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Attendant Angel

ArtistFollower of Tino di Camaino (Italian, 1280 - 1337)
Formerly attributed to Giovanni Bertini da Firenze (Italian (Florentine), active ca. 1325 - 1351)
Formerly attributed to Pacio Bertini da Firenze (Italian (Florentine), active ca. 1325 - 1351)
Dateca. 1340-1350
MediumMarble
DimensionsOverall: 37 7/16 × 22 1/8 × 11 3/4 inches (95.09 × 56.2 × 29.85 cm)
Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Object number46-68/1
On View
On view
Gallery Location
  • 105
Collections
Exhibition History
Eighteenth Loan Exhibition of Old Masters, The Detroit Institute of Arts, January 7-February 20, 1938, nos. 13 and 14.
Gallery Label
This pair of marble angels may have originally been carved for placement on a tomb, where they would have been seen from below. This would explain the less sensitive, more formulaic carving of the angels' wings, which, being in the background, would have been least visible to an observer. The realism of Tino da Camaino's style is apparent even in these workshop pieces, and the two angels have very individual, even slightly pugnacious personalities.

Provenance

With Salvatore Romano, Florence, possibly on joint account with Jacob Hirsch, New York, by 1930-1946 [1];


Purchased from Romano, through Harold Woodbury Parsons, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1946.


NOTES:


[1] Dealers Salvatore Romano and Dr. Jacob Hirsch and Nelson-Atkins agent Harold Woodbury Parsons were friends and business collaborators for many years. They may have joint owned these angels, which are first mentioned on a list of objects for the trustees’ future consideration, compiled by Parsons on May 2, 1930. On this list, Romano is named as the current owner and Parsons noted: “I have been trying to buy them for two years.” NAMA Archives, RG 80-05, William Rockhill Nelson Trust Office Files, Box 4, Harold Woodbury Parsons 1930, folder 1. In 1935, Wilhelm Valentiner described the angels as in a New York private collection and having come from the same source as a similar pair in Cleveland (which were also purchased from Romano through Parsons). That same year, the Nelson-Atkins angels were lent to A. S. Drey Galleries’ Italian Sculpture of the Renaissance exhibition, but Dr. Jacob Hirsch is listed as the lender in the exhibition catalogue. In 1938, Parsons is listed as the lender of the angels to The Detroit Institute of Arts’ Eighteenth Exhibition of Old Masters exhibition. When the Nelson-Atkins purchased the angels in 1946, the purchase was made from Romano. Copies of all archival documents are in the NAMA curatorial files.




Published References

Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Tino di Camaino: A Sienese Sculptor of the Fourteenth Century (Paris: Pegasus, 1935), 138, (repro.), as Two Angels holding curtains, from the tomb of Philip of Taranto or that of Giovanni of Durazzo.

Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Italian Gothic and Early Renaissance Sculptures (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1938), unpaginated, (repro).

John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1955).

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 57, (repro.), as Attendant Angel.

“Gallery Tour Booklet for Docents,” NAMA Department of Education (August 1969): 49.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 68, (repro.), as Attendant Angel (One of a Pair).

Anita F. Moskowitz, “Four Sculptures in Search of an Author: The Cleveland and Kansas City Angels and the Problem of the Bertini Brothers,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art I (The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996): 100, 112-14, (repro.), as Attendant Angels.

Dorothy Gillerman, Gothic Sculpture in America, vol. 2, The Museums of the Midwest (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 221-23, (repro.), as Two Angels.

Francesca Baldelli, Tino di Camaino (Morbio Inferiore, Switzerland: Selective Art, 2007), 334-35, 426, (repro.), as Angelo reggiodrappo.

Romuald Kaczmarek, Italianizmy: studia nad recepcją gotyckiej sztuki włoskiej w rzeźbie Środkowo-Wschodniej Europy (koniec XIII-koniec XIV wieku) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2008), 217, 339n803, (repro.), as Aniol odchylający kotarę.

 

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