead.

The apocalyptic signs are present but discreet. A small gold sun with fine rays is set on the breast of the pink dress, and a gold star with rays marks the mantle at the right shoulder. A small crescent appears to lie at the lower left corner of the painted field, near the hem, but it is faint in the photograph. Together these signs present Mary as the woman of Revelation 12:1, clothed with the sun and with the moon beneath her feet. The Worcester panel uses the same signs, and the Walters reads the sun on the Baltimore Virgin in the same way.

The ornament is of high quality. The blue mantle carries large gold ogival motifs filled with scrolling foliage. This is the bold pattern of the Baltimore Madonna and the Virgin of the Accademia triptych, not the fine scrollwork of the Worcester panel. The green lining and the pink dress with its gold collar repeat the colour scheme of Catarino’s signed Madonnas. The halo of the Child is drawn with fine incised lines. The Virgin’s halo is not visible, perhaps lost when the panel was cut and regilded.

The inscription along the base reads

S[AN]C[T]A MARIA DE UM[I]LITATE,

which the museum translates as Holy Mary of Humility. Written titles of this kind accompany several Venetian and Adriatic Madonnas of Humility of the period and confirm how the image was named. The museum’s provenance runs from an Italian private collection, once said to be that of Prince Umberto, through Baron Thyssen at Schloss Rohoncz, to Heinemann, who gave the panel in 1963. Its fine finish and good condition make it one of the strongest arguments for extending Catarino’s catalogue beyond the signed works.

Madonna of Humility, Columbus

The Columbus panel is one of the Madonnas of Humility that criticism has attributed to Catarino. It is unsigned. Its value for the catalogue lies in comparison with the signed Madonna at Worcester and the attributed panels at Cleveland and Faenza. At under thirty centimetres high it is the smallest of the group and was made for private devotion.

The painted field ends in a round arch against a dark border. Whether that border is a later frame, an old repaint or the edge of an engaged moulding cannot be judged from this image. The lower edge cuts across the Virgin’s mantle and leaves her feet and most of the meadow out of view. The panel has probably been reduced at the bottom, which would explain the absence of the signature scroll or the crescent moon found in this position at Worcester.

The Virgin sits low on the ground in the posture of humility. An orange cushion lies beside her at the right, and a dark meadow with small white and red flowers fills the lower right corner. Her mantle spreads across the lower half of the panel in a broad dark mass. The arrangement corresponds closely to the Worcester panel, where the same cushion lies at her side on a similar meadow.

She nurses the Child, who sits on the green lining of her mantle across her lap. He is bare above the waist, with a white band at the chest, and wrapped below in an orange cloth with a yellow lining. He holds the breast with one hand and turns his head up to suckle, and his bare feet cross at the lower right. The Virgin supports him with both hands. The Child sits on the same side as at Worcester and Cleveland.

Her head is inclined towards him, with a long nose, a small mouth and heavy eyelids, and her gaze drops past him to the lower left. A dark veil frames the face, and a pink dress shows at the neck. The type matches the Worcester Virgin more closely than the frontal, outward-looking Virgin at Cleveland.

The mantle is a very dark blue scattered with small sprigs of flowers in a lighter colour, perhaps gold. This is neither the fine continuous scrollwork of Worcester nor the large ogival motifs of Cleveland and Baltimore. A spaced, repeated sprig of this kind is a simpler form of textile ornament. Whether it is painted or mordant-gilt cannot be determined from this reproduction.

The gold ground appears to carry incised rays spreading from the figure, and some small gold points near the top. The halos of both figures are faint and the gold is worn. A network of craquelure covers the ground. No disc on the breast and no star on the shoulder can be made out, though at this resolution their absence cannot be confirmed.

The Columbus panel repeats in miniature the formula of the signed Worcester Madonna: the low seat, the cushion, the meadow, the nursing Child and the bowed head. Its reduced size and simpler ornament fit a painting made for a modest patron, as do many in the group. A secure judgement between Catarino and his workshop would need a high-resolution image and the museum’s catalogue entry.

Coronation of the Virgin, St Petersburg

The Hermitage attributes the panel to Caterino Veneziano. It is unsigned, as far as can be seen, and the attribution rests on comparison with his signed Coronations of 1372 and 1375. It is not the only one in play: the DBI entry on Donato reports that criticism has tried to enlarge Donato’s catalogue with a Coronation of the Virgin and Stories of Blessed Giuliana of Collalto in the Hermitage (Pallucchini, 1964), and the sources consulted do not say whether that is this panel. Its recorded history begins in the collection of the historian and collector N. P. Likhachev. It was bought in 1914, passed to the State Russian Museum and entered the Hermitage in 1923. Nothing is known of its original setting. Its height of 120 cm and its unframed edges suggest the central panel of a dismembered polyptych, as the Querini Stampalia Coronation is.

The composition fills the panel without any throne architecture. Christ and the Virgin sit side by side on an unseen seat, their feet resting on a pale floor. Behind them hangs a broad red cloth of honour patterned with gold foliage. Above it a dark blue sky spreads to the sides, and the upper part of the panel is crowded with angels against the gold. Narrow dark strips with gold stars run down both edges, showing that the sky continues behind the cloth.

Christ turns towards the Virgin and sets a jewelled crown on her head with his right hand. In his left he holds a long, thin sceptre ending in a fleur-de-lis, which crosses his body diagonally. He wears a red tunic with a gold border and a dark mantle lined with gold. The Virgin inclines her head towards him and holds her hands joined before her breast. A gold disc fastens her mantle at the neck.

The two mantles are almost black and are covered with large gold motifs shaped like radiating stars or snowflakes, arranged in a regular grid. Their borders carry a band of gold ornament. The Virgin’s red dress is scattered with small gold crosses or fleurs-de-lis. This dense, uniform patterning flattens the figures. It follows the same principle of ornament as the Accademia Coronation of 1375 and the Baltimore polyptych, where a repeated gold motif is laid over the folds, though the star-shaped motif here does not occur in the signed works.

The sky contains the most unusual detail. In the starry arc behind the heads, a small gold sun with a face and rays appears at the left, and a crescent moon at the right. Together they frame the coronation as a cosmic event. They also recall the woman of Revelation 12:1, clothed with the sun and standing on the moon, whose signs appear on the Virgin’s breast in Catarino’s Madonnas of Humility. Here the signs are placed in the heavens instead of on the figure.

About a dozen angels fill the upper part of the panel, in rows that rise to the top edge. All are winged, haloed and dressed in red, black or rose with jewelled collars. Several join their hands in prayer, and none plays an instrument. The two lowest angels, at the outer edges, hold up the red cloth of honour. The Querini Coronation has a partial parallel, in the angel at the left of the throne who grasps the hanging. The absence of musicians, which both signed panels include, sets this panel apart.

The heads are long and narrow, with straight noses, small mouths and heavy-lidded eyes. Christ’s long face with its falling hair, his red tunic and his diagonal sceptre are close to the Christ of the Querini panel. The Virgin’s joined hands, however, differ from the open, answering gesture of both signed Coronations. Christ’s face is darkened and abraded, and the beard has largely disappeared. The gold ground is worn throughout, especially at the edges, and there are losses along the vertical joins of the boards.

Along the base, in the lower left and lower right corners, are traces of small inscriptions. They are illegible in this reproduction. Both signed Coronations carry the date and the painter’s name at the foot of the panel, the Querini one in two cartouches at either side. If these traces contain a name or a date, the Hermitage attribution would rest on a signature as well as on style. They should be checked on the panel or in the museum’s record.

Coronation of the Virgin with angels, Lingenauber collection

This is the smallest Coronation associated with Catarino. At under twenty-eight centimetres high, it was made for private devotion, or as one compartment of a small portable altarpiece. It is now mounted in a modern setting, a gilded pointed arch lined with green velvet, which tells nothing of its original arrangement. The shape of the painted field, with its cusped ogee head and lobed sides, suggests that it was once set within a carved frame of matching outline, perhaps as the centre of a small triptych.

The composition is divided into two zones. Below, the Virgin and Christ sit inside an architectural throne whose dark interior forms a niche behind them. Above, a moulded cornice closes the niche, and over it, in the arched head of the panel, three angels lean on a parapet. The two zones are clearly separated, the upper one set against gold and the lower one against the dark wood or stone of the throne.

Christ sits at the right, turned towards the Virgin, and raises a jewelled crown over her head with his right hand. He wears a red tunic densely patterned with small gold flowers, with gold borders at the neck and wrist, and a dark blue mantle with large gold floral motifs across his knees. He has no sceptre. His face is in profile, with a dark beard and long hair.

The Virgin sits at the left with her head bowed and her hands joined in prayer, the gesture of the Hermitage Coronation rather than the open hand of the signed panels. Her blue mantle is covered with gold flowers, and a white veil falls from her head across her lap. Beneath it she wears a pink dress with gold at the cuffs. Both figures rest their feet on a pale stepped platform with a red cushion or cloth at its edge.

The throne is the most elaborate element. Its side walls rise as thin piers, and small angel heads, two or three on each side, look in from behind them. The back is a dark panel with a gold-patterned frieze below the cornice. A small pale rectangle appears on the seat between the two figures, near Christ’s elbow, which may be a book or a small inscribed label. The architectural throne recalls the pink Gothic throne of the Accademia triptych, here rendered as an enclosed chamber.

The three angels above are winged and haloed. The central one, seen frontally with red wings, holds a tall object, perhaps a staff or a banner. The angel at the left, in grey, holds a round white object, perhaps a disc or a cymbal, and the one at the right looks down at the scene. None plays a recognisable instrument. Their placement on a balcony over the throne gives the group the character of spectators.

The ornament is fine for so small a panel. The gold patterns on the Virgin’s mantle and on Christ’s tunic and mantle are drawn with care, and the haloes are tooled. The gold floral pattern on dark blue is close to the Virgin’s mantle in the Accademia triptych with Saints Lucy and Nicholas of Tolentino. The faces are small and simplified, as the scale requires. The Virgin’s long nose and heavy lids follow the type of the signed Coronations.

The architectural throne, the joined hands and the absence of musicians set the panel apart from both signed Coronations. The pattern of the textiles and the facial types support a connection with Catarino’s workshop.

Crucifix with the Virgin, St John and an archangel, Zadar

The attribution goes back to an article of 1965–66 in the Croatian journal Peristil, whose title, “A work by Catarino in Zadar?”, already carries the question mark. According to the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, Petricioli excluded that the cross could be the work of the two older painters of the commission, Donato and Pietro di Nicolò, and so proposed Catarino, doubtfully. The cross comes from the Dominican convent of San Platone, later San Domenico, in Zadar. In 1386 that convent commissioned a crucifix and two anconas from a group of Venetian masters that included Catarino and Donato. If the attribution holds, the cross would be the only surviving witness of Catarino’s late activity and of his work in Dalmatia.

The link with the 1386 commission needs caution. The biographical dictionary entry on Donato states that the polyptych was entrusted to Donato and Catarino, a second polyptych to Pietro di Nicolò, and the crucifix to the carver Andrea Moranzone. A crucifix ordered from a carver would most naturally have been carved, not painted. On that reading this cross cannot be the crucifix of the contract, though it could belong to the same campaign of furnishing. The wording of the 1386 document has to be checked before the two are connected.

The cross is very large, almost three and a half metres high, and was made to hang high in the church, probably over the choir screen or the entrance to the presbytery. It has the shape that Venetian painted crosses inherited from the thirteenth century. The arms widen in stepped profiles towards the terminals, which end in quatrefoils. The field behind Christ is plain gold. There is no patterned apron behind the body, and the cross itself is painted as a dark beam against the gold.

Christ is shown dead, in the Gothic type of the Christus patiens. His head has fallen onto his right shoulder, and his eyes are closed. His arms are drawn up into a shallow V, and his body sags to the left with the hips pushed out. His ribs, the hollow below the breastbone and the swollen belly are modelled in brown and green shadows. His feet are crossed and fixed with one nail. A thin, partly transparent white loincloth is knotted at his hips and falls in a long point at the right.

The mourners occupy the side terminals in half length. The Virgin, at the left, wears a dark green mantle over her head and raises her hand to her face in grief. Saint John, at the right, wears a pink mantle over a blue tunic and turns towards Christ with his hands raised. Both heads are inclined, and both figures fill their quatrefoils closely. Their faces are long and narrow, with heavy lids.

The upper terminal holds a winged archangel in a red mantle over a white tunic. He holds a tall staff in one hand and a dark orb in the other. These attributes are those of an archangel as heavenly messenger, and both Michael and Gabriel appear in this form. Above the head of Christ, on the upright of the painted cross, a small transverse panel carries the titulus I.N.R.I. A dark shape above it, perhaps a pelican, is not legible in this reproduction.

The lower terminal shows no figure, only a dark rocky form in which the foot of the cross is set. This is Golgotha, and it may once have held a skull, the usual sign of Adam’s grave, which the photograph does not show. The surface here is dark and worn, and it is not clear whether a figure, such as a kneeling donor or Mary Magdalen, has been lost.

Comparison with Catarino’s signed works is limited, because none of them is a cross. The documents, however, place him in this field. In 1367 he and Donato received payment for a painted Cross for Sant’Agnese in Venice, now lost. In 1390 he was in Treviso restoring the painted Cross of Santa Maria Maggiore. The long faces of the mourners and the hard contours of the body fit his manner in general terms. A more precise judgement would need close comparison with the heads of the Accademia Coronation and the Baltimore polyptych.

Style, iconography and ornament

Read together, the signed works describe a painter formed within Paolo Veneziano’s late-Byzantine idiom as mediated by Donato. That idiom shows in the embroidered throne-cloths, the music-making angels and the Coronation as a subject of Venetian devotion. He then moved progressively towards Lorenzo Veneziano’s Gothic manner and the painters of the mainland. Pallucchini’s sequence, endorsed by the DBI, runs from the 1375 Coronation through the Baltimore polyptych to the triptych with Saints Lucy and Nicholas. It traces a gradual retreat from Paolo’s “bizantinismo” and growing emphasis on Lorenzo’s manner. The DBI adds that the sequence should also be read as increasing contact with mainland painting. It points to Giovanni da Bologna, whose Saint Christopher in Padua the Baltimore Christopher seems to copy, and to Paduan chiaroscuro. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale arranges the same evidence into three phases. The first is an early phase within Donato’s workshop. The second, from 1374–75, is a popular and simplified late Gothic shaped by Lorenzo and by Giovanni da Bologna’s arrival. The third is a late phase, exemplified by Baltimore and Pennabilli, oriented towards Jacobello di Bonomo and a north-Adriatic koinè.

The judgements of quality in these sources are consistently severe. The DBI calls Catarino a “volgarizzatore”, a popular vulgariser, of Lorenzo’s manner. It speaks of a dry contour hardening the features, monotonous drapery, a hint of chiaroscuro and sparing gold ornament on the garments, and ends by calling his art part of “una tradizione stanca e senza via d’uscita”. Such verdicts belong to the historiography as much as to the works. A specialist reader should weigh them against the commercial and devotional function of these repeated images, and against the condition of the panels. Where the signed works do show his technique, it lies in the gold ground with punched and incised rays, the textile ornament of the throne-cloths, and, in the Humility series, the striking red grounds.

The iconographic repertoire is narrow, and it divides into two types. The first is the Coronation of the Virgin, in which Christ sits at the right and sets the crown on Mary’s head with his right arm, while his left hand rests on his knee or holds a sceptre. The signed panels of 1372 and 1375, the Accademia triptych and the Hermitage panel all keep this scheme, and the Lingenauber panel keeps it on a miniature scale. What changes from one panel to the next is the setting. The wide throne with stepped flanks of 1372 gives way to a cloth of honour hung behind the throne in 1375, and then to the pink Gothic throne of the triptych, built like a small church with an ogee gable and a pierced opening. The Lingenauber panel turns the throne into an enclosed chamber. The second type is the Madonna of Humility, in which the Virgin sits low on a meadow or cushion and nurses the Child. It is the larger group in the catalogue, but only the Worcester panel bears a complete signature, so the type is best defined from that panel and from the central panel at Baltimore, where the Child is not nursing. The Crucifixion at the top of the Baltimore polyptych and the saints around it complete the list. Catarino does not seem to have invented any of these formulas. He seems to have taken them over from the tradition of Paolo, Donato and Lorenzo Veneziano and repeated them with small variations, which suits the commercial and devotional function of the images but makes the dating of individual panels depend on very small details.

Textile ornament is the most useful of those details, and the comparisons made above show how much weight it carries. In 1372 the draperies are covered with long, close-set gold filaments, the chrysography inherited from Paolo, which follows the fall of the cloth. In 1375 and at Worcester the mantle carries a fine continuous scrollwork of gold stems and palmettes, laid over the paint so evenly that it flattens the folds. At Baltimore, in the Accademia triptych and at Cleveland the pattern is a bold grid of large gold ogival motifs, like pine cones or pomegranates, with the modelling left to the green lining and the darker blue of the shadows. The Columbus panel has only spaced sprigs, and the Faenza mantle is plain blue. The Hermitage mantles show a star-shaped motif that occurs in none of the signed works, and the Lingenauber panel has small gold flowers on the Virgin’s mantle and on Christ’s tunic. These patterns mark a drift from the Byzantine filament towards a Gothic textile design, and they agree broadly with the sequence proposed by Pallucchini. They cannot be used as a strict chronology. Scale, workshop habit and condition all affect the pattern, and a painter working for a modest patron may simply have chosen the cheaper gold.

The apocalyptic attributes of the Virgin form a second family of ornament, and they are a link between the Humility panels and the Coronations. The Worcester Virgin has gold rays incised in the ground, a gold disc on her breast and a crescent moon in the grass at her feet. The Baltimore Virgin has a small radiant face on her dress, which the Walters reads as the woman of Revelation 12:1, clothed with the sun. At Cleveland a small gold sun and a star mark the dress and the shoulder, and a faint crescent lies at the lower left. The Faenza record names the red ground, the lobed arch and the rays as typical of Catarino’s Madonnas of Humility. The Hermitage Coronation places the same signs in the heavens, with a sun that has a face on one side of the starry arc and a crescent moon on the other. Whether Catarino’s patrons asked for these signs, or whether he simply reused a repertoire shared by Venetian and Adriatic workshops, the sources do not say. Their absence is not a reason for doubt, since the Columbus panel may have been cut down, and the Faenza panel may have lost its attributes along its damaged lower edge.

The angels and the cloth of honour show the reduction of the Coronation most clearly. About thirty haloed angels fill the Querini panel, with a choir that includes a portative organ, a vielle, two lutes or gitterns and a psaltery, and three small angels kneel at the foot of the throne. In 1375 eight angels remain, five of them forming a concert at the summit. The triptych has five, three of them playing. At the Hermitage about a dozen angels pray in rows and none plays an instrument, and the Lingenauber panel has three angels on a balcony who hold no recognisable instrument. Angels at the sides of the throne are the one constant, though their action varies: in 1372 the one at the left grasps the hanging, in 1375 the outer pair rest a hand on the throne, and in the Hermitage panel they hold up the cloth of honour. The progression fits the reading of Flores d’Arcais, who saw in the 1375 panel a turn to a more popular idiom, and it fits the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale’s view that the angels of 1372 already open towards the late Gothic of Guariento’s Paradise. It also shows what the Hermitage and Lingenauber panels do not do, which is to follow the pattern of the signed works exactly. That is one reason why their attributions remain open.

The standing saints and the faces complete the picture. The Baltimore polyptych and the Accademia triptych use a small group of types. Anthony Abbot and Nicholas of Tolentino are gaunt, deeply shadowed old men. Lucy is a swaying, fair-haired figure that the state catalogue and Flores d’Arcais derive from Lorenzo Veneziano. John the Baptist is lean and anatomical, and Christopher is the only figure shown in a setting, and the one most likely to depend on a model from outside Venice. The heads of the Coronations are long and hollow-cheeked, with heavy dark contours, while the Virgins of the Humility panels are smoother and paler, with long noses and heavy eyelids. The inscriptions on the Baltimore panels add a note of caution to any iconographic reading, since the labels of Ursula and Barbara have been confused. The state of the panels also limits what can be said about technique. Abraded gold grounds, cracks, old restoration and later frames affect nearly every panel discussed here, and the reproductions on which most judgements rest are small. Any argument from style, iconography or ornament should therefore be checked against the panels themselves or against the museum catalogues.

Conclusion

Catarino di Marco is a painter whose existence is well documented and whose personality is hard to grasp. The record gives him a wife, a parish, a long partnership with an older master and a few commissions, from the lost Cross of Sant’Agnese in 1367 to the restoration of the Cross of Santa Maria Maggiore at Treviso in 1390. It gives him a working life of nearly thirty years. The paintings give him a manner that is easy to recognise and difficult to rank. This conclusion sets out what can be taken as established, what remains a hypothesis, and what a future study would have to settle.

The firmest results concern identity and chronology. Testi’s distinction, confirmed by the Dizionario Biografico entry on the Moranzone family, separates the painter from the carver Caterino di Andrea Moranzone and from the Catarino pittore of 1455. It removes the Corpus Domini altarpiece and the Verucchio frame of 1404 from the painter’s record. The suggestion, from Thieme-Becker and Pallucchini, that two painters of that name worked in the 1370s has been judged unconvincing and has not been adopted. The Treviso document of 1390 supersedes the older terminal date of 1382 still given by some museums. Of the points that remain open, the earliest document, the exact wording of the Zadar patronymic and the question of whether the 1367 paper was a contract or a receipt all depend on archival checks that this study could not make.

The relationship with Donato is the second fixed point, and also the least documented. That Donato was Catarino’s master is “unanimously hypothesised”, in the words of the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, but it is inferred from the partnership and from age, not from an apprenticeship contract. What is documented is an association at three points, in 1367, 1372 and 1386. The Querini Coronation is the one surviving product of that association, and it is a signed workshop piece. Whether Donato painted most of it, whether Catarino painted the angels, or whether the double signature simply names the shop, is a question of connoisseurship, and the three answers in the literature cannot be tested against documents. The same caution applies to the Hermitage triptych and the Moscow Madonna, which are attributions to the joint workshop and not facts.

The independent catalogue rests on a very small core. The Accademia Coronation of 1375, the Accademia triptych with Saints Lucy and Nicholas of Tolentino, the Baltimore polyptych and the Worcester Madonna of Humility carry the painter’s name, though the triptych is incomplete and undated and several transcriptions in this study depend on small reproductions. Everything else is attributed by style. The Faenza, Cleveland, Columbus, Hermitage and Lingenauber panels differ widely in how well they can be defended. Cleveland, with its fine finish and its Baltimore-type ornament, is probably the strongest of them. Faenza is the weakest, since the museum now allows that it may be the work of a follower. The others lie between these two, and the Columbus panel would need a high-resolution image before any firm judgement could be made.

The development that the sources describe is coherent, and it is the main intellectual result of the literature. Catarino begins within the Byzantine idiom of Paolo Veneziano, as passed on by Donato, with its chrysography, its choirs of musicians and its throne-cloths. From 1374–75 he turns to the Gothic manner of Lorenzo Veneziano and to the more popular, harder drawing that the Dizionario Biografico calls “estremamente popolaresca”. In his last phase, represented by Baltimore and the triptych, he looks towards the mainland, to Giovanni da Bologna and Paduan chiaroscuro, and towards Jacobello di Bonomo. This sequence is a reasonable order of the works, and it should not be read as a precise chronology. Most of the panels are undated, and the Baltimore Christopher gives only a weak terminus, since its dependence on Giovanni da Bologna has not yet been checked against the Paduan panel.

The repeated type is both the strength and the weakness of this art. Catarino’s contemporaries, and his patrons in Venice, on the Adriatic and in the Marche, apparently wanted the Coronation and the Madonna of Humility, and he delivered them in a recognisable form. The same gestures, the same throne, the same angels at the cloth and the same long, heavy-lidded faces recur from 1372 to the 1380s. The severe verdicts of the historiography, from “rozza e pesante di segno” in 1931 to “una tradizione stanca e senza via d’uscita” in the Dizionario Biografico, belong to a criticism that valued invention. A reading that starts from function would stress something else. The small Madonnas of Worcester and Columbus were made for private devotion, and a stable formula is what such a market asked for. The repetition is also what allows the attributions to be made at all.

The value of the painter lies in the evidence he gives of how a type travelled. The Humility panels and the later Coronations suggest the passing of formulas associated with Lorenzo Veneziano into the workshops of the second half of the fourteenth century, and the Zadar commission and the Treviso restoration show a Venetian master working for the Dalmatian and mainland markets. The Pinacoteca of Faenza, the signed Madonna now in Worcester and the Hermitage panel show how far the product went. If the Zadar Crucifix proposed by Petricioli is accepted, it would be the only witness to the last years of the work. It is probable that more of his works are waiting in storerooms and in the churches of the Marche and Romagna, since the small panels are the easiest to lose and to misattribute.

Any further study should begin with the sources that this one could only report. The notarial records for 1362 and 1365, Cecchetti’s edition of the 1367 document, Prijatelj’s article on Zadar and Bampo’s manuscript for Treviso need to be read in the original. The signatures on the panels need to be read on the panels, with the condition of each surface recorded, and the Hermitage panel should be examined for the traces of an inscription at its base. The Querini Coronation should be examined technically, since the division of hands is the one question that physical evidence, not documents, could settle. Until that work is done, Catarino remains what the evidence shows him to be: a competent and productive painter of the second half of the fourteenth century, formed by one Venetian tradition and drawn towards another, whose signed panels are firmly fixed and whose wider catalogue is still a matter of judgement.