Fontana + The Gothic

At the centre of this small Nativity scene, the young Christ lies on a bed of straw while the Virgin and Saint Joseph gaze down upon him. In the right corner, two shepherds peer down at the new-born while on the left, Saint Jerome is depicted in his hermit attire, beating his chest with a stone in penitence. The figures are poised within a stable modelled on a centrally-planned ancient temple shown in ruins with a detailed mountainous landscape extending into the infinity of the background. The painting, of relatively small dimensions, was intended for use in private devotional practices. In the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena is another version of this Nativity, though of lesser quality and in poorer condition. In 1908, Mason Perkins pointed out that the Nativity in Siena must be considered a mediocre copy of the present panel, which was at the time in the B. H. Webb collection in London, and attributed to the Sienese painter Giacomo Pacchiarotti. Now the work is correctly assigned to Pietro di Francesco Orioli, a Sienese painter active in the last two decades of the fifteenth century who likely trained in the workshop of Matteo di Giovanni before entering that of Francesco di Giorgio Martini. At a later stage he absorbed influences from beyond the Sienese milieu, including certain stylistic elements from Ghirlandaio and new innovations in perspective painting; it is probable that he became familiar with the latter during a visit to Urbino and the Marche around 1485. The Nativity with Saint Jerome offers an incomparable insight into Orioli’s elegant and charming style. Typical of his repertoire are the little trees with round, dark-green foliage, presumably intended to represent ilexes or oaks. The panel’s wonderful state of preservation allows us to admire highly-finished details such as the face of Saint Jerome, highlighted with touches of white on the head and on his beard, or the straw flecked with silver threads on which the Child is shown in repose. The all’antica stable reflects the architectural capricci of Francesco di Giorgio, similar to that in the Nativity in one of the frescoes of the Bichi chapel in Sant’Agostino in Siena, where Orioli worked alongside Francesco di Giorgio around 1490. Comparison between the present Nativity with Saint Jerome and another version of the same subject by Orioli, now in an American private collection and presented at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1988 as part of the exhibition Painting in Renaissance Siena 1420–1500, is inevitable. In a recent study, Maria Cristina Terzaghi has rightly emphasised the slight but perceptible chronological gap that may be detected between the two paintings. In the American panel the elastic and elongated figures, the gestures of their hands and the torsion of their bodies, imbued with subtle pathos, reflect the style of the so-called Master of Griselda, a rare and eccentric painter who was working in Siena in 1492. Yet these qualities are absent from the present panel, in which the more properly Sienese aspects of Orioli’s art can more readily be discerned. On the other hand, Orioli’s keen interest in perspective, evident in the impressive depth of the landscape here, seems to anticipate the background of the Sulpicia in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, painted in 1492. For these reasons a dating slightly before 1490, but in any case subsequent to the artist’s return to Siena after his period in Urbino, seems likely for the present painting, as confirmed by Andrea de Marchi in 2002. Please note that the price and availability of the above work are subject to change without prior notice.