The Annunciation

Workshop of Benedetto Briosco (Italian, ca. 1460-after 1514)

Workshop of Tomaso Cazzaniga (Italian, active ca. 1477-1504)

Dateafter 1484

MediumMarble with gilding

DimensionsOverall: 24 7/8 × 24 3/4 × 6 5/8 inches (63.17 × 62.87 × 16.84 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Object number51-29/1

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

European Art

Terms

Exhibition History

The Art of the Renaissance Craftsman, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, May 1937, no. 3.

Eighteenth Loan Exhibition of Old Masters: Italian Gothic and Early Renaissance Sculptures, The Detroit Institute of Arts, January 7-February 20, 1938, no. 85.

Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, CA, 1939-1940, no. 228, as by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo.

The Sforza Court: Milan in the Renaissance 1450-1535, Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin, TX, October 27-December 18, 1988; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, January 18-March 12, 1989; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, April 16-June 4, 1989, no cat.

Gallery Label

This relief and its companion piece, The Presentation in the Temple (51-29/2), are two of five narratives made for the tomb of Pier Francesco Visconti, Count of Saliceto, who died April 30, 1484. The elaborate sepulchre occupied the left hand wall of the family burial chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Milan, until it was dismantled sometime after 1685 and the components dispersed among collections in both Europe and North America. The surviving dedicatory plaque names both Briosco and Cazzaniga as the sculptors of the tomb; because their respective styles have never been clearly distinguished, the reliefs are somewhat generically attributed to their common workshop. The five narratives would have decorated the ends and one long side of the Visconti sarcophagus.

Provenance

Santa Maria del Carmine, Milan, after 1484 [1];

Vercellino Visconti, Milan [2];

By inheritance to Prince Belgioioso, Milan;

By inheritance to Prince Luigi Alberico Trivulzio (1868-1938), Milan, by 1937;

With Jacob Hirsch, New York, stock no. 357, as by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, by March 24, 1937-1951 [3];

Purchased from Hirsch by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1951.

NOTES:

[1] From the tomb of Pier Francesco Visconti, Count of Saliceto (d. 1484). This relief, and The Presentation in the Temple (51-29/2), are part of a group of five with the same provenance: two others are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (nos. 1952.5.91 and 1952.5.92); and one is in the Cleveland Museum of Art (no. 1928.863). The provenance of these reliefs is described in detail in Ulrich Middeldorf, Sculptures from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools, XIV-XIX Century (London: Phaidon Press, 1976), 55-57.

[2] For the descent of the reliefs through the Visconti, Belgioioso and Trivulzio families, Middeldorf cites Diego Sant’Ambrogio, “Dello stemma sopravanzato nel Palazzo del Broletto del conte Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola,” Archivio Storico Lombardo 18 (June 30, 1891), 403 n.1 as giving “a plausible account of the descent of the reliefs through these families by inheritance, without giving genealogical details.”

[3] According to a letter from Jacob Hirsch to Bernard Berenson, March 24, 1937, Berenson Library Photo Archive, Villa I Tatti, Florence, copy in NAMA curatorial files.

Published References

The Art of the Renaissance Craftsman , exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1937), 18-19, (repro.).

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

Art: Official Catalog, Golden Gate International Exposition , exh. cat. (San Francisco, CA: Recorder Printing & Publishing Co., 1940), 17.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts , 4^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 64, (repro.).

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, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 85, (repro.), as Annunciation.

Ulrich Middeldorf, Sculptures from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools XIV-XIX Century (London: Phaidon, 1976), 55-56n10, as Annunciation.

Ellen Longsworth, “Benedetto da Briosco, Tommaso Cazzaniga, and the Visconti di Saliceto Monument,” Studies in Late Quattrocento Sculpture, vol. 2 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1992).

Ellen L. Longsworth, “The so-called ‘Monumento to Camillo Borromeo’,” Arte Lombarda, no. 100 (1992): 68n15, as Annunciation.

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 147, (repro.), as The Annunciation.

Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 55, (repro.), as The Annunciation.

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