BICCI DI LORENZO (1373 Florence 1452) Counterparts: Saint Benedict and Saint Margaret. Tempera on wood. 33 × 30 cm each. Provenance: - Collection Josef Clemens Prince of Bavaria. - Private collection, Southern Germany. With a detailed art historical analysis by Prof. Dr Gaudenz Freuler, January 2024. Benedict and Margaret of Antioch both appear as full-length figures in the light-coloured habit of the Benedictine order, which suggests that the two panels were once created as lateral elements of a winged altarpiece in the context of one of the Benedictine branches. The dragon devouring an unclothed figurine, which St Margaret is leading on a leash, alludes to an episode in her legend, according to which a city prefect saw St Margaret tending sheep and desired her. As she steadfastly refused, he had her thrown into prison and subjected to various tortures. The tempter appeared to her several times as a giant dragon and coiled around her to devour her, but he was broken by the sign of the cross that Margaret made over him and she remained unharmed. As will be argued below, the authorship of the two panels can be attributed to the Florentine painter Bicci di Lorenzo. He was the second generation of a famous Florentine dynasty of painters, founded by his father Lorenzo di Bicci (c. 1350-1427) and carried on well into the 15th century by the third generation with Neri di Bicci (1418-1492), his son. This authorship can easily be verified by comparing it with Bicci di Lorenzo's side panels of a small winged altarpiece in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie (1527,1528, inv. no. CC BY-NC-SA). Just as here, the saint's face shows the typical simplification of the internal forms, abstracting them into simple sculptural shapes, to which his father, Lorenzo di Bicci, had already turned. Bicci di Lorenzo's art is unmistakably derived from his father's form. Early on, the painter also turned artistically to one of the formative exponents of "Neo-Giottism" in Florence, namely Spinello Aretino (c. 1350-c. 1410). From the last decade of the 14th century, he had decidedly embraced a "renaissance" of Giotto's sculptural forms and thus followed a trend to which the leading Florentine painter of the time, Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-c. 1425), also felt attached - albeit within a cultivated Gothic pictorial world. This tendency towards an at times somewhat crude-looking abstraction after Giotto is characteristic of Bicci di Lorenzo's early phase around 1410-1420, to which the two aforementioned altarpieces in Berlin also belong. To summarise, it can be stated that the panels in question here originate from a winged altarpiece for the private devotion of a Benedictine monk, probably painted in the second decade of the 15th century, perhaps still in his father's workshop. The fact that the two panels - when joined together - reveal a continuous floe landscape could be interpreted to mean that they once formed the back of the wings and were intended to be viewed when closed. These objects marked with * (asterisk) are fully subject to VAT, i.e. VAT will be charged on the hammer price plus surcharge. Buyers who present a legally stamped export declaration will be reimbursed the VAT.