Luca di Tommè

Introduction: The Problem of a Working Painter

There is a particular kind of art-historical difficulty presented by artists who were neither innovators nor failures. Luca di Tommè was, on the available evidence, one of the busiest painters in Siena during the third quarter of the fourteenth century. He was enrolled in the painters’ guild before 1356; he was employed on the fabric of Siena Cathedral; he sat on the councils of the Republic; he signed and dated altarpieces that travelled as far as Rieti and the Marche; he was still receiving commissions in 1389, more than thirty years after his first documented appearance. Around fifty surviving works are attributed to him, the great majority of them altarpieces. By any measure of productivity, market share, or civic standing, he was a success.

And yet for the better part of a century the historiography treated him as a subordinate figure: a competent executant, a hand rather than a mind, a painter whose interest lay chiefly in what he revealed about the more original artists around him. The adjective most frequently attached to his name in the older literature is “pedestrian.” One distinguished Italian scholar, writing in 1951, so admired the flight of angels in the Assumption now at Yale that he proposed removing the picture from Luca altogether and giving it to a more inventive contemporary — an instructive moment, because it shows the circularity that governed the field: quality was evidence against Luca’s authorship, and Luca’s authorship was evidence against quality.

The reconstruction of Luca di Tommè as an independent artistic personality is thus one of the more revealing episodes in the modern study of Sienese painting. It is a story that begins with the dispersal of his altarpieces on the nineteenth-century art market, proceeds through the patient reassembly of a corpus by connoisseurs working from photographs and physical evidence, passes through a decisive discovery made during a restoration in 1932, and culminates in a monograph of 1986 that remains the standard catalogue. Along the way it intersects with two of the largest interpretative questions in Trecento studies: the effect of the plague of 1348 on Italian painting, and the nature of workshop organisation in a city whose painters appear to have collaborated far more fluidly than the model of the individual bottega allows.

This essay is organised thematically rather than chronologically, though chronology governs the central sections. It moves from the documentary life, through the historiography that constructed the artist, to the four securely dated works that form the evidentiary spine of the corpus, and thence outward to attribution, style, technique, patronage, iconography, and critical fortune. It closes with an explicit verification list separating fact from consensus from conjecture — an apparatus that this subject, more than most, requires.

Siena after 1348: The Setting

Any account of Luca di Tommè must begin with a city that had recently lost a very large proportion of its population and, with it, the generation of painters who had defined its artistic identity. The plague of 1348 removed from Siena both Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Simone Martini had died in Avignon four years earlier; Duccio belonged already to the previous century. The painters who inherited the Sienese tradition — Luca among them — did so without direct access to the masters who had made it.

What followed has been the subject of one of the most influential and most contested theses in twentieth-century art history. In 1951 a study of Florentine and Sienese painting after the Black Death argued that the catastrophe produced a measurable stylistic change: a retreat from the spatial naturalism and human warmth of the 1330s toward a more hieratic, frontal, abstract, and penitential mode of religious image-making. The argument was seductive because it connected form to feeling and both to history. It also, as this essay will discuss at greater length in a later section, drew criticism almost immediately — from 1952 onward — and has been substantially reframed by more recent scholarship, which argues that Sienese painting after 1348 was not reactionary but deliberately pluralistic, offering patrons a range of stylistic registers rather than a single collective retreat.

Whichever reading one prefers, certain material facts about the Sienese art world of Luca’s generation are not in dispute. The demand for altarpieces did not collapse; if anything, the reallocation of wealth through inheritance and pious bequest stimulated it. Painters organised themselves into a guild whose matriculation roll — the Breve dell’arte de’ pittori senesi — survives in the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati (MS C II 12) and was published by Milanesi in 1854. The commune employed painters on public works, and painters in turn served in communal office, a reciprocity that placed the profession within the ordinary civic order rather than outside it.

Most significantly for the interpretation of Luca’s career, there is evidence that the leading Sienese painters of the 1350s and 1360s worked in configurations far looser than a modern reader might expect. They shared tools; they signed pictures jointly; they were paid jointly for the same task. A 2006 monograph, developing an argument first made in an article of 2000, proposed that a group of these painters — including Luca — constituted a loosely structured compagnia, a cooperative pooling of resources, equipment, and commissions rather than a hierarchy of master and pupil. The evidence for this proposition is partly documentary and partly technical, and it will be examined in the sections on collaboration and on materials below. Its consequence for the present essay is methodological: it warns against reading every shared feature between two Sienese pictures as evidence of one painter’s dependence on another.

The Documentary Life

The archival record for Luca di Tommè is thin but genuine. It permits a career, not a biography. What follows is a strict account of what the documents say and what they do not. The artist’s full name, as recorded and as used by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is Luca di Tommè di Nuto. He was the son of a Tommè (Tommaso) di Nuto, described in the literature as a painter or artisan. He was a native of Siena. Luca’s birth date “c. 1330,” which appears on museum labels and in reference databases with wearying regularity, is an inference drawn backwards from the date of his first documented professional activity. It is a reasonable inference — a painter enrolled in the guild in the mid-1350s was probably born in the late 1320s or around 1330 — but it is an inference, and it should not be presented as a fact. No baptismal or fiscal record establishing his birth has been published.

Luca’s name first appears in the Breve dell’arte de’ pittori senesi, the earliest matriculation roll admitting only Sienese painters. The manuscript bears the date MCCCLV (1355); the majority of the scholarly literature cites 1356. The discrepancy is not an error but a calendrical one, arising from the Sienese stile comune, and an honest account should present both figures rather than silently choosing one.

The position of Luca’s name within the roll is itself informative: he appears third, after Lippo Vanni and Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio. This is recorded in the entry on the artist in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale (1997). Whatever the ordering principle of the list — seniority, precedence, or simple sequence of registration — Luca was not an obscure figure at the moment of his first appearance.

In 1357–58 Luca is recorded gilding the hat of an apostle in a work that has not been identified, and, together with Cristofano di Stefano, repairing (racconciò) a mural formerly on the exterior façade of Siena Cathedral. These are modest tasks — maintenance and finishing rather than invention — and they place the young Luca within the ordinary economy of the cathedral workshop.

In 1362 Luca, together with Bartolomeo Bulgarini and Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio, received a joint payment of 4 lire and 10 soldi for assistance in moving Duccio’s Maestà — the document uses the phrase arghomentare a levare. The record is in Milanesi (p. 50) and is discussed in a volume edited by Freuler in 1991.

This small payment carries disproportionate interpretative weight, and it is worth pausing on why. Three painters of standing were paid together, as a group, for a physical task connected with the most venerated painting in the city. The document does not establish a formal partnership, and it should not be made to bear more than it can. But it is precisely the kind of evidence on which the compagnia hypothesis rests: a pattern of joint action among a recurring set of names.

Luca held office in the government of the Sienese Republic. Here the two principal reference works disagree in a way that must be reported rather than resolved.

The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (vol. 66, 2006), citing Milanesi p. 28, records Luca as a member of the Consiglio Maggiore in the July–August bimester of 1373, an office he held again in 1379. The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale (1997) instead gives residency terms of July–August 1375 and September–October 1379. Both are Treccani publications; both are scholarly; they do not agree on the earlier term. He is also recorded in the Libro dei Riformatori in 1368, a reference attributed in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry to a publication of 1927 rather than directly to Milanesi.

The substantive point survives the discrepancy. Luca served the commune in office, more than once, in the middle and later years of his career. Such service was common among Sienese painters of his generation and signals a citizen of respectable standing — not a craftsman on the margins but a man eligible for the councils of the Republic.

Luca is documented as present at the cathedral worksite in Orvieto in 1374. What he did there is not established by the sources consulted for this essay, and no work at Orvieto should be attributed to him on this basis alone.

In August 1375 Luca married madonna Miglia (Emilia), daughter of the late Giacomino. The record is in Milanesi. Nothing further about his household — children, property, the size of his workshop — emerges from the published documentation.

Payments of 1379 and February 1380 concern an altarpiece for the chapel of St Paul in Siena Cathedral; the second payment was of 105 gold florins, a substantial sum. The commission had first been deliberated in 1363, following the commune’s victory over the mercenary Compagnia del Cappelletto — that is, it was a votive undertaking of civic thanksgiving, conceived some sixteen years before the surviving payments. The documentation is discussed in a study of 2001.

This is, on the documentary evidence, the most prestigious commission of Luca’s career: a chapel in the cathedral of his own city, arising from a public vow. The painting itself does not survive in an identified form.

Luca’s name reappears in the Breve dell’arte de’ pittori senesi of c. 1389 (Milanesi p. 40; Freuler 1994, p. 426, doc. 71). It occurs for the last time in two acts of 1389 concerning a now-lost panel for the chapel of the Arte dei Calzolai — the shoemakers’ guild — in Siena Cathedral, to be executed in collaboration with Bartolo di Fredi and his son Andrea di Bartolo (Freuler 1994, docs. 72–74, 76). For Andrea di Bartolo this was the first documented work of his career.

The symmetry is striking and should be noticed. Luca’s documented career opens with collaboration (the guild roll, the shared payments, the joint signature of 1362) and closes with collaboration: an ageing master associated with an established colleague and that colleague’s son at the outset of his own career. Whatever else the Sienese painting economy of the later Trecento was, it was not a world of solitary masters.

No document recording Luca’s death has been published. The date “1389” that circulates in some sources is simply the last documented mention; the formulation “c. 1330–1399” found in certain databases presents as fact a conjecture about a terminus ante quem. The honest statement is that Luca di Tommè disappears from the record in 1389 and that neither the place nor the date of his death is known.

Historiography: The Assembly of an Artistic Personality

It is a peculiarity of Luca di Tommè that his existence as an artist — as opposed to as a name in a guild register — is a modern construction. The corpus now assigned to him was assembled, panel by panel, between roughly 1908 and 1986, and the sequence of that assembly is instructive both about Luca and about the discipline that reconstructed him.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Luca’s paintings were scattered under other names. Altarpieces that had been dismembered for the art market circulated as isolated panels, their original ensembles unrecognised; attributions clustered around better-known Sienese names — Bartolo di Fredi above all — or drifted toward Florentine and even Venetian painters. The Crucifixion now in San Francisco, to take one telling instance, was catalogued in the Kress collection as “Attributed to Antonio Veneziano.” The problem, in short, was not that Luca was undervalued; it was that he did not exist as a coherent visual identity.

Between 1908 and 1924 a series of articles, principally in the Rassegna d’arte senese, began to draw together a body of paintings that had drifted under other names. This work was the necessary precondition for everything that followed. In 1923–24 the first synthesis appeared, in a general history of Italian painting, with a largely negative verdict on the artist’s quality — a verdict that would prove remarkably durable. In 1927 a further publication introduced new documents and questioned the 1355/56 dating of the guild enrolment.

The decisive intervention came in 1932, during the restoration of a polyptych in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena (no. 51). Beneath the Virgin, on the moulding, a signature and date were uncovered: the picture had been painted jointly by Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and Luca di Tommè, in 1362. This single physical discovery gave Luca a fixed point — a work of certain authorship and certain date, against which every other attribution could be tested.

It also, however, gave him a role. The scholar who published the discovery interpreted the collaboration hierarchically: Niccolò was the inventor, Luca the executant. That reading, published in L’Arte in 1932, established the framework within which Luca was discussed for the next fifty years. His subsequent works were understood as the diminished continuation of an idiom that was not his own. The term “pedestrian” enters the literature here and proves extraordinarily difficult to dislodge, particularly in the Italian criticism.

The first substantial revaluation came in 1951, from the same study that proposed the Black Death thesis. Luca was taken seriously — but as evidence, as a symptom of a collective stylistic reorientation rather than as an artist with intentions of his own. The same scholar, in 1963, isolated an anonymous personality (the so-called “Master of the Magdalen Legend”) from material that others would later reassign to Luca.

In 1958 Federico Zeri published in Paragone a study that changed the shape of the problem. Working on the 1362 polyptych, Zeri reconstructed its dispersed predella: four Scenes from the Life of St Thomas, now in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (formerly Crawford collection), and a central Crucifixion now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. He also reconnected Luca to the frescoes at San Gimignano. The importance of this article lies less in any single attribution than in its method: Zeri demonstrated that the way to understand a painter of dismembered altarpieces is to reassemble the altarpieces. Panels that appear inert in isolation acquire meaning — of scale, of narrative sequence, of relation to a viewer standing before an altar — only when returned, at least conceptually, to the structures for which they were made.

In 1982, in a major survey of Sienese Gothic painting, the hierarchy of 1932 was reversed. Luca was granted autonomy of language, originality, and a distinctive chromatic delicacy; the reading of him as Niccolò’s subordinate was rejected. In the specific case of the 1362 predella, it was argued that Luca’s hand was not merely present but in places dominant.

The division of hands in the 1362 polyptych therefore remains genuinely contested, and no responsible account can present either reading as settled. It should be added that even the identity of the collaborator is unstable: “Niccolò di Ser Sozzo” has traditionally been identified as Niccolò di Ser Sozzo Tegliacci, but recent research proposes instead Niccolò di Ser Sozzo di Stefano.

The standard catalogue of Luca di Tommè is Sherwood A. Fehm Jr.’s Luca di Tommè: A Sienese Fourteenth-Century Painter (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale–Edwardsville, 1986). It rests on a Yale dissertation of 1970 and on a sequence of prior studies: The Collaboration of Niccolò Tegliacci and Luca di Tommè (Getty, 1973), an altarpiece reconstruction in The Burlington Magazine the same year, and an article of 1976 on Luca’s followers in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz.

Fehm’s periodisation structures the corpus into four phases: early works (1356–61); the collaboration with Niccolò (1362–65); the major phase (1366–73); and later works (1374–c. 1390). This scheme has proved robust, and the present essay follows it in substance. Fehm’s book is also the place where the verbatim texts of the signatures on the dated panels are recorded — a point of some consequence, as the following section explains.

Since 1986 the most significant contributions have come from two directions. Gaudenz Freuler, in publications of 1991, 1994, and 1997, has established the documentary and technical evidence for Sienese workshop practice in this period, published the archival material surrounding the 1389 commission, and reconstructed dispersed ensembles. And a 2006 monograph on post-plague Sienese painting has reframed the interpretative context by rejecting the reactionary reading of the period in favour of an argument about pluralism and the art market.

The pattern of this historiography deserves a final observation. Luca di Tommè was constructed as an artist by exactly the operations that connoisseurship performs best — the assembly of a corpus from stylistic evidence, the reconstruction of dismembered structures, the reading of physical marks — and he was misjudged for half a century by exactly the operation that connoisseurship performs worst, which is the assignment of relative worth. The signature of 1362 told scholars that two painters worked on one panel. Everything said thereafter about which of them was the greater was inference of a quite different order.

The Evidentiary Spine: The Four Signed and Dated Works

Everything that can be said about Luca di Tommè’s development rests on four panels signed and dated between 1362 and 1370. Eight years — a fraction of a career documented across at least thirty-three — carry the entire chronological structure of the corpus. This is a narrow base, and the reader should hold its narrowness in mind when encountering confident statements about Luca’s “early” or “late” manner.

1. Two Hands, One Altarpiece: Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and Luca di Tommè’s Polyptych of 1362

The subject is the Madonna and Child enthroned with angels and Saints John the Baptist, Thomas, Benedict and Stephen. Its original destination was probably the church of S. Tommaso degli Umiliati in Siena — the qualification is the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry’s own, and it should not be dropped.

The panel’s modern history is a compressed version of the whole historiographic problem. It was attributed in 1908 to the young Bartolo di Fredi; it was subsequently reassigned to Luca; and in 1932, during restoration, the joint signature and date were found on the moulding beneath the Virgin.

The inscription — the only one of Luca’s signatures whose verbatim text this essay can responsibly quote — reads:

NICCHOLAUS SER SOCCII ET LUCAS TOMAS DE SENIS HOC HOPOS PINSERU(N)T ANNI MCCCLXII

“Niccolò [di] Ser Sozzo and Luca [di] Tommaso of Siena painted this work in the year 1362.”

The text is recorded in Fehm 1973, p. 7. A variant transcription, giving SER SOCII and HOC OPUS PINSERUNT, appears in later auction cataloguing; the discrepancies are orthographic, of the kind endemic to fourteenth-century lapidary lettering and to its modern transcription, and do not affect the sense.

Three features of the inscription deserve comment. It is a joint signature, using a plural verb — pinserunt, “they painted” — with no grammatical subordination of one name to the other. Both painters are identified as de Senis, of Siena. And the formula names them in an order that has been read as significant, though word order in such inscriptions is weak evidence for hierarchy.

Zeri’s reconstruction of 1958 restored the predella: four Scenes from the Life of St Thomas (Edinburgh) and a central Crucifixion (Pinacoteca Vaticana). The recovery matters because a predella is where a Trecento painter’s narrative capacity is exercised — the main tier being governed by iconic convention — and it is precisely in these small scenes that the argument for Luca’s independent invention has been pressed.

Status: the signature and date are documented fact. The division of hands is contested. The 1932 reading (Luca subordinate) and the 1982 reading (Luca autonomous, in places dominant) are both live positions in the literature.

2. A Sienese Calvary in Pisa: Luca di Tommè’s Signed Crucifixion of 1366

Signed and dated 1366, this gabled panel is one of the fixed points in Luca di Tommè’s chronology and, together with the Sant’Anna Metterza of 1367 and the Rieti altarpiece of 1370, marks the phase in which the painter’s independent manner is fully formed. Its earlier history is unknown, though the work has probably been in Pisa or its territory for a very long time; it hangs today among the Trecento and Quattrocento holdings of the museum. The inscription running along the lower moulding, now abraded but still partly legible in Gothic capitals, preserves the artist’s name and the date, and is of the same self-assertive kind that Luca employed on his other signed altarpieces.

The composition is reduced to the essential triad of the Calvary: Christ crucified between the mourning Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist, with no Magdalene, no soldiers, no throng of holy women. Above, in the gable, a half-length blessing figure emerges from a bank of white cloud, robed in green and rose with a golden sash — the customary crowning image of the Redeemer that in a polyptych would have surmounted the central compartment. The tall, cuspidate format and the engaged moulding suggest that the panel functioned either as an autonomous devotional image or as the principal element of a complex now dismembered, a question that the object’s obscure provenance leaves open.

Iconographically the panel belongs squarely to the tradition of the Christus patiens. Christ is fixed with three nails, the feet resting on a small suppedaneum, the head sunk onto the right shoulder, the eyes closed, the ribcage drawn taut over a hollowed abdomen. The most arresting invention is the treatment of the blood: rather than being confined to discreet rivulets, it falls from the pierced feet in a dense vertical cascade that runs the full height of the lower field and pools upon the rock of Golgotha. This insistence on the redemptive flow — devotionally charged, almost eucharistic in emphasis — has long been recognised as characteristic of the panel, which is regularly invoked as a term of comparison for later crucifixes of comparable pathos.

The two mourners are conceived in deliberately contrasted registers of grief. The Virgin, enveloped in a dark mantle over a red gown, keeps her hands locked at her waist and her sorrow wholly interiorised; her lined face, modelled with a dry, greenish underpaint, is among the more Lorenzettian passages in Luca’s œuvre. Saint John, youthful and fair, raises one hand towards the cross in a gesture of address while the other gathers a great sweep of rose drapery whose broad, sculptural folds dominate the right half of the picture. The rhythmic opposition of the two silhouettes — closed and columnar on the left, open and expansive on the right — gives the composition its measured internal balance.

The present appearance of the work is conditioned by extensive abrasion of the gilding, through which the red bole shows over much of the ground and produces the warm, flame-like tonality visible today. The punched haloes, and above all Christ’s richly tooled cruciform nimbus, survive better and remain valuable evidence for workshop practice and for the punch-tool comparisons on which much recent attributional work in Sienese painting depends.

3. Anne, Mary, Christ: Luca di Tommè’s Signed Polyptych of 1367

Signed on the framing moulding beneath the central compartment:

LUCA THOME DE SENIS PINSIT HOC OPUS MCCCLXVII,

this pentaptych belongs to the brief sequence of dated works, running from the Pisa Crucifixion of 1366 to the Rieti altarpiece of 1370, in which Luca di Tommè’s independent manner is at its most severe and iconic. The altarpiece came from the Capuchin church at San Quirico d’Orcia, where it was preserved in a wholly dismantled state, and its gilded woodwork was extensively remade when the ensemble was reconstructed after its transfer to the Sienese gallery in the later nineteenth century. The elaborate crocketed spires and gables that now unify the five compartments must therefore be read with caution as evidence of the original carpentry.

The central panel presents the iconographic type known in Italy as the Sant’Anna Metterza, in which Anne dominates her daughter Mary — seated on her mother’s lap and rendered at a reduced scale — while Mary in turn holds her own son, so that the hierarchy of the composition returns the viewer to Anne as the origin of the sacred lineage. Luca gives the theme a monumental gravity: Anne’s grey-mauve mantle falls in broad, weighty planes that establish the group as a single pyramidal mass, and her long, austere face, modelled in cool greenish half-tones, contrasts with the softer oval of the Virgin, who inclines her head to touch her mother’s cheek. The Child, nude but for a rose-coloured cloth, turns towards Mary’s breast in a gesture that lightens the otherwise hieratic construction.

The four lateral saints stand full-length against burnished gold in compartments of equal width. Catherine of Alexandria carries the spiked wheel of her torment and the martyr’s palm; John the Baptist holds the scroll inscribed with the words of John 1:29 and raises his right hand in a gesture directed towards the central group, and specifically towards Christ; Anthony Abbot leans on his tau-shaped crutch; and Agnes appears exceptionally without the lamb that her name would suggest, holding instead a fine chain from which hangs a ring. The pairing is telling: two virgin martyrs frame the ensemble at the outer edges, while the two ascetic males — precursor and eremitic founder — stand immediately beside the Holy Kindred, a distribution that speaks of a monastic or conventual destination.

In the four lateral gables the Evangelists are shown in the act of writing, each with his symbol: Mark with the lion, Matthew with the angel, Luke with the ox, and John with the eagle. The central pinnacle poses a problem of some interest. It is occupied by a Saint Andrew whose presence in this position is unexpected — a blessing Christ would be the norm — and which has proved not to be by Luca’s hand, a substitution perhaps made when the dismembered altarpiece was moved from San Quirico to Siena. The hypothesis finds support in the market history of a Blessing Christ published as the original pinnacle of this very polyptych, detached from the ensemble and in the collection of Johann Anton Ramboux by 1862, while the remainder of the altarpiece reached the Pinacoteca Nazionale by 1872. The Siena complex is thus a composite object: authentic in its painted compartments, partly alien in its crowning element, and modern in much of its gilded architecture.

Stylistically the panel confirms what the signed works of these years establish. The figures are conceived as solid, self-contained volumes, their draperies broken into few and ample folds, their expressions inward rather than demonstrative; the debt to Pietro Lorenzetti is evident in the physiognomies, that to Simone Martini in the linear elegance of the contours and in the sumptuous punchwork of the haloes. Painted a generation after the Black Death, the altarpiece exemplifies the way in which Sienese painters of the third quarter of the Trecento consolidated the achievements of the 1330s into a grave, frontal and emphatically devotional idiom.

4. Siena in Sabina: Luca di Tommè’s Dominican Polyptych of 1370 for San Domenico in Rieti

The Rieti polyptych closes the short series of signed and dated works by Luca di Tommè and represents the painter’s furthest reach beyond Siena. It was executed for the high altar of the Dominican church of San Domenico in Rieti, and its attribution rests on the artist’s own signature. Local historiography associates the commission with the arrival of Sienese painters in the city under a prior who was himself a Sienese, a tradition that, whatever its documentary weight, accords well with the wider diffusion of Sienese models through Umbria and the Sabina in the second half of the Trecento. Whereas Treccani places the dismemberment of the complex in 1635, the museum’s own account gives 1676, when the five panels were separated — the saints removed to the chapel of Saint Catherine, the Madonna transferred to the choir — and their cusped terminations were cut away; the definitive attribution to Luca followed the restoration of 1957.

That mutilation governs how the work must now be read. The five compartments today end in flattened, chamfered tops, the truncated remains of the pointed gables that once carried the vertical thrust of the ensemble, and nothing survives of the pinnacles, spandrel roundels or predella that a Dominican high altarpiece of this scale would certainly have possessed. What remains, however, preserves the original hierarchy of the programme with unusual clarity.

At the centre the Virgin sits on a marble throne of Cosmatesque inlay, her head slightly inclined, the deep blue-black of her mantle forming a broad silhouette against the burnished ground. The Child stands upright on her lap, blessing with the right hand while his left holds an unfurled scroll bearing an inscription in Gothic minuscule. Above, in the space beneath the arch, two prophets emerge holding scrolls and gesturing towards the Virgin and her Son — a device that transforms the compartment into a compact statement of prophecy fulfilled, in which the written word of the Old Covenant answers the word displayed by the Child himself.

The lateral saints are arranged with strict symmetry around this axis and articulate the identity of the commissioning order. Immediately flanking the centre stand the two princes of the Apostles: Peter, in ochre mantle over a grey-blue tunic, holding his keys and a book; Paul, in green and grey with a red-lined mantle, grasping the sword of his martyrdom and displaying an open volume with a legible text — the emblems of the preaching Church. At the outer extremities appear the two great Dominican saints in the black cappa over the white tunic of the order: Dominic himself, holding a red-bound book and a lily stem, and Peter Martyr, likewise with book and the palm of his martyrdom. The programme thus reads inwards from the founders of the order to the founders of the apostolate and finally to the Incarnation, an argument about preaching, doctrine and legitimate succession that is entirely characteristic of Dominican altar imagery.

Stylistically the polyptych confirms the late direction of Luca’s development, in which critics have recognised a substantial rapprochement with the art of the Memmi: the contours are more linear and the surfaces flatter than in the works of the mid-1360s, the physiognomies elongated, the drapery articulated in long unbroken sweeps rather than in the weighty masses of the Sant’Anna Metterza. The gold grounds, richly punched with foliate haloes and arcaded borders, reassert a decorative and iconic register that would remain the common currency of Sienese painting for another two generations.

What the spine can and cannot support

Four dated works between 1362 and 1370 permit certain conclusions and forbid others.

They permit the observation that Luca was working at full professional capacity throughout the 1360s, producing multi-panel altarpieces for destinations both within Siena and at considerable distance from it. They permit a chronology of style within that decade. They permit the identification of a documented collaboration at its opening.

They do not permit a secure account of Luca’s formation before 1362 — the works Fehm assigns to 1356–61 are dated on stylistic grounds alone — nor of his development after 1370. The “later works” of Fehm’s fourth phase, running to about 1390, rest on connoisseurship and on the documentary evidence of continued activity, not on dated panels. Nearly two decades of a long career are chronologically unanchored. This is not a defect peculiar to Luca; it is the ordinary condition of Trecento studies. But it is worth stating plainly, because the confident stylistic narratives found in general accounts of the period frequently rest on foundations no firmer than this.

Other signed works

Two further signed paintings are recorded in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry: a Madonna and Child with St Anthony in S. Francesco at Mercatello sul Metauro (Pesaro), and a pentaptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints from the parish church of Forsivo near Norcia, now in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. Their dates are not given in the sources consulted here, and they should not be dated by inference.

EGO SUM LUX MUNDI»: Luca di Tommè’s Panels from the Pieve Collegiata of Mercatello sul Metauro

These two panels are the surviving elements of a dismembered polyptych by Luca di Tommè, painted around 1370 for the Pieve Collegiata of Mercatello and now displayed in the museum attached to the church of San Francesco. The commission belongs to the same phase as the Rieti altarpiece and the pentaptych for the parish church of Forsivo near Norcia — the group of late works through which Luca’s Sienese idiom travelled south and east into Umbria, the Sabina and the Marche, and which testifies to a demand for Sienese altarpieces well beyond the political horizon of the republic. Treccani records that the Mercatello painting bears the artist’s signature, a circumstance that gives these fragments a documentary weight out of proportion to their modest fame.

The physical evidence of dismemberment is plainly legible. The Madonna’s panel has had its upper corners cut away, leaving an irregular octagonal silhouette where the original gable rose, while the Anthony panel retains a more complete pointed termination; both preserve their painted arches, borne on slender spiral colonnettes, which once continued in an unbroken rhythm across the whole ensemble. The difference in scale and in framing width confirms the expected disposition: the seated Virgin occupied the wider central compartment, the standing hermit one of the lateral bays, and at least one further saint — very probably more — must be presumed lost.

In the central panel the Virgin is seated on a white marble throne whose crocketed finials and traceried arms emerge at either side of her figure. She is enveloped in a deep blue mantle edged in gold and lined in olive green, its mass falling in long, quiet folds that reduce the whole lower half of the composition to a single dark, almost abstract shape — a device Luca had employed at Rieti to comparable effect. Her head inclines slightly, the features long and regular, the modelling built up in cool half-tones over a green underpaint, and the expression tempered by that sweetness which has long been noted as the distinguishing quality of these panels. The Child stands on her knee in a rose-coloured tunic belted at the waist, his hair rendered in tight blond curls, one hand raised while the other unfurls a scroll inscribed in blue Gothic letters:

EGO SUM LUX MUN[DI].

The choice of text (John 8:12) is significant. Rather than the more usual blessing gesture alone, the Child here proclaims his own divinity in the first person, converting a devotional image into a christological assertion addressed directly to the viewer.

The Saint Anthony is conceived in deliberate contrast. Set full-length against a gold ground, the hermit is defined almost entirely by silhouette: a black hooded cape falls over a grey-blue habit whose folds break at the hem in a shallow cascade, and the only strong accents are the long white beard, carefully combed into parallel locks, and the red tassel that hangs from the attribute held in his crossed hands. He leans on the tall staff that identifies him, his head bowed and his gaze lowered in a register of ascetic withdrawal appropriate to the founder of monasticism. The figure’s austerity, and the sober palette that sustains it, throw the chromatic richness of the central compartment into relief.

Taken together, the two panels illustrate the late manner of Luca di Tommè with unusual clarity: elegance of contour, a preference for broad and uninterrupted planes of drapery, and an emotional temperature that is gentle rather than dramatic — the idiom by which Sienese painting of the third quarter of the Trecento was transmitted, through provincial commissions such as this, far into central Italy.

«MANDATUM NOVUM»: Luca di Tommè’s Polyptych from Sant’Apollinare at Forsivo

The Forsivo pentaptych belongs to the closing phase of Luca di Tommè’s career, in a group of works that carried the Sienese manner well beyond Tuscany into Umbria and the Marche. The catalogue of the Galleria places it in the artist’s last years, in parallel with polyptych no. 586 of the Sienese Pinacoteca, itself later than 1370. Its origin is unusually well remembered locally: the altarpiece was acquired for the church of Sant’Apollinare by the inhabitants of the Nursine castle of Forsivo, who habitually migrated seasonally into Tuscany to work as customs officers, butchers and dyers — a reminder that the diffusion of Sienese painting through the Apennine valleys was carried not only by patrons and prelates but by the labour networks of the mountain communities themselves.

The subsequent history of the object is a small case study in the fortunes of provincial altarpieces. By the early twentieth century the lateral panels were still displayed in the church while the central compartment served as the backing of a sacristy cupboard; the latter was illicitly sold to a dealer in 1920, recovered in 1924 under a ministerial decree that declared it inseparable from the lateral panels, and transferred to the Spoleto gallery. The State purchased the whole from the Comunanza Agraria of Forsivo in 1942 and decreed its transfer to Perugia in 1951, where it has remained; a copy now stands in the church of origin.

The ensemble is exceptionally well preserved in its carpentry. Five pointed compartments, each crowned by a gable and separated by slender twisted colonnettes rising into crocketed pinnacles, retain the silver leaf that once contrasted with the burnished gold of the grounds and that has now oxidised to a warm grey — a chromatic distinction between architecture and image that most surviving Trecento polyptychs have lost. The saints’ names are inscribed in Gothic capitals along the base of each compartment.

At the centre the Virgin holds the Child on her left arm, both frontal, the group set against a densely punched gold ground. Her dark blue mantle, bordered in gold, falls without interruption to the base of the panel, so that the composition is carried almost entirely by the pale oval of her face and by the rose-coloured tunic of the Child. Between them they display an unfurled scroll inscribed

MANDATUM NOVUM,

the opening words of Christ’s new commandment (John 13:34). The choice is arresting: rather than the customary christological proclamation, the text places the injunction to mutual love at the visual centre of the altarpiece, an emphasis on caritas that would have spoken directly to a rural community which had pooled its resources to buy the work.

The four saints are disposed in strict hierarchical symmetry. To the Virgin’s right stand John the Baptist, in a red mantle over his hair shirt, pointing towards the centre and holding the scroll

ECCE AGNUS [DEI],

and Peter, in ochre and blue-green, grasping his keys. To her left are Paul, with the sword and the book, and Apollinaris, the titular saint of the church, resplendent in an embroidered mitre and a green chasuble over a jewelled dalmatic, holding his crozier — the local dedication thus given the outermost but most conspicuous position. In the gables above appear a blessing Christ at the centre, flanked by Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel and Anthony Abbot on one side, and by Leonard and a female saint with a sword, possibly Barbara, on the other.

Stylistically the panel confirms what the Rieti altarpiece announces: contours drawn with a long, unhurried line, drapery reduced to broad and quiet planes, faces elongated and impassive, and a decorative richness concentrated in the tooled haloes and the goldsmith’s precision of Apollinaris’s vestments. It is the idiom in which Sienese painting, consolidated rather than renewed after 1348, was exported to the periphery and by which it survived there for another two generations.

The Attributed Corpus and the Fate of the Altarpiece

Around fifty works are attributed to Luca di Tommè, the majority of them altarpieces. The great majority of these attributions rest on connoisseurship rather than on signature or document, and they are held with varying degrees of confidence. What follows is a selective account organised by the problem that dominates the corpus: dismemberment.

The Trecento altarpiece was a structure, not a picture. A polyptych comprised a main tier of panels within an engaged frame, pinnacles above, a predella below, pilasters and colonnettes at the sides, and it was made for a specific altar in a specific building, at a specific height, to be seen under specific light and in the course of a specific liturgy. Almost none of Luca’s altarpieces survive in this condition. The Rieti polyptych was taken apart in the seventeenth century; the San Quirico altarpiece lost its central pinnacle by the mid-nineteenth; the 1362 polyptych lost its predella entirely, its panels dispersed between Edinburgh and the Vatican.

The causes were successive and cumulative: liturgical reordering in the Counter-Reformation and after, which made old high altarpieces obsolete; the suppressions and secularisations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and, decisively, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century art market that found isolated gold-ground panels far more saleable than fifteen-foot ecclesiastical structures. A dealer who cut a polyptych into portable saints multiplied his stock.

The consequence for scholarship is that a great part of the work on Luca has necessarily been reconstructive. Zeri’s recovery of the 1362 predella is the model; Freuler’s and Zeri’s reconstruction of the San Michele polyptych in Siena — probably commissioned by the Arte della Lana for the Vallombrosan church of San Michele, its panels now dispersed including to the Getty — is another.

The distribution of the attributed works is itself a historical document, mapping the trade in early Italian painting between about 1870 and about 1960.

The Pelican and the Chalice: Luca di Tommè’s Crucifixion Banner from San Francesco at Montepulciano

Long assigned by tradition to Barna da Siena, this gabled Crucifixion was published by Cesare Brandi in 1931, who recorded its provenance from the convent of San Francesco at Montepulciano and restored it to Luca di Tommè; the attribution is now unanimously accepted, and close affinities have been observed between this painting and the Crucifixion in the Pinacoteca Vaticana that formed the central compartment of the predella of the 1362 polyptych.

Its later fortunes are typical of a work displaced by suppression: Brogi’s inventory of the artistic property of the Sienese province, compiled between 1862 and 1865, does not record it in San Francesco or the adjoining convent, which had already been suppressed under French rule in 1809, and the precise moment of its transfer to the Comune is unknown; by 1931 Aroldo Peruzzi noted it in the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico. The painting was originally intended as a processional standard, and in the eighteenth century it was altered by the addition of figures of Saints Francis and Clare at either side of the gable, removed in the restoration carried out by the Comune in 1967.

That original function accounts for the work’s most distinctive features. It is painted not on a gold ground but against a deep blue-black field that reads as the darkness which covered the earth at the sixth hour, and its support — canvas rather than panel — is that of a banner carried in procession, later mounted for permanent display. The composition is correspondingly legible from a distance: a strict central axis, two dense figural groups symmetrically disposed, and a chromatic contrast between the pallor of the crucified body and the saturated reds and ochres of the crowd.

The iconographic programme is unusually rich. In the gable a pelican rends her breast to feed her young in the nest, the classic emblem of Christ’s self-sacrifice, placed directly above the red titulus; the eucharistic argument is then restated below by the angel who flies in from the left to gather the blood of the pierced hand in a golden chalice, while a second angel opens his arms in wordless grief. Christ himself is fixed with three nails, the body elongated and drained of colour, the head fallen onto the right shoulder, blood descending from the feet onto the rock of Calvary.

To the left the holy women press together in a compact block of haloed faces; the Virgin, in rose and olive green, is supported as she sinks under her grief, while the Magdalene kneels at the very foot of the cross in a great sweep of scarlet, her loose blond hair falling over her shoulders and her arms raised towards the wood — the single most dynamic figure in the picture and the pivot of its emotional structure.

To the right stands John the Evangelist, his hands locked before him, and behind him the soldiery: helmets, lance-points and red banners crowding towards the upper edge, among them a haloed figure in a white turban who must be the centurion converted at the moment of death, once identified by an inscription now largely illegible. The two flanks thus articulate the traditional antithesis of belief and unbelief, mourning and indifference, resolved in the single figure who crosses from one to the other.

Stylistically the painting stands close to the works of the early 1370s: contours drawn with a long, flexible line, drapery massed in broad planes, and physiognomies of Lorenzettian derivation set within a composition of markedly narrative animation — evidence that the severe, iconic register of Luca’s signed altarpieces was a mode adopted for the altar rather than the limit of his expressive range.

The Centre of a Dispersed Predella: The Vatican Crucifixion from the Sienese Polyptych of 1362

This small panel occupied the centre of the predella of the polyptych signed jointly by Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and Luca di Tommè in 1362, executed for the church of San Tommaso degli Umiliati in Siena and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of that city. The predella, comprising four scenes from the life of Saint Thomas and this Crucifixion, was dismembered and divided between the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Vatican; the reconstruction is due to Zeri, following Brandi’s discovery in 1932 of the joint signature on the main register. Critical opinion has generally assigned the execution of the five predella compartments to Luca, even where the design of the altarpiece as a whole has been credited to the older Niccolò — a division of roles that the technical evidence complicates rather than settles, since heart-shaped punches and the same treatment of the gold ground by sgraffio and engraving recur in the production of both painters.

The compartment is set within an unusual polylobed field: a central pointed gable flanked by two great lobes and answered below by two further cusps, the whole cut into a gilded moulding whose spandrels are painted in imitation of veined porphyry and coloured marbles. The shape is not merely decorative. It divides the narrative into three legible zones — the crucified Christ at the centre, the soldiery at the left, the centurion and his companions at the right — while allowing the two seated mourners to occupy the lower cusps as a distinct, subordinate register.

The body of Christ is rendered with a chromatic severity rare even in Sienese painting of these years: the flesh has turned greenish and livid, the ribs and sternum drawn as a taut cage over the hollow abdomen, the head fallen onto the right shoulder beneath a finely tooled halo, while thin threads of blood descend from the hands along the arms of the cross and gather at the foot of the stipes. Below, the Virgin has sunk to the ground at the left, wrapped in a blue mantle that reduces her almost to a single closed volume, her head bowed onto her hand in the classical gesture of mourning; at the right John the Evangelist, seated on the earth and twisting upward, clasps the base of the cross where the blood falls, his pale rose tunic catching the only light in the lower field.

The two lateral lobes stage the confrontation that gives the scene its argument. On the left the soldiers press forward in helmets and mail, one gesturing in argument, the lances rising into the gold; on the right the centurion, in blue mantle and haloed as a saint, extends his arm towards the cross in the act of recognition — the visual translation of the words of Matthew 27:54 — while behind him his companions crowd against a dark shield. Belief and incomprehension are thus set at the two extremities of the panel and mediated by the axis of the crucified body.

Within Luca’s development the panel is of some importance. Painted at the very outset of his documented career, it already displays the physiognomic types and the taste for abrupt emotional contrast that would characterise his later independent work: close affinities have been noted between this Crucifixion and the processional standard at Montepulciano of the following decade. In it one can see, better than in the hieratic saints of the main register, the narrative temperament of the young painter whose autonomy nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism was so long reluctant to concede.

Scenes from the Life of St Thomas

The four panels, together with the Vatican Crucifixion in the center, formed the predella of the 1362 polyptych.

The five surviving panels were identified by Federico Zeri in 1958; previously, the Crawford panels had already been attributed to Luca di Tommè by Berenson and Kaftal, while the Vatican panel was considered to be the work of Lorenzo Monaco. The execution of the predella is generally attributed to Luca alone, even by those who attribute the design of the main register to Niccolò di Ser Sozzo.

«Send me anywhere but to India»: The Commission at Caesarea

The first compartment of the predella opens the legend at its point of departure. According to the Golden Legend, Gundaphorus, king of the Indies, sent his steward Abanes to Judaea to engage an architect capable of raising a palace in the Roman manner; the envoy encountered the Lord in the market at Caesarea, and the Lord presented Thomas to him as a master of that art. The apostle’s reply — that he would go anywhere but to India — was met with the promise that he would return bearing the palm of martyrdom. Luca condenses the negotiation, the acceptance and the ensuing voyage into a single field, exploiting the mistilinear opening of the quatrefoil to distribute the action across two zones that are simultaneously distinct and continuous.

The right-hand lobe is given over to the encounter. Christ, in a rose-red mantle over a blue tunic, stands in profile and extends his right hand in a long, deliberate gesture towards the kneeling steward, the arm crossing the empty centre of the panel and functioning as the compositional spine of the whole scene. Immediately behind him Thomas, enveloped in a blue-grey mantle whose folds fall in broad, quiet planes, inclines his head and lowers his eyes: the pictorial equivalent of the reluctance recorded in the text, and a small masterpiece of characterisation within a figure barely fifteen centimetres high. Abanes kneels on one knee at the centre, hands crossed upon his breast, his upturned face catching what little light the panel retains — the posture of feudal homage transferred to a scene of apostolic commission.

The left half is occupied by the ship. Its mast, spar, stays and pennant are drawn with a precision that suggests direct observation of the vessels of a Tyrrhenian port, and the hull and gangplank cut diagonally across the lower lobe, where a sailor bends double as he hauls on a line and another figure works aboard. The two halves of the panel thus present cause and consequence at once: the word that sends and the vessel that carries.

Much of the picture’s original chromatic organisation has been lost. The background, now reduced to an almost uniform black, will have been a deep blue distinguishing sea and sky from the gold that survives only in a narrow band along the upper edge, so that the sharp opposition Luca intended between the luminous zone of the encounter and the darkness of the voyage no longer registers. The panel has been slightly trimmed at the sides and is heavily soiled, while the quatrefoil moulding, though largely original, has been worn and regilded.

What remains legible is the narrative intelligence of the design. The gesture of Christ, the assent of the kneeling envoy and the labour of the sailors form a single continuous chain, read from right to left against the customary direction, so that the eye is carried from the divine command outward towards the sea and, by implication, towards the three panels that follow. It is a mode of storytelling learned from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s predelle, and handled here by the young Luca with a confidence that the hieratic saints of the main register would never have led one to expect.

The Blow and the Black Dog: The Wedding Feast at Andrapolis

The second compartment of the predella illustrates the episode that follows the apostle’s embarkation. Thomas and the steward Abanes put in at a city where the king was celebrating the wedding of his daughter and where attendance had been made obligatory. At the banquet the apostle neither ate nor drank but kept his eyes fixed upon heaven; a cupbearer, offended by this abstraction, struck him across the jaw, and Thomas replied that he would not rise from the table until the offending hand was brought to him by dogs. The man went out to draw water, was killed by a lion, and a black dog carried his severed right hand into the middle of the hall.

Luca stages the whole of this sequence within a single interior, seen frontally beneath a coffered ceiling and a scalloped valance whose gilt embroidery is picked out with small punched dots. The table, spread with a white cloth and set with dishes, cups and knives, runs the full width of the composition and divides it into two registers of unequal status. Above it sit the guests: at the far left the crowned king in a red robe with an embroidered collar, beside him a white-bearded elder in conversation, then a further guest in blue and red, and at the centre Thomas, frontal and haloed, his face lifted and his eyes wide in that ecstatic distraction which the legend makes the cause of the whole incident. Immediately to his right the cupbearer, bare-armed and half-turned, has already raised his arm to strike, his other hand still resting on the cloth.

The narrative invention lies below the table. In the shadowed zone beneath the boards, where the drapery of the seated figures falls in loose folds, a black dog advances from the right with a severed hand in its jaws — the punishment already accomplished while the offence is still in the act of being committed. The two moments are thus given simultaneously and hierarchically: the visible, public world of the banquet above, the hidden operation of divine justice below, legible only to the viewer who stoops to the predella and looks closely. No participant in the scene has yet noticed the dog.

The subordinate figures reinforce the effect. At the right, beyond the wooden framing post of the hall, a servant is glimpsed in a further room, and behind the cupbearer other heads press forward, so that the interior is felt to extend beyond the field of vision. The architecture — beams, valance, jamb — functions less as a constructed space than as a proscenium, a device inherited from Ambrogio Lorenzetti and here reduced to the minimum required to make the story legible at the scale of a hand’s breadth.

The panel is now much darkened; the background between the figures has sunk to an almost impenetrable black, and the surface, like that of its companions, is soiled and worn, with the gilt of the quatrefoil moulding largely renewed. Even so, the physiognomies retain their sharpness — the elder’s matted beard, the cupbearer’s coarse profile, the fixed stare of the apostle — and confirm the observational appetite that distinguishes Luca’s narrative work from the hieratic altarpieces of the following decade.

Prison and Font: The Raising of Gad and the Baptism of Gundaphorus

The third compartment carries the legend to its central paradox. Entrusted by Gundaphorus with a great treasure for the construction of a palace, Thomas distributed it among the poor and spent the two years of the king’s absence in preaching; on his return the king had him thrown into a deep prison, intending to have him flayed and burned. At that moment Gad, the king’s brother, died, and on the fourth day returned to life to report that angels had shown him a palace of gold and precious stones in heaven — the palace that Thomas had in fact built for his brother. Gad hurried to the prison, struck off the apostle’s chains and begged mercy for the king, who thereupon received baptism.

Luca resolves this dense sequence by means of a single architectural body. A cubic prison, set at an angle so that two of its faces are visible at once, occupies the centre of the field and serves as the hinge between two successive moments. In its left flank a barred window opens, and behind the grille Thomas appears, haloed, his hands at the bars, gazing out at the figure who approaches — Gad, in a pale robe over a dark gown, his arm extended upwards towards the window in the gesture of supplication with which the legend concludes his intervention. Behind him a knot of officials in hats and hoods presses into the corner of the panel, one figure in red barely emerging from the shadow, so that the whole left lobe reads as a compressed crowd of witnesses.

The right side of the panel, beyond the corner of the building, is given to the baptism. There the king kneels naked and bowed, his loins wrapped in a white cloth, over a shallow basin set on the ground, while a bearded elder in blue leans over him and a second haloed figure — the apostle himself, now free — bends to administer the water. Behind them a soldier and further attendants crowd against the wall. The interior of the prison, glimpsed between the two zones through an open door, is rendered as a dark cell with a wooden bedstead, so that the eye is led continuously from confinement to liberation to sacrament.

The device of the corner-cut building derives from Ambrogio Lorenzetti and is handled here with real spatial intelligence: the two visible faces of the prison, receding in opposite directions, generate a plausible volume around which the narrative turns, while its blank ochre walls give the composition the only broad quiet surface in the whole predella. The lower lobes, by contrast, are filled with the crouching, twisting bodies of the participants, and the resulting contrast of mass and movement is what holds an extremely crowded field together.

Conservation has been less kind to this panel than to its companions: the gold ground has blistered and lost in places, and the general soiling that affects the whole series has here flattened the modelling of the darker passages. The mistilinear moulding, worn and partly regilded, is nevertheless substantially original, and its lobes continue to perform their compositional function — enclosing, at the left, the appeal to the imprisoned apostle, and at the right, the moment in which the persecutor becomes a Christian.

The Idol and the Blade: The Shattering of the Image and the Death of Saint Thomas

The final compartment brings the legend to its close with the two events that the Golden Legend relates in a single breath. Having converted Migdonia and the queen, and having refused to restore them to husbands still in error, Thomas was ordered by the king to prostrate himself before the image of the sun-god. The apostle consented in appearance only: kneeling before the idol, he commanded in Hebrew the demon lodged within it to destroy the image, declaring that he adored neither the idol, nor the metal, nor the likeness, but his Lord Jesus Christ. The image at once melted away like wax; whereupon the high priest of the temple drew his sword and ran him through, crying that he would thus avenge the insult done to his god.

Luca sets the scene inside a temple conceived as a Gothic hall: three pointed arches carried on slender columns, the central bay opening into a vaulted recess where a tall, richly worked column supports the vanished idol. The lateral bays serve as compartments for the witnesses. At the left stand the converted women — one crowned, the others veiled — with a bearded official in a turban gesturing towards the centre; at the right, in the corresponding bay, a group of priests and courtiers in red and ochre look on. The columns thus operate as the framing screen of a stage, restricting the action to the middle bay and lending the small panel an unexpected monumentality.

At the centre kneels the apostle. His blue-grey mantle falls over his shoulders and swells into a single unbroken ovoid mass that dominates the lower half of the field — one of those broad, quiet volumes in which Luca’s debt to Pietro Lorenzetti is most evident — while his arm shoots out to the right in the gesture of command, the fingers extended and the profile sharply lifted beneath a densely punched halo. Before him, on the pavement, the shattered idol burns: fragments of a gilded head and limbs scattered among tongues of red flame, painted with a nervous, almost calligraphic touch that contrasts sharply with the stillness of the kneeling figure.

The murder is given without emphasis and almost without space. Immediately behind the apostle’s outstretched arm the priest presses in, his blade already at the level of the saint’s back; the blow is neither staged nor dramatised, but folded into the crowd of onlookers, so that the eye discovers it only after it has registered the miracle. This is the reverse of the strategy adopted in the second panel, where the punishment preceded the offence beneath the table: here the consequence is concealed within the very act of triumph.

The panel has been slightly trimmed at the sides, and its surface, like that of its companions, is soiled and abraded; the mistilinear moulding, though partly worn and regilded, remains substantially original. What survives intact is the argument of the image. In closing a predella whose central compartment showed the Crucifixion, the destruction of the false image and the death of the true witness answer one another across the altar: the idol that melts and the martyr who does not, offered to the beholder as the twin poles of an apostolic life.

The Goldfinch and the Coral: Luca di Tommè’s Enthroned Virgin in Cambridge

Datable to the years around the Sant’Anna Metterza of 1367 and the Rieti polyptych of 1370, this panel is among the finest of Luca di Tommè’s Madonnas outside Italy. The museum’s own record traces it to the collection of Cavaliere Giuseppe Toscanelli of Pisa, whose sale in Florence in April 1883 saw it acquired by Charles Butler, and it entered the Fitzwilliam in 1893; the panel is at present in storage. Its height of 160 cm, its width, and above all its engaged frame with lateral colonnettes leave little doubt that it once formed the central compartment of a polyptych whose lateral saints, pinnacles and predella are now lost or unidentified — the same fate that has overtaken so much of the artist’s production for provincial and conventual churches.

The carpentry is exceptionally well preserved and is integral to the effect. A steep crocketed gable, its tympanum filled with a large punched roundel and incised foliate scrollwork, rises above a cusped and trilobed arch borne on slender gilded colonnettes with moulded capitals; every surface of this architecture is worked in burnished gold, so that the painted field appears set within a shallow, luminous tabernacle. The device establishes the panel as an object of veneration rather than a window onto a scene, and the choice is consistent with the frontal, iconic register that Luca adopted in these years.

Within it, the Virgin is seated on a throne whose back is hung with a cloth of honour rendered entirely in sgraffito: the gold has been laid, painted over, and the pattern scratched back to reveal the metal beneath, producing a dense brocade of stylised palmettes and lozenges that fills the whole upper field. Against this shimmering surface the Virgin’s mantle reads as a single mass of deep blue-black, bordered with a fine gold hem that describes its silhouette in one long unbroken curve from the crown of her head to the pavement — the boldest formal decision in the picture, and one that reduces the entire lower half of the panel to a quiet, almost abstract shape. Beneath it a crimson gown appears at the breast and sleeve. Her features are elongated and impassive, the modelling built up in cool green half-tones, the fingers exceptionally long and tapering.

The Child sits on her knee, his torso bare above a white band and a rose-coloured cloth, and turns his head outward towards the beholder with an expression of startling gravity. Two attributes carry the panel’s theological argument. Around his neck hangs a strand of red coral with a pendant, at once an apotropaic charm of the kind hung upon Tuscan infants and a prefiguration of the blood of the Passion; in his left hand he holds a small bird, in all likelihood the goldfinch, whose association with the crown of thorns made it the most widespread of all Passion emblems in Trecento painting. The maternal image is thus inflected, without narrative, towards the sacrifice.

Four angels complete the group, two emerging above the back of the throne and two at either side, their heads inclined and their hands folded, their haloes overlapping the gold ground in a shallow, deliberately unresolved recession. Their function is less spatial than ceremonial: they constitute the court of the Queen of Heaven and press the composition forward towards the viewer.

Stylistically the panel confirms what the signed works of these years establish — Lorenzettian physiognomies, drapery reduced to broad and quiet planes, and a decorative magnificence in the tooled and scratched gold that owes its ultimate model to Simone Martini. It is, in miniature, the whole argument of Sienese painting in the third quarter of the century: an art that consolidated the inventions of the 1330s into an idiom of grave, sumptuous, and profoundly conservative devotion.

The Starry Mantle: An Early Madonna by Luca di Tommè at Polesden Lacey

Assigned to the years between the painter’s first documented appearance in 1356 and the polyptych signed with Niccolò di Ser Sozzo in 1362, this diminutive gabled panel belongs to the earliest recoverable phase of Luca di Tommè’s activity. The National Trust catalogue proposes that it served as the central element of a triptych, a function entirely consistent with its scale and with the pointed-arch format: an object of private devotion, portable, and designed to be closed. Its recorded history begins only in the modern era.

The panel is said to have belonged to Prince Andrey Gagarin (1855–1920) and to have been shown at St Petersburg in 1909; the date of its acquisition by Mrs Greville is unrecorded, and it passed to the National Trust with Polesden Lacey under the bequest of Dame Margaret Greville in memory of her father, William McEwan. It was discussed by Berenson in 1968 and by Sherwood Fehm in his Yale dissertation of 1970 and again in 1973, and remains among the least studied of Luca’s early works.

Within a field barely fifteen centimetres wide the painter has organised a fully articulated sacra conversazione. The Virgin is seated frontally on a throne whose back is masked by a great cloth of honour, its gold ground worked with a dense scrollwork of incised and punched foliage that fills the entire gable. The cloth is not merely hung: it is held aloft by angels, one appearing at the apex above the Virgin’s head and further pairs at the shoulders of the panel, each grasping a fold of dark blue lining that falls in swags at either side. The device converts the whole upper zone into a canopy of honour and, at this scale, produces an effect of concentrated splendour disproportionate to the panel’s size. The Trust’s own title speaks of four angels while its description records three; the visible figures number three, and the discrepancy would repay verification before the panel to establish whether a fourth is concealed behind the cloth.

The Virgin’s mantle is the most striking invention. Rather than the customary plain blue with a single star at the shoulder, Luca has powdered the entire surface with small gold stars, converting the garment into a firmament and identifying its wearer, without recourse to crown or inscription, as Queen of Heaven. Against this the Child, nude but for a rose-coloured cloth and a fine transparent veil, is held on her left arm and turns towards her with an unusually direct and lively movement of the head.

The two saints occupy the lower corners, entering the composition from behind the throne rather than standing beside it. At the left John the Baptist appears in his camel-hair tunic, gaunt and long-haired, holding the scroll of his prophecy; at the right Catherine of Alexandria, crowned, wears a rose mantle over a blue and gold brocaded gown and carries the palm of martyrdom. The pairing of the precursor with a virgin martyr is the standard formula of small-scale Sienese devotional images, and it is likely that a lost donor’s preference lies behind the specific choice of Catherine.

Stylistically the panel already announces the physiognomic types of Luca’s maturity — the long oval face, the arched brows, the tapering fingers — while its lavish use of punched and incised gold declares the debt to Simone Martini that runs through the whole of his production. What distinguishes it from the great altarpieces of the following decade is the intimacy of the address: this is an image made to be held rather than approached, and its magnificence is that of a jewel.

The Empty Tomb: Luca di Tommè’s Assumption of the Virgin at Yale

Among the most fully preserved of Luca di Tommè’s works, this panel retains its original tabernacle frame virtually intact — a rarity that makes it as valuable a document of Trecento carpentry as of Sienese painting. Its recorded provenance begins in an oratory in the environs of Arezzo, from which it was removed in 1818, by permission of the bishop, to the private chapel of the Sienese noble family who owned it; by 1860 it had entered the collection of James Jackson Jarves, and it passed with that collection to Yale. Pia Palladino has proposed that it derives from an altarpiece of about 1362, conceivably the very complex painted for San Tommaso degli Umiliati, and that a series of five prophets’ heads now in Utrecht and formerly in a Florentine private collection may have belonged to the same ensemble. The panel occupies a significant place in the historiography of the period, having been discussed at length by Millard Meiss in his study of painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death and by Henk van Os in his work on the Marian image.

The frame is a small Gothic architecture in its own right: a tall central gable with a crocketed finial, flanked by two lower gables, the whole carried on slender colonnettes rising into leafy pinnacles, with punched roundels enclosing tiny heads in the spandrels. Its function is not decorative but declarative — the painted field is presented as an apparition seen through a shrine.

In the crowning gable Christ appears in half-length, bearded and haloed, holding a golden crown in both hands: not the Coronation itself, but the moment immediately preceding it, so that the panel encompasses the Virgin’s ascent and the reward awaiting her at its end. Below, she rises frontally within a pointed mandorla of banded blue, her hands joined in prayer, her head veiled and slightly inclined. Her robe and mantle are executed entirely in sgraffito, the gold laid, painted over, and scratched back to produce a garment of woven metal that gives the figure both immateriality and weight; against the softer gold of the ground it reads as a body of light, and the technique places her in an order of being distinct from every other figure in the panel.

The celestial company is disposed in strict symmetry. Immediately behind the mandorla, six-winged seraphim in red and cherubim in blue press against the frame in the gables and lateral bays, their faces emerging from folded wings. Beyond them, clusters of angels in white and gold brocaded gowns turn their heads towards the ascending figure, while at the base two larger angels with flame-coloured wings kneel in adoration, their forms rhymed in mirror image and their outstretched wings framing the lower half of the composition.

The most eloquent passage is the emptiest. At the foot of the panel, seen in steep perspective and rendered in greenish stone, stands the open and vacant sarcophagus, its lid displaced. There are no apostles, no witnesses, no flowers — none of the narrative apparatus that Italian painters usually deployed for this subject. The tomb is offered simply as evidence, and the viewer is left to draw the inference: what the picture depicts is not an event but its consequence.

Stylistically the work belongs to the moment of the collaboration with Niccolò di Ser Sozzo, and critics from Bruce Cole onwards have noted the strength of the older painter’s influence upon it. The elongated proportions, the linear elegance of the contours, and above all the extravagance of the tooled and scratched gold declare a debt to Simone Martini that Luca never abandoned. What is already his own is the gravity of the central figure — self-contained, unmoving, and monumental at a scale of barely eighty centimetres.

Francis and Dominic Flanking the Cross: An Early Predella by Luca di Tommè

This long horizontal board belongs to the type of predella that precedes the narrative predella and long coexisted with it: rather than a sequence of scenes, it offers a row of half-length intercessors disposed symmetrically about a central Crucifixion, the whole conceived as a base whose function is devotional rather than expository. The panel entered American collections through the Paris dealer Ercole Canessa, appearing in the New York sale of January 1924 as school of Simone Martini, where it was bought by Maitland F. Griggs, whose bequest brought it to Yale in 1943. It was discussed by Fehm in 1973 and 1986, by Cristina De Benedictis in 1979, and most recently in the Yale catalogue of Italian paintings.

The organisation of the surface is unusual and deserves attention in its own right. Nine compartments alternate in strict rhythm: five gold-ground fields containing figures and four — with two further half-fields at the extremities — filled with painted imitations of inlaid stone. These simulate opus sectile in the Cosmatesque manner, lozenges and quatrefoils of orange-red and blue set within dark red borders, executed partly in silver leaf now oxidised to a dull grey. Above them runs a band of crenellated dentils in green and gilt. The predella thus presents itself as a marble revetment through whose openings the sacred figures appear — an illusionistic conceit that binds the painted register to the real architecture of the altar beneath it.

At the centre stands the Crucifixion, reduced to Christ alone upon the cross against gold, his body slight and elongated, the head fallen, the rocky ground of Golgotha indicated by two grey outcrops. The lower half of this compartment has suffered severe loss and now shows a broad area of exposed gesso, so that the figure appears to dissolve at the waist; the damage is the more regrettable in that the panel’s whole argument converges here.

The four mourners are ranged in pairs. Immediately to the left the Virgin appears in a deep blue mantle over an ochre gown, her hands crossed at her breast and her head inclined in restrained grief; to the right, John the Evangelist, youthful and fair, turns inward in a pale cream mantle over blue, one hand drawn across his body. Beyond them stand the two founders of the mendicant orders: Francis at the far left, in a grey habit, hands joined in prayer; Dominic at the far right, in the black cappa over the white tunic of his order, holding a book and a lily. The pairing of Francis with Dominic — rather than either one alone — argues against a straightforwardly Franciscan or Dominican destination and points instead towards a confraternal or lay context in which both mendicant families were honoured.

The early dating locates the panel before Luca’s first documented appearance in the Sienese painters’ confraternity in 1356, and the style is consistent with that position: the physiognomies are still close to Pietro Lorenzetti, the modelling soft, the drapery handled with a restraint that has not yet hardened into the broad planes of the signed altarpieces. The wood retains its unpainted edges, worn and worm-eaten, a reminder that this is a structural member of a lost altarpiece rather than an independent picture — and the only surviving evidence for the appearance of a complex whose main register is entirely unknown.

The Bird on a String: Luca di Tommè’s Virgin and Child with a Goldfinch

Painted in the years of the Sant’Anna Metterza and the Fitzwilliam Madonna, this half-length panel belongs to the category of independent devotional images that formed a substantial part of Luca di Tommè’s output alongside his altarpieces. Its scale and its close, cropped format indicate a domestic or conventual destination rather than an altar: an object to be looked at from very near, and probably from below eye level. It comes to the museum from the collection formed by Richard L. Feigen, whose Italian paintings — among the most complete in private hands — were exhibited and catalogued at Yale in 2010.

The composition is reduced to essentials. The Virgin occupies the panel almost to its edges, her head inclined and turned slightly to her left, the Child seated on her arm at the right. Her mantle, now darkened to a deep blue-green, is drawn over her head as a single continuous mass, its borders picked out with a fine band of mordant-gilded ornament that runs unbroken from the crown of the head to the shoulder and defines the silhouette with the precision of a drawn line. A small gold star, the ancient sign of the Stella Maris, is set on the left shoulder. Beneath the mantle a violet-grey gown appears at the breast; the green lining shows in a long diagonal fold across the lower field. Both haloes are worked with dense rosette punching, and the gold ground, though extensively crackled, retains its burnish.

The Child, in a rose-coloured tunic with gilt-bordered neck and puffed sleeves, turns his head sharply upward to look at his mother’s face — one of those small, exactly observed movements of a real infant that distinguish Luca’s Madonnas from the more impassive types of his Sienese contemporaries. His right hand rests flat against his chest; his left, extended downward, holds the end of a fine white thread.

That thread carries the meaning of the picture. At the other end of it, perched on the Virgin’s raised hand, is a goldfinch, its black and white wings spread and its red face clearly indicated. The bird is not merely held: it is tethered, in the manner of the live birds that Tuscan children kept as playthings and that appear on strings in a long series of Trecento and Quattrocento Madonnas. The motif is thus at once domestic and doctrinal. The goldfinch’s association with the crown of thorns — from the legend that it drew a spine from Christ’s brow — made it the standard emblem of the Passion, so that the game between mother and child is also a prefiguration of the sacrifice, and the string that links the Child’s hand to the bird links him to his own death.

The Virgin’s expression completes the argument. Her eyes are lowered and directed neither at the Child nor at the bird but into the middle distance, in that attitude of foreknowledge which Sienese painters of the generation after the Black Death made the emotional centre of the Marian image. The contrast between the Child’s animation and her stillness gives the panel its tension.

Technically the picture is characteristic of Luca’s maturity: contours drawn with a long unhurried line, flesh modelled in cool greenish half-tones warmed with pink at the cheeks, drapery reduced to a few ample planes, and the whole set off by tooled gold whose ultimate model remains Simone Martini. It is a small work, but it demonstrates better than the altarpieces how the severe idiom of the signed polyptychs could be inflected, for private use, towards tenderness.

Three Identical Persons: Luca di Tommè’s Trinity with the Crucifixion in San Diego

Acquired by the Putnam Foundation in 1967, this hinged triptych is among the earliest works given to Luca di Tommè and one of the very few of his private devotional objects to survive complete and in exceptional condition. The museum’s own assessment is that it was almost certainly made for an individual’s use, and that its distinction lies in the sheer profusion of narrative it contains: measuring roughly twenty-two inches in each direction when open, it accommodates no fewer than seven scenes from the life and death of Christ across its three elements. Its date, around 1355, places it immediately before the painter’s entry into the newly formed Sienese painters’ guild.

The central compartment presents a fusion of two subjects that Trecento painters normally kept apart. Christ hangs on the cross within a pointed mandorla banded in blue and white, but the crucified body is not alone: from behind the transom emerge three bust-length figures, haloed, robed in blue, identical in feature, gesture and scale, from whom a vast rose-red mantle descends to enfold the entire almond of light.

The Timken identifies this group as the Trinity supporting the crucified Son within an encompassing red shroud, and the formulation deserves emphasis, since it belongs to the rare iconography of the Trinitas triformis — the three Persons represented as three indistinguishable equals rather than through the more familiar Throne of Mercy, in which an aged Father holds the cross above a dove. The choice makes a doctrinal point with unusual directness: the consubstantiality of the Persons is asserted by their exact visual identity, while the shared red mantle expresses the indivisibility of the divine substance and, simultaneously, the involvement of the whole Godhead in the Passion.

At the foot of the cross three mourners are ranged on the gold ground: the Virgin at the left in dark blue over crimson, her head bowed; John the Evangelist at the right in blue and rose; and, kneeling immediately below the stipes, a friar in the brown habit of the Franciscans — Saint Francis, whose presence is the strongest indication of the patron’s affiliation and whose kneeling posture supplies the devotional model that the owner of the triptych was invited to imitate. In the gable above, the Resurrection is compressed into a single band: Christ steps from the sarcophagus with the cross-staff while two soldiers in red slump asleep at either side.

The wings are subdivided into three registers apiece and read outward from the centre. Their gables carry the Annunciation, divided between the two panels — the angel kneeling at the left with his scroll, the Virgin seated at the right — so that the salutation is spoken across the whole width of the open triptych. The middle registers give the Nativity at the left and the Mocking of Christ at the right; the lower registers, the Adoration of the Magi and the Lamentation. The arrangement is not chronological but antithetical: Incarnation faces Passion, the Magi’s homage faces the mourning over the dead body, and every episode of joy on the left is answered by an episode of suffering on the right, with the Crucifixion holding the two sequences in balance at the centre.

The whole is set against burnished gold, an inheritance from Byzantine practice that here serves equally to declare the object’s status as a luxury commodity. Stylistically the triptych confirms Luca’s early formation in the orbit of the Lorenzetti: the small figures are compactly modelled, the interiors constructed with the receding gables and cutaway architecture that Ambrogio had made standard, and the emotional register — especially in the Lamentation — is warm rather than severe. It is the work of a painter not yet in possession of the hieratic gravity of his signed altarpieces, and all the more valuable for that.

The Renounced Crown: Luca di Tommè’s Virgin and Child with Saints Louis of Toulouse and Michael

This tall, narrow tabernacle panel belongs to the class of small-scale devotional images that occupied a substantial part of Luca di Tommè’s early production, and its proportions and engaged frame make it likely that it once formed the central element of a portable triptych whose hinged wings are now lost. The dating before 1362 places it in the phase preceding the polyptych signed jointly with Niccolò di Ser Sozzo, and its handling is consistent with that position: the modelling is soft, the figures compact, and the debt to the Lorenzetti still more evident than the severe frontality of the later signed altarpieces.

The carpentry survives in remarkable state and is fundamental to the effect. A steep crocketed gable is framed by mouldings worked in gilded pastiglia, its tympanum filled with dense foliate scrollwork in relief, at whose centre a punched roundel encloses a half-length Christ in red and blue, blessing and holding a book. Below, the painted field is closed by a pointed arch whose gold ground is worked all over with tooling of exceptional density. The device presents the image as an apparition within a shrine, and at this scale the effect is that of a reliquary rather than an altarpiece.

The Virgin is seated on a throne, the stepped dais of which appears in red and cream at the base of the panel, and is enveloped in a deep blue mantle whose folds fall in one continuous, weighty mass. Behind her a red cloth of honour, now much abraded, is stretched against the gold, held by two standing angels who appear at either side above the saints, each in a gold-brown tunic with dark wings and each grasping a slender rod. The Child, in a rose-coloured tunic, sits on her left arm and reaches upward with both hands towards a small object she holds between her fingers — the flower or bird that in Sienese practice conveyed, without narrative, the double register of maternal play and Passion prefiguration.

The two saints are the interpretative key to the commission. At the lower left stands Louis of Toulouse, mitred and vested in a cope of gold brocade drawn over the brown habit of the Franciscans, holding his crozier; at his feet, unmistakably, lies a discarded crown — the crown of Naples that the Angevin prince renounced in order to take the habit and accept the see of Toulouse, and the attribute by which he is always identified. Opposite him the archangel Michael appears in gilded armour beneath a red mantle lined in blue, gripping the shaft of his lance, which descends to transfix the dark serpentine body of the dragon writhing beneath his feet.

The pairing is unusual and pointed. Louis, canonised in 1317 and the great dynastic saint of the Angevins, was also the model of Franciscan renunciation of worldly power; Michael was the weigher of souls and the defender of the Church militant. Together they present two complementary forms of victory — the crown laid down and the dragon crushed — and their selection may reflect either a Franciscan destination, an Angevin sympathy on the part of the patron, or simply the baptismal names of the person who commissioned the object.

The panel’s quality lies in the tension between its miniature scale and the monumentality of its conception. Luca has pressed his figures hard against the framing arch, allowed the Virgin’s mantle to occupy nearly half the field, and reserved every accent of colour — the red cloth, the rose tunic, the gilded armour — for the smallest possible area. It is a picture designed to be looked at from a few inches away, and it repays that scrutiny in the punchwork of the haloes and the goldsmith’s precision of Louis’s cope.

Both Faces of the Cross: Luca di Tommè’s Franciscan Processional Crucifix

Objects of this kind stand at the meeting point of painting and the goldsmith’s art. Crosses and censers were carried in procession while reliquaries and shrines held the remains of saints, and because of their sacred function such objects were executed in the most valuable materials available — ivory, bronze, enamel, rock crystal and gold — so that they served at once as instruments of access to the divine and as displays of wealth and craftsmanship.

The Harvard cross belongs to a distinctively Tuscan variant of the type, in which the metalwork is replaced, or rather imitated, by a painted and gilded wooden armature. Its cusped terminals, its tooled and punched gold borders and the faceted rock-crystal bosses set at every extremity reproduce in wood and gesso the vocabulary of a silver processional cross, at a fraction of its cost and with far greater scope for figural narrative.

The object was designed to be read from both sides. Carried at the head of a procession, it presented one face to the congregation and the other to the clergy following behind; set upon an altar, it addressed celebrant and worshippers alike. The two programmes are therefore complementary rather than duplicated, and each is organised around its own crucified Christ, painted along the axis of the shaft against a ground of deep blue bordered in gold.

On the obverse the body of Christ is slender and elongated, the head fallen to the right, thin rivulets of blood descending from the hands and from the wound in the side; below the suppedaneum the blood runs down the blue shaft to gather at the base, where the rock of Golgotha is indicated in a few strokes. The four terminals carry half-length figures on gold.

At the summit the Redeemer appears in blue and rose, blessing and displaying an open book inscribed in two columns of Gothic minuscule. The lateral terminals hold the two traditional mourners: at the left the Virgin, veiled in blue over crimson, her head inclined and her hands drawn together at her breast; at the right John the Evangelist in a rose mantle, his head resting against his raised hand in the ancient gesture of grief. At the foot of the cross stands Saint Francis in the grey habit of the order, displaying the stigmata on his hands and holding a red-bound book.

The reverse repeats the crucified figure and surrounds it with a militant and hierarchical company. At the summit the archangel Michael appears in armour, wings spread, sword raised and shield on his arm; the lateral terminals hold the two princes of the Apostles, Paul in violet-red at one side and Peter in ochre at the other; and at the foot, answering Francis on the obverse, stands Louis of Toulouse, mitred and vested as a bishop over the Franciscan habit.

The disposition of these two lowest fields is the key to the object’s original destination. Francis and Louis of Toulouse — the founder and the Angevin prince who renounced a crown for the habit — face one another across the thickness of the panel, occupying in each case the position closest to the hand of the bearer and to the eye of anyone kneeling before the cross. The commission was almost certainly Franciscan, and the pairing of Michael with the two Apostles on the reverse suggests a church in which the cross served both processional and altar use.

The gilt-metal stand on which the cross is now displayed — a baluster socket rising from a scrolled base with lion’s-paw feet — is a later addition, as the abrupt junction with the dark shaft makes plain, and should not be read as evidence for the object’s original mounting.

Stylistically the cross belongs with Luca’s work of the mid-1360s: the physiognomies are those of the Pisa Crucifixion of 1366, the drapery is broadly massed, and the emotional register is restrained. What distinguishes it is the technical ambition — the crystal bosses, the silver and gold, the double-sided design — which places it among the most complete surviving witnesses to the Sienese painter’s role as a maker of liturgical furniture rather than merely of altarpieces.

Ecce Agnus Dei»: Luca di Tommè’s Baptist from the San Michele Polyptych

This imposing panel was once part of an altarpiece, possibly painted for a Vallombrosan monastery church in or near Siena, and belongs to the last decade of Luca di Tommè’s long career. Its original position within that complex can now be established with unusual precision. A panel representing Saint Bernardo degli Uberti — the Florentine nobleman who became a Vallombrosan monk, abbot general, cardinal and bishop of Parma — bears dowel marks on its left edge indicating that it occupied the extreme right of the central register of what has been called the San Michele polyptych, immediately to the right of the Getty Baptist. The two compartments were therefore adjacent, and the Vallombrosan identity of the ensemble is confirmed by the presence of the order’s great cardinal-bishop beside the Precursor.

The figure fills its compartment almost to the point of constraint. Shown at three-quarter length within a gilded trefoil arch whose mouldings are worked in relief, the Baptist stands frontally against burnished gold, his head enclosed by a halo whose punched decoration forms a wreath of foliate motifs. He raises his right hand in the gesture of speech that identifies him as preacher, the fingers extended and slightly curled, while his left holds the rod and the unfurled scroll that crosses the lower part of the panel. Upon it, in bold Gothic letters interrupted by a foliated initial, runs the text of John 1:29 — ECCE AGNUS DEI, ECCE QUI TOLLIT — the declaration by which the Precursor announced the coming of Christ to the world, and which appears in almost every representation of him in Sienese painting.

The characterisation is among the most vivid in Luca’s œuvre. The face is broad and heavy-browed, the eyes wide and unblinking, the cheeks hollowed beneath a dense forked beard; the hair falls in long coiling locks over the shoulders. The camel-hair shirt is described with short, carefully curved brushstrokes that render its woolly texture as a mass of grey-brown fleece, and over it are laid a blue-grey cloth knotted at the breast, a blue sash at the waist, and a red-orange mantle that appears at either shoulder. The chromatic contrast between the coarse fleece and the saturated red mantle carries the panel visually at the distance from which an altarpiece compartment would have been seen.

The upper corners complete the argument. In the spandrels above the arch two Old Testament prophets appear in half-length, each holding an inscribed scroll that names him: David at the left in blue, Elijah at the right in red over green — the two figures who, in the Getty’s own reading, likewise foretold the coming of the Messiah. Their placement is not decorative but syntactical: the prophecy of the Old Covenant is set above, the last of the prophets below, and the Lamb himself would have been present in the central compartment towards which the Baptist’s raised hand is directed. The choice of Elijah also carries a monastic resonance, since he was claimed as founder by more than one religious order and stands here as the model of the desert ascetic that John became.

The panel’s condition is that of a compartment long detached from its ensemble: the gold is worn along the left margin and around the lower edge, and a vertical split runs through the head. The engaged frame, however, survives, and with it the trefoil arch and the pastiglia mouldings that once continued in unbroken rhythm across the whole width of the altarpiece.

Stylistically the work confirms what is known of Luca’s final phase. The contours are drawn with a long, deliberate line, the drapery reduced to a few broad planes, the modelling of the flesh built up in cool half-tones over green underpaint; and the whole is animated by an observational sharpness — the tangled hair, the fleece, the knotted cloth — that had marked his narrative painting since the predella of 1362 and that never left him.

Ecce virgo concipiet»: Prophecy and the Christ Child in Princeton’s Sienese Madonna

The accession number alone gives this panel a certain historical distinction: catalogued as y1, it was the gift of Bernard Berenson, who included it in successive editions of his Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, and it was published by Frank Jewett Mather in 1925. It has since figured in the standard literature on the painter, from Fredericksen and Zeri’s Census to Cristina De Benedictis’s survey of Sienese painting and to Eling Skaug’s study of punch marks — the last a reminder that panels of this kind are now read as much through their tooling as through their style. Sherwood Fehm discussed it in an essay explicitly devoted to the attributional problems surrounding Luca di Tommè, and the picture belongs to that substantial category of Sienese devotional images whose place between the master’s own hand and his workshop remains open.

The panel is conceived as a shallow tabernacle. Within the flat outer frame a painted architecture rises: a cusped and trilobed ogee arch carried on slender colonnettes, its mouldings gilded and worked in relief, framing a field entirely covered by a cloth of honour executed in sgraffito. The gold has been laid, painted over in rose, and scratched back to produce a dense scrolling brocade of vine tendrils and lozenges that fills every interval left by the figures. The effect — sumptuous, flat, and insistently decorative — is characteristic of Sienese practice in the later fourteenth century, when the material splendour of the surface came to carry as much of the devotional charge as the figures themselves.

The Virgin appears at half length, her head inclined towards her son, her features long and regular, the eyes lowered. Her mantle, now darkened almost to black, is drawn over her head and falls in a single unbroken mass down the left side of the panel, edged with a fine gilt border and marked at the shoulder by the small gold star of the Stella Maris; beneath it a crimson gown appears at the breast and sleeve. Her right hand, with the tapering fingers that recur throughout Luca’s production, is laid flat across the Child’s lap.

The Child, in a rose-coloured tunic and seated on her left arm, turns his head sharply upward towards his mother’s face, his hair rendered in small blond curls. In his hands he holds a small white bird, grasped by the body and the tail in a gesture of childish possessiveness. As so often in Trecento Madonnas, the motif operates on two registers at once: the bird is a plaything of the kind Tuscan children genuinely kept, and it is simultaneously the emblem of the Passion, so that the mother’s stillness and the child’s animation are held in the same frame as promise and foreknowledge.

The interpretative key is supplied above. In the two spandrels appear half-length prophets holding banderoles, the left inscribed

ECCE VIRGO CHONCIPIET,

the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, while the right, now much abraded, terminates in NOBIS and is most naturally read as the companion text of Isaiah 9:6,

PUER NATUS EST NOBIS.

Conception and nativity are thus proclaimed from the corners of the panel, and the maternal group below is presented not as a scene but as the fulfilment of what the Old Covenant had announced.

The panel has suffered: a vertical split runs the full height, passing through the Virgin’s face, and the gilding of the spandrels is extensively worn, leaving the prophets faint against their ground. What survives intact is the design — the great dark silhouette of the mantle set against the shimmering brocade — and it demonstrates, at the scale of a private image, the formal economy that governs Luca’s altarpieces of the same years.

The Heads of the Apostles: A Sienese Image of Pope Urban V

Acquired by the museum in 1951 from the Savoy Galleries in New York, this panel was long given to the Lucchese painter Angelo Puccinelli and appears under his name in Fredericksen and Zeri’s Census and in the Bolaffi dictionary; the museum now records it as Sienese and as the work of Luca di Tommè. The reassignment is consistent with the physiognomic type and the tooling, and it places the picture among the devotional images that Sienese workshops produced in quantity in the last third of the century.

The subject is unmistakable and historically precise. Guillaume de Grimoard, elected pope in 1362 as Urban V, is shown at half length wearing the papal tiara, its dark lappets falling over his shoulders, and a red cope over a white alb; his right hand is raised in blessing, a jewelled ring with a dark star-shaped stone on the finger. Before him, held with both hands and occupying almost a quarter of the field, is a gold reliquary shrine in the form of a gabled tabernacle, its surfaces entirely covered with punched and incised ornament, within which appear two bearded heads.

These are the capita apostolorum, the skulls of Peter and Paul. Long kept in the Sancta Sanctorum, they were transferred by Urban V during his brief return of the papacy to Rome and enclosed in two large anthropomorphic reliquaries set high in the new tabernacle above the high altar of the Lateran basilica, where the arrangement served to proclaim the double apostolicity of Rome and the restoration of the Roman Church after Avignon; in the following century they became among the most prestigious relics in the city, rivalling the Veronica. The panel therefore does not simply portray a pope: it commemorates a specific act of papal policy and makes the reliquary itself the pope’s attribute, exactly as a crozier identifies a bishop.

The iconography also implies a cult. Urban died in 1370 and was venerated as blessed almost immediately in Italy and Provence, though formal confirmation came only in 1870; the halo, minutely punched with a double ring of rosettes and beading, presents him unambiguously as a saint, and the frontality, the blessing hand and the displayed relic together give the image the character of an object of veneration rather than a likeness. Panels of this kind circulated widely in the decades after 1370, and their function was to make available in a parish or conventual church the intercession attached to the Lateran relics themselves.

The picture’s condition is poor and conditions any reading of it. The red cope has suffered extensive abrasion and loss, leaving broad areas where the underlayer and the ground show through, and the gold field is worn throughout; a vertical split runs from the tiara through the face, and the outer edges are damaged. The head, however, is comparatively intact, and it is the finest passage in the panel: the modelling of the heavy jaw and the hollowed cheek is built up in cool half-tones over green underpaint, the brows are drawn in single long strokes, and the eyes are given a fixity that distinguishes this from the more generic saints of the workshop.

The plain fabric-covered moulding now surrounding the panel is a modern housing and preserves nothing of the original carpentry. Whether the compartment stood alone or belonged to a larger complex cannot be determined from its present state, though its dimensions would suit a lateral element of a small altarpiece as readily as an independent devotional image.

Ego sum lux mundi»: Luca di Tommè’s Virgin and Child in Ponce

Painted in Siena in the year of the signed Pisa Crucifixion, this tall gabled panel was conceived as the central compartment of an altarpiece whose lost lateral elements may have held two, or perhaps four, standing saints. It belongs to the phase in which Luca’s independent manner is fully consolidated, and it exemplifies with unusual clarity a compositional habit that runs through his work: the figures are pressed hard against the edges of the field, so that the Child’s scroll, having reached the springing of the Gothic arch, is obliged to double back upon itself.

The Virgin is seated frontally on a throne, the marble arms and gabled finials of which appear at either side of her figure in pale grey-green against a gold ground worked all over with punched foliate ornament. Her mantle, now darkened almost to black, is drawn over her head and falls across the whole lower half of the panel as a single unbroken mass, its edge marked by a fine gold border and its green lining showing in a long fold at the hem; beneath it a crimson gown appears at the breast and forearm. The head is inclined and turned slightly to her right, the features long and regular, the modelling built up in cool half-tones. The effect is deliberately monumental — an image conceived to command the axis of an altar and to be read at a distance.

Against this gravity Luca sets a series of small, humanising details that are the panel’s real distinction. The Child, seated on his mother’s knee in a rose-coloured tunic, holds an unfurled scroll inscribed

EGO SUM LUX MUNDI,

the christological proclamation of John 8:12 which the painter also employed on the Madonna at Mercatello sul Metauro; his declaration of divinity is thus addressed directly outward, to the beholder. Around his neck hang a Greek cross and a piece of coral, the latter credited by long tradition with the power to ward off evil and, by its colour, with an allusion to the blood of the Passion. With his free hand he tugs at his mother’s white veil — in early Italian painting a reference to the winding cloth on which the crucified Christ would be laid — while the Virgin’s long-fingered hand closes gently over his foot, the caress by which the two monumental figures are brought within the reach of the viewer’s own experience.

The panel’s iconographic programme is therefore constructed entirely from small objects and gestures: cross, coral, veil, scroll, and the mother’s hand. Nothing is narrated; everything is prefigured. This is the characteristic method of Sienese devotional painting in the generation after the Black Death, in which the emotional charge of an image derives less from action than from the tension between an impassive surface and a set of attributes that the informed beholder was expected to decode.

The condition is generally good, though the mantle has darkened and flattened with age, and the gold has been abraded along the outer edges of the arch. The engaged frame survives in part, preserving the pointed gable and the moulded jambs that once continued into the adjoining compartments — the only physical evidence now remaining of the ensemble to which the panel belonged. Its arrival in Puerto Rico by way of the Kress Foundation is characteristic of the twentieth-century dispersal of Sienese altarpieces, whose compartments are today distributed across three continents and whose reconstruction remains one of the standing tasks of Trecento scholarship.

The Crowded Loggia: Luca di Tommè’s Flagellation in Amsterdam

Like many small paintings of the period, this panel came from a series of predella compartments that once stood at the base of a large altarpiece; such altarpieces typically presented the Virgin and Child with a few standing saints in the main register, while the predella allowed the painter a greater freedom in the choice and handling of his scenes. The observation is worth making at the outset, because the Amsterdam Flagellation is precisely the kind of picture in which Luca’s narrative intelligence operates without the constraints of the iconic mode, and it has long been singled out as evidence of his capacity to convey emotion through the figure.

The setting is a colonnaded loggia of pink-brown masonry, its round arches carried on slender columns with white capitals and its entablature picked out with a running frieze of gilded scrollwork and a band of black lozenges. Across the rear wall hangs a green cloth of honour patterned in gold with foliate sprigs and edged with a scalloped, pearled border — the tooling of the same order as that in Luca’s altarpieces, and the only concession to gold in an otherwise wholly earthbound scene. The column against which Christ is bound rises directly behind his head, its shaft interrupted by the great punched halo, so that the instrument of the torture is at once present and concealed.

Christ stands at the centre, naked but for a white loincloth, the wrists crossed and bound before him, the head bowed and turned to his right. His body is rendered with unusual anatomical attention: the ribs and sternum drawn taut, the abdomen hollowed, the shoulders sloping in exhaustion, and the pale flesh set against the dark green of the hanging so that it appears illuminated from within. Two thin white cords fall across his chest. The face, small beneath the immense halo, is one of the most affecting passages in Luca’s work — not contorted, but slack with fatigue.

Around him the executioners and their audience are compressed into a dense frieze. At the left an executioner in a saffron tunic seizes his arm and thrusts a rod against his body, while behind him soldiers in mail coifs and kettle hats press forward with lances, one of them holding a red shield emblazoned in gold. At the right a second tormentor in pale blue grips Christ’s arm and the shaft of a scourge, flanked by further helmeted heads and a red cap. At the far left, in a rose-red robe with a jewelled crown and an ermine-lined mantle, stands the presiding magistrate — identified by the Rijksmuseum as Pilate — who extends a long arm and a pointing finger across almost half the width of the panel.

That gesture is the compositional and moral pivot of the picture. It travels horizontally through the crowd of executioners and terminates in the bound wrists of the victim, converting the whole left-hand group into an instrument of an order given at a distance; the physical violence at the centre is thereby shown to proceed from an act of administration. The contrast between the languid authority of the pointing hand and the coarse, straining faces of the men who carry out the sentence is the panel’s principal expressive resource.

The picture’s later history is that of many works in Dutch collections of the period. It belonged to Professor Otto Lanz of Amsterdam and, after his death, to his widow, from whom it passed in 1941 — with a large group of other paintings, and through the mediation of the dealer N. Katz — to Hans Posse for the Führermuseum planned at Linz; it was recovered after the war by the Netherlands Art Property Foundation in February 1946. Its presence in the Rijksmuseum is therefore also a document of restitution, and the panel now hangs among the museum’s earliest Italian holdings.

The Crown on the Ground: Luca di Tommè’s Adoration of the Magi

The critical history of this small square panel is instructive. When it was offered at the Helbing gallery in Munich in 1919 it was catalogued as a work in the manner of Taddeo Gaddi; the attribution to Luca di Tommè was made by F. Mason Perkins, who published it in the Rassegna d’Arte Senese in 1924, and it has not since been questioned, though the dating has remained a matter of debate. The panel formed part of the predella of an altarpiece, and the reconstruction of that predella has occupied several generations of scholars: in 1963 Millard Meiss identified its central compartment as the Crucifixion now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, arguing from the decoration of the gold haloes and the ornamental borders as well as from more general stylistic considerations; in 1979 Cristina De Benedictis proposed two further scenes, a Nativity and a Presentation, both in private collections, though without publishing photographs to support the suggestion; the first photographic reconstruction of the ensemble was assembled by Gaudenz Freuler for the exhibition catalogue Manifestatori delle cose miracolose.

Within its square field Luca has constructed one of the most spatially ambitious compositions of his career. A shed with a red-tiled roof carried on rough beams stands at the centre, set against the mouth of a dark cave and backed by a range of grey rocks that rise in stepped planes to a gold sky; two stylised trees with dark foliage occupy the upper corners, and the punched border of the gold ground runs across the top of the panel like a cornice.

The Virgin is seated low on the ground at the right, her blue mantle spread in a great arc over a gown of rose brocade, her head bowed and her hands supporting the Child, who leans forward from her lap wrapped in a golden cloth and raises his hand in blessing. Before her the eldest of the Magi kneels in a pale lavender mantle over a gold-patterned tunic, his hands lifted in reverence — and his crown, removed, lies on the ground at the lower edge of the panel, a small detail placed exactly where the beholder’s eye falls first and carrying, without commentary, the entire meaning of the episode: earthly sovereignty set down before a child.

The two remaining kings stand at the left, the bearded second Magus in orange-red holding his covered vessel, the youthful third crowned and robed in blue and gold, carrying a gilded bowl. Behind them, glimpsed above the roofline, the grooms wait with the horses, one of them in a conical straw hat — the kind of observed, quotidian detail that Luca’s narrative painting habitually admits at the margins of a sacred scene.

The most engaging invention is at the centre. Beneath the shed stands Joseph, haloed, in a blue tunic and crimson mantle, receiving into his own hands the two gold dishes already presented. The motif converts the Adoration from a static presentation into a transaction: the gifts pass from the kings, through the mediation of the foster-father, into the household, and the domestic reality of the Holy Family is quietly asserted in the middle of a scene of royal homage.

At the right two angels complete the group, one in golden yellow with hands joined, the other in blue, their heads inclined towards the Child and their haloes overlapping the rock — a celestial counterweight to the human retinue on the opposite side.

Stylistically the panel belongs to the years of the collaboration with Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and of the Saint Thomas predella of 1362: the same taste for compressed narrative, the same appetite for costume and physiognomy, the same handling of rocky landscape in flat stepped planes derived from Ambrogio Lorenzetti. What distinguishes it is the chromatic richness — lavender against orange, blue against gold — which at this scale produces something closer to the quality of a manuscript illumination than of an altarpiece.

Two Crowds at Calvary: Luca di Tommè’s Crucifixion in San Francisco

This panel was once the central scene of the lower register of an altarpiece, and its identification as such underpins one of the more durable reconstructions in the Luca di Tommè literature: in 1963 Millard Meiss recognised it as the central compartment of the predella to which the Adoration of the Magi now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza belongs, arguing from the tooling of the haloes and the ornamental borders as well as from style; Cristina De Benedictis later proposed a Nativity and a Presentation for the same series, and the first photographic reconstruction was assembled by Gaudenz Freuler. Its modern provenance runs from the Achillito Chiesa collection through Contini Bonacossi, who sold it to Samuel H. Kress in October 1927 already as a Luca di Tommè; given to the National Gallery of Art in 1939, it was deaccessioned in 1952, returned to the Kress Foundation, and presented to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1961.

Within a horizontal field bounded above by a punched gold border, Luca constructs a Calvary of exemplary clarity. Christ hangs at the centre against the gold, fixed with three nails, the head sunk onto the right shoulder, the flesh drained to a greenish pallor; supple contours and delicate shadows articulate the musculature of the isolated body, and thin threads of blood descend from the hands, the side and the feet, gathering at the base of the stipes and running forward in a fine red line towards the lower edge of the panel. Grey rocks rise in flat, stepped planes at either side, closing the composition without interrupting the ground.

The two flanking groups are conceived as antitheses, and the whole meaning of the picture is carried by their gestures. At the left the holy women crowd together in a mass of saturated colour: the Virgin has collapsed backwards in a faint, her eyes closed and her head fallen, supported under the arms by two companions — one in a yellow mantle, the other in green lined with purple, a chromatic pairing that recurs among the Three Marys of the Montepulciano banner and has recently been used as a term of technical comparison between the two works. Behind them the Magdalene throws both arms upward in anguish at the sight of the crucified Christ, her red sleeves cutting diagonally across the gold; further women press in at the margin, their faces overlapping in tiers.

At the right stand the soldiery and the officials of the execution. Two haloed figures dominate the foreground — the lance-bearer Longinus and the centurion — the first in blue with the shaft of his spear held vertically, the second in rose and green with a white turban, both gazing upward at the cross in the moment of recognition. Behind and around them helmets, a red banner and a thicket of lance-points indicate the troop, while at the extreme right a group of men in yellow and blue turn away from the cross to argue among themselves, indifferent to what is happening behind their backs.

The composition therefore sets grief against conversion, and both against incomprehension. The Virgin’s swoon — the spasimo, an iconography that Sienese painters had made canonical and that theologians would later contest — expresses a suffering that requires no words; Longinus and the centurion supply the moment of belief; the disputing soldiers at the edge supply its refusal. The gold ground, punctuated by gold accents and fine punchwork in the local taste for surface ornament, holds all three in a single continuous plane, so that the argument is read horizontally, like a sentence.

The panel belongs to the years in which Luca was producing devotional images in quantity for a population still shaped by the plague of 1348, and it demonstrates, better than his hieratic altarpieces of the same decade, the expressive resources he retained from the previous generation of Sienese painters: the emphasis on emotion conveyed through gesture, the rhythmic massing of drapery, and the willingness to fill a small field with a great many faces without losing the legibility of any of them.

Annunciation with Saints and Prophets

This imposing polyptych represents one of the most accomplished statements of Sienese devotional painting in the generation after the Black Death. At its centre, beneath a cusped Gothic arch, the Annunciation unfolds against an unbroken field of burnished gold: the archangel Gabriel, wrapped in a rose mantle over a star-spangled blue tunic, inclines toward the Virgin with his hand pressed to his breast, while Mary, drawing her deep blue cloak about her in a gesture of modesty and troubled reflection, holds open a book inscribed with her response

Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi

the very words of her consent. Above, God the Father appears within a mandorla borne by seraphim, dispatching the dove of the Holy Spirit along a divine ray toward the Virgin. The scrolls held by the flanking prophets in the spandrels — Isaiah’s

Ecce virgo concipiet

and

Puer natus est nobis

prominent among them, alongside Elisha, Aaron and Malachi — construct a typological frame in which the Incarnation is announced across the whole span of Scripture.

The lateral compartments house four full-length saints beneath trilobed arches: Francis of Assisi, displaying the stigmata and clasping a red-bound book; Nicholas of Bari in episcopal vestments with crozier and golden orb; and, to the right, a youthful saint bearing a sword together with a bearded apostle — identified in the older literature as Thomas — holding a richly tooled volume. A frieze of cherubim in quatrefoils runs across the entablature, unifying the five compartments within their sumptuous carpentry.

Stylistically the work is a document of Luca di Tommè’s mature manner, in which the monumental gravity absorbed from the Lorenzetti is tempered by a lingering Martinian elegance of line — most evident in the sinuous fall of Gabriel’s drapery and the Virgin’s elongated, melancholy profile.

Cristina De Benedictis has read the polyptych as a point of transition in Luca’s development, noting its relationship to the works painted under the guidance of Niccolò di ser Sozzo, and has even proposed a direct intervention by Niccolò himself; the Annunciation, understood as a unio mystica, has moreover been connected with the milieu of the Spiritual Franciscans — a reading that gains plausibility from the prominence accorded to St Francis at the far left. Van Os proposed that the altarpiece’s predella survives in panels now divided between the Balcarres collection in Scotland and the Vatican Library.

Style: Inheritance, Formula, and the Problem of Judgement

Discussion of Luca di Tommè’s style has been distorted for so long by the question of his relative worth that it is worth attempting to describe what he did before assessing how well he did it.

Luca’s art stands within the great Sienese tradition and draws above all on Pietro Lorenzetti, from whom he takes compositional inventions and iconographic motifs. This is the single most consistent judgement in the literature, and it is the natural one: Pietro was the dominant force in Sienese painting in the two decades before 1348, and the generation that followed had his works constantly before them.

But an inheritance received posthumously is a different thing from an inheritance received in a workshop. Luca almost certainly never studied under Pietro Lorenzetti; he learned from Pietro’s paintings. What is transmitted in such a case is the visible surface of a style — its compositional formulae, its physiognomic types, its iconographic solutions — and not the reasoning that produced them. This is a general condition of the post-plague generation, and it goes some way toward explaining the character that older critics registered as a decline: not a loss of skill, but a shift in the relation between a painter and the tradition he works in.

Alongside Pietro, the sources record the presence of Simone Martini and of the Memmi — Lippo and Tederigo — in Luca’s formation. The Memmi connection is of particular interest because it involves one of the more instructive corrections in Trecento studies. The New Testament frescoes in the Collegiata at San Gimignano, long attributed to a “Barna” of Siena, are now given to the Memmi family and dated to the 1330s; the “Barna” personality itself is generally rejected as a mis-transcription. The relevance to Luca is direct, since Vasari makes him a discepolo di Berna senese — a pupil of an artist who, on the current understanding, did not exist.

The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani entry further observes that the Rieti polyptych of 1370 shows a substantial rapprochement to the art of the Memmi. Luca’s stylistic biography is therefore not a single line of descent from Pietro Lorenzetti but a set of negotiations with several available idioms.

From the later 1360s Luca’s manner is described as becoming more static, more severe, and more iconic. The 1951 study read this as symptomatic of post-plague religiosity, and the reading was influential.

Two cautions are in order. First, the observation and the explanation are separable: one may accept that Luca’s later Madonnas are more frontal and less spatially adventurous than his earlier ones without accepting that the plague caused it. Second, the sample is small. The stylistic trajectory is traced across four dated works spanning eight years, plus an undated corpus arranged by connoisseurial judgement — and that judgement was itself formed by the expectation of a trajectory. The circularity is not vicious, but it is real.

Luca produced enthroned Madonnas, Crucifixions and standing saints in quantity, over decades, with recurring compositional solutions. In the critical vocabulary of the older literature this is “pedestrian” or “formulaic.”

It is worth stating the alternative reading, which the 1982 revaluation made available and which the compagnia research supports. A painter supplying altarpieces to parish churches in the contado, to guild chapels, to Dominican and Franciscan houses at a distance from Siena, was operating a business with real constraints of cost, time, and transport. Repetition of successful solutions is what such a business requires.

Furthermore, a devotional image is not a work of literature and was not expected to be original: its function was to be recognisable, to present the Virgin and Child in the form the confraternity or the congregation expected, with the attributes that made the saints identifiable to people who could not read their names. Novelty in such an object is a liability more often than an asset.

None of this establishes that Luca was a great painter. It establishes that the criteria by which he was found wanting — invention, spatial ambition, individual expressiveness — are criteria formed by later art and later expectations, and that applying them to a working Sienese altarpiece painter of the 1370s is an anachronism rather than a judgement. The 1982 argument for Luca’s autonomy of language, his originality, and his chromatic delicacy was in part an argument for looking at his pictures with different questions in mind.

Technique and Materials: The Physical Evidence

Some of the most consequential recent work on Luca di Tommè has been technical rather than stylistic, and it bears directly on the question of how Sienese painters actually worked together.

Luca painted in tempera on poplar panel with gold ground, in the standard Trecento manner: the panel prepared with cloth and gesso, the ground laid in bole and gold leaf, the leaf burnished, the haloes and borders decorated with punches and with sgraffito, and the paint built in egg tempera over a green-earth underlayer in the flesh.

The systematic study of punch marks, the small metal tools struck into gilded gesso to decorate haloes and borders, has become one of the more powerful instruments available for Trecento attribution. Because individual tools were physical objects with individual irregularities, and because they were owned, lent, inherited, and shared, the identification of a specific punch in two paintings establishes a material connection between them independent of style. The two comprehensive catalogues of this evidence are Erling S. Skaug’s Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico (Oslo, 1994) and Mojmír Frinta’s Punched Decoration on Late Medieval Panel and Miniature Painting (Prague, 1998).

For Luca the result is significant. Shared punches — including heart-shaped tools — and shared gold-ground techniques such as sgraffito and engraving link him to Niccolò di Ser Sozzo and to Bartolomeo Bulgarini. Freuler’s publications of 1991 and 1997 develop this evidence, and it forms part of the material basis for the compagnia hypothesis.

The interpretative force of this evidence deserves emphasis. Stylistic similarity between two painters can always be explained in several ways: common training, common models, imitation, or the accident of a shared visual culture. The presence of the same physical tool in both painters’ work narrows the possibilities sharply. It means the tool travelled — that the two workshops were connected by something more concrete than influence. It does not by itself establish partnership, joint enterprise, or the sharing of commissions; a tool can be lent or sold. But combined with the joint signature of 1362, the joint payment of the same year, and the joint commission of 1389, it constitutes a pattern.

The most detailed technical study of any work by Luca is a 2025 article in the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte devoted to the Crucifixion at Montepulciano — the only known Sienese Trecento painting on cloth. The picture first appeared in 1926 and is dated to about 1365; it has been restored in 1961 at Siena, again in 1967, and in 1979 at the Palazzo Pitti under Andrea Rothe.

The findings are worth setting out because they show what technical examination can and cannot deliver. The linen was glued — not tacked — to a six-member wooden strainer. The background was painted in azurite blue rather than gilded overall; the haloes of the saints were locally gilded and left untooled; and the expensive ultramarine was reserved for selected mantles. Each of these is a decision with a cost implication and a visual consequence, and together they describe an object made to a particular specification.

On this basis the 2025 study reaches a conclusion that overturns the previous understanding. The picture had been interpreted — including by Fehm — as a processional banner, a reading that the cloth support naturally suggests. The 2025 analysis argues instead that the glued mounting on a fixed strainer is incompatible with processional use and that the object was made as a single devotional image.

This is a model of what technical art history contributes. A question about function, which stylistic analysis could only address by analogy, was settled by an observation about adhesive and stretcher construction. It also illustrates the provisionality of even well-established readings: an interpretation held by the artist’s principal monographer was revised by the examination of the object itself.

Patronage, Function, and Geography

The pattern of Luca’s documented and probable commissions is unusually informative, because it spans nearly the full range of institutional patronage available in fourteenth-century Tuscany.

The Arte dei Calzolai, the shoemakers’ guild, commissioned the lost panel of 1389 for its chapel in Siena Cathedral. The Arte della Lana, the wool guild, is the probable patron of the San Michele altarpiece. Guild patronage of chapels in a cathedral is a form of corporate self-representation: the guild acquires a permanent presence at the ritual centre of the city, and the altarpiece is simultaneously an act of devotion and a statement of standing.

Dominicans at Rieti — the 1370 polyptych came from the high altar of San Domenico. Franciscans and Capuchins at San Quirico d’Orcia and at Montepulciano. Vallombrosans at San Michele in Siena. The Umiliati at S. Tommaso, if the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani’s “probably” for the 1362 polyptych is accepted.

The iconographic consequences are visible in the pictures. The Rieti altarpiece for a Dominican high altar shows Saints Dominic and Peter Martyr — the founder and the order’s first martyr — alongside Peter and Paul, and carries a scroll text on the taking up of the cross. This is not generic sanctity; it is an image made for a specific community’s understanding of its own vocation.

The chapel of St Paul in Siena Cathedral, deliberated in 1363 as a votive undertaking after the victory over the Compagnia del Cappelletto and paid for in 1379–80 at 105 gold florins for the second instalment alone, represents patronage of a third kind: the commune commemorating a military deliverance through a religious foundation. That the commission took sixteen years to reach payment is itself characteristic of civic decision-making.

Beyond Siena and its contado — San Quirico d’Orcia, Montepulciano — Luca’s signed works reached Rieti in Lazio, Forsivo near Norcia in Umbria, and Mercatello sul Metauro in the Marche. This is a wide catchment for a Sienese workshop.

The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale proposes, on technical grounds, that Luca may have travelled to some of these destinations to execute the largest works in situ rather than transporting completed altarpieces from Siena. This is a hypothesis rather than a documented fact, but it is a plausible one: a multi-panel altarpiece of nearly three metres in width, gilded and gessoed, was a fragile and awkward object to move over Apennine roads, and the documented presence of Luca at Orvieto in 1374 shows that he did travel for work.

The large polyptychs served as high-altar images, standing behind the altar table and visible to the congregation during Mass. Their structure — a hierarchical main tier with the Virgin at the centre, saints in attendance, a narrative predella at eye level for those who approached, pinnacles above — encodes a hierarchy of attention: iconic presence for the assembly, narrative detail for the individual devotee close to the altar. The Montepulciano Crucifixion, by the 2025 reading, served a different and more intimate function as a single devotional image.

Iconography

Luca’s subjects are the standard repertory of Tuscan altarpiece painting, treated with the consistency of a practised workshop. Four groups predominate.

Crucifixions by or attributed to Luca survive at Pisa (the dated panel of 1366), in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (the predella panel of the 1362 ensemble), at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, at Montepulciano (the canvas), and on the double-sided portable cross at Harvard. The subject recurs across his career and across formats — main panel, predella scene, independent devotional image, processional object — which is itself a reminder that iconography and function are separable variables.

The Madonna and Child enthroned with attendant saints and angels is the backbone of the corpus, from the 1362 polyptych to the Rieti altarpiece of 1370 and beyond. Within these images certain motifs recur: the amulet of red coral worn by the Christ Child, a protective device used for real infants and here carrying the additional resonance of blood; the crucifix worn by the Child, prefiguring the Passion; and the goldfinch, a Passion symbol by long tradition, associated with the bird that drew a thorn from Christ’s brow.

The theological point of these motifs is consistent and is worth articulating, since they are easily read as charming detail. Each of them inserts the Passion into the image of the infancy. The Child who plays with a goldfinch is the man who will be crucified; the coral is both an apotropaic charm and the colour of blood. The devotional image of mother and child is thus never simply that.

The Assumption of the Virgin at Yale is an early work of considerable ambition, praised even by a critic who wished to give it to another artist. The Sant’Anna Metterza of 1367 belongs to a specifically Italian iconographic type in which Anne, the Virgin, and the Child are compressed into a single figural group — a genealogy of the Incarnation made visible, and a subject with particular resonance for confraternities and for female devotion.

The predella panels are where Luca’s narrative capacity is exercised: the Scenes from the Life of St Thomas now in Edinburgh; a dispersed Life of the Magdalen, the attribution of which remains contested between Luca and an anonymous personality isolated in 1963; the Flagellation in the Rijksmuseum and the Adoration of the Magi in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, both detached predella panels. Standing single saints — the St Peter at Exeter College, the St John the Baptist at the Getty, the Pope Urban V at Princeton — represent the disaggregated remains of larger structures.

The Black Death Question

No account of Luca di Tommè’s generation can avoid the interpretative framework within which it has most often been placed, and none should adopt that framework uncritically.

The argument, set out in a study of Florentine and Sienese painting published at Princeton in 1951, is that the plague of 1348 produced a discernible change in Italian painting: away from the naturalism, spatial coherence and human tenderness of the pre-plague generation, toward images that are more frontal, more hieratic, more abstract, and more insistent on penitence, judgement and the authority of the Church. The change was linked to a documented shift in patronage and to the psychological aftermath of mass mortality.

Luca di Tommè occupied a natural place in this account. His later manner — more static, more severe, more iconic — was precisely what the thesis predicted.

The thesis attracted objection almost immediately, in 1952, and further criticism through the 1960s. The lines of attack were several: that the stylistic change had begun before 1348; that the sample of dated works was too small to support the generalisation; that the explanation was psychological rather than historical, and unfalsifiable in consequence; and that the pattern of patronage on which it partly rested had been read selectively.

The most substantial reconsideration came in an article of 2000 and a monograph published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Its argument, in brief, is that Sienese painting after 1348 was not a collective retreat into archaism but a condition of deliberate pluralism: multiple stylistic registers were available simultaneously, and patrons chose among them. A conservative, iconic altarpiece and a more naturalistic one might be produced in the same decade by the same circle of painters — not because the culture was confused but because different commissions called for different things.

The same research advanced the compagnia hypothesis: that a group of Sienese painters — including Bartolomeo Bulgarini, Niccolò di Ser Sozzo, the Palazzo Venezia Master, Luca di Tommè, Naddo Ceccarelli, Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio and Bartolo di Fredi — operated after the plague as a loosely structured cooperative, pooling resources and equipment rather than functioning as separate hierarchical workshops.

This reframing changes the questions one asks of Luca’s paintings in three ways:

1. It removes the assumption that stylistic conservatism requires a psychological explanation. If pluralism was the condition of the market, an iconic Madonna is evidence about a commission, not about a painter’s state of mind.

2. It undermines the master–assistant model that governed the reading of the 1362 collaboration. If Sienese painters routinely worked in shifting cooperative arrangements, then a jointly signed panel with a plural verb may mean exactly what it says — that two painters of comparable standing made a picture together — rather than encoding a hierarchy that must be recovered by connoisseurship.

3. And it recasts repetition and standardisation as features of a functioning art market rather than as symptoms of decline. The corroboration from punch-mark analysis matters here: shared tools are material evidence that these painters’ operations were physically interconnected.

None of this makes Luca a major artist, and it is not offered as advocacy. It is offered as a correction of the interpretative frame within which the older judgements were formed.

Critical Fortune, Collecting, and the Modern Museum

The reception of Luca di Tommè in the modern period is a history of commerce as much as of scholarship.

Luca entered modern art history substantially through nineteenth-century collecting, and particularly through James Jackson Jarves, whose collection of 119 early Italian paintings was purchased by Yale in 1871 — making the Yale University Art Gallery the first major repository of early Italian painting in America. The Assumption of the Virgin (acc. 1871.12) came by this route; its recorded provenance places it in an oratory near Arezzo until 1818.

Jarves was collecting at a moment when “primitive” Italian painting was cheap, disregarded by most collectors, and available in quantity because Italian ecclesiastical and aristocratic collections were being dispersed. The consequence is that a substantial portion of the surviving Sienese Trecento is now in the United States, and that American university museums became, almost accidentally, centres of research on it. The Yale catalogue of Italian paintings by Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino, whose first volume covering 1230–1420 appeared in 2025, treats the Assumption at pp. 282–85, no. 57, as securely by Luca.

The Samuel H. Kress Collection represents the second great mechanism of dispersal, and its workings are visible in the provenance of the San Francisco Crucifixion traced above, and in the Virgin and Child at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Kress acquired early Italian pictures in bulk, often through the same Italian dealer-collectors, and subsequently distributed them among American museums. The scholarly consequence was a wide diffusion of Trecento material into institutions that had no prior expertise in it, with attributions frequently inherited from the point of sale.

Two exhibitions frame the modern consolidation of the artist. The Timken Museum exhibition of 1997–98 in San Diego, Art and Devotion in Siena after 1350: Luca di Tommè and Niccolò di Buonaccorso, presented Luca to a general public as an artist in his own right. And the major exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350, shown at the Metropolitan Museum (13 October 2024 – 26 January 2025) and the National Gallery in London (8 March – 22 June 2025), with a catalogue published by National Gallery Global in 2024, reasserted Siena’s centrality against the Vasarian, Florence-centred account of the origins of Italian painting.

Luca did not feature centrally in the 2024–25 exhibition, whose terminal date of 1350 places it precisely on the far side of his career. This is worth noting rather than lamenting. The exhibition addressed the tradition Luca inherited; it did not address what his generation did with it. The absence quietly registers a persistent structure in the field: the pre-plague generation is the object of major public exhibition, and the generation that followed remains the province of specialist catalogues.

Conclusion: The Uses of a Secondary Figure

Luca di Tommè will not be promoted by this essay into the first rank of Trecento painters, and there is no evidence that would support such a promotion. The judgement that his art is derivative of Pietro Lorenzetti, formulaic in its repetitions, and conservative in its later development is not simply prejudice; it corresponds to observable features of the work.

What this essay has argued is that the framework within which that judgement was rendered was defective in three specific ways, and that the defects are instructive well beyond this artist.

First, the judgement was circular. Once the 1932 reading established Luca as a subordinate executant, quality became evidence against his authorship — as in the proposal of 1951 to remove the Yale Assumption from him on the grounds that it was too good. A corpus assembled under such a rule will confirm the rule.

Second, the criteria were anachronistic. Invention, spatial ambition and individual expression are the criteria of a later art. Applied to a painter supplying altarpieces to guild chapels and rural Dominican houses, they measure the wrong thing. Recognisability, durability, iconographic correctness and cost control were the operative virtues, and by those standards Luca’s thirty-three documented years of continuous employment constitute the relevant evidence.

Third, the model of production was probably wrong. The master–assistant hierarchy that structured the reading of the 1362 collaboration is difficult to reconcile with what the documents and the physical evidence now suggest: a joint signature with a plural verb, a joint payment to three painters in the same year, a joint commission with two other painters at the end of his career, and punch tools shared across several workshops. The compagnia hypothesis may or may not survive further testing, but the phenomena it was framed to explain are real.

There is a broader point about method. Luca di Tommè is valuable to historians precisely because he was ordinary. Exceptional artists are poor evidence about the conditions of their profession; their careers are, by definition, atypical. A painter of Luca’s kind — busy, competent, geographically wide-ranging, institutionally embedded, serving guilds and friars and communes across four decades — tells us what it was actually like to make religious images for a living in fourteenth-century Tuscany. The dispersal of his altarpieces across three continents tells us how the nineteenth century treated the objects it inherited. The construction of his artistic identity between 1908 and 1986 tells us how connoisseurship works, and where it fails.

And the shape of what remains unknown — no birth date, no death date, no training, no verbatim text for three of four signatures, eighteen years of documented activity with no dated work to anchor them — tells us something about the honest limits of the discipline. The temptation in writing about such a figure is to fill those gaps with plausible narrative. The better course is to leave them visible.