MAESTRO DI SANT'IVO Madonna with St Anthony and St Francis. Tempera and gold ground on wood. 84 × 47.2 cm. Provenance: Swiss private property. Literature: - Miklòs Boskovits: Pittura Fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370-1400, Florence 1975, pp. 376-379. - Costanza Baldini: Il Maestro di Sant'Ivo: profilo di un pittore fiorentino a cavallo tra XIV e XV secolo, in: Arte Cristiana, XCIII, 2005, pp. 261-276. The present panel with the Madonna and Child and Saints Anthony Abbas and Francis epitomises a type of private devotion that was very popular in Florence at the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th century. The Madonna lowers her eyes to her son while tenderly offering him her breast. The Christ Child, dressed in a green cloth and looking up at his mother, sits on her arm in a playful pose that somewhat cheers up the picture. The liveliness of the Christ Child, the elongated proportions of the figures and the rhythmic contours that animate our somewhat sombrely coloured picture are typical features of late Gothic Florentine painting. This is undoubtedly a characteristic work by the Master of St Ivo, several of whose paintings on the same theme (Madonna with Child and Saints Anthony Abbas and Francis) have survived. This applies to the panel formerly in the Galli collection in Carate Brianza (Baldini 2005, p. 268, fig. 9) or the one sold from the Mazzoni collection in Siena in 1927 (Baldini 2005, p. 276, appendix no. 45). Unfortunately, it has not been possible to verify whether the present painting is possibly the one auctioned in Siena. The hitherto anonymous Master of Sant'Ivo owes his notable name to a painting with a highly unusual subject, St Ivo in Judgement, which was formerly in the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa and can now be seen in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence (Baldini 2005). Federico Zeri was the first to attribute a group of works to this master in 1967, calling him the "Master of the Madonna Christ Church" because of the similarity between a Madonna of Humility in the Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford (inv. no. 17) and another in the Vatican Museums' collections (inv. no. 178). A few years later, in 1975, Miklòs Boskovits summarised 35 paintings by the hand of our Master and renamed him "Master of Sant'Ivo". This oeuvre has since expanded to a good fifty works. The earliest works by the Master, who worked between around 1390 and 1415, show clear influences from the art of Agnolo Gaddis (1350-1396), which indicates that he was probably trained in his workshop. His hand has been identified in Gaddi's late fresco cycles in Santa Croce in Florence and in the cathedral of Prato. His later work shows an affinity with the works of Mariotto di Nardo (c. 1365-c. 1424), Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-c. 1425) and Lippo d'Andrea (c. 1370-before 1451). Judging by the paintings previously attributed to him, the Master of Sant'Ivo seems to have specialised more in the painting of small-format works, such as the present panel depicting the Madonna and Child with Saints, which were intended for private devotion (see Koller, Zurich, 31.3.2023, lot 3001, sold for CHF 51,540). The group of figures in our Madonna and Child appears to be a direct derivative of one of our painter's most graceful Madonna paintings, a circular picture with an extremely similar configuration of figures, which is in the London art trade (Moretti Art Gallery). The latter is a round picture that was attached to the keystone as a vault finial. As the latter is clearly orientated towards the art of the late Agnolo Gaddi and the early work of Lorenzo Monaco (San Gaggio Altarpiece 1388-90) and reveals subtleties of execution, it can be assumed that the London Madonna can be dated to the late 14th century. This is also confirmed by the appearance of this graceful Madonna, which is not yet marred by the conspicuous graphic simplifications and brittleness of the later style. The painting already bears witness to the master's later artistic tendency to create his paintings in a somewhat more brittle form and, in their simplification and abstraction of forms, to bring them closer in certain ways to the works of his Florentine contemporary Lorenzo di Niccolò (1373-1412), such as the Madonna in the winged altarpiece painted around 1400 in the sacristy of San Lorenzo. This should provide an approximate date for the creation of our panel painting by the Master of Sant'Ivo. A date of around 1400 seems plausible. We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Gaudenz Freuler for his scientific support in cataloguing this painting.