Master of the Fiesole Epiphany

Baron Michele Lazzaroni (1863-1934), Paris;

With Joseph Duveen, New York;

With John Levy Galleries, New York, by 1930;

From whom acquired by Oscar. B. Cintas (1887-1957), New York;

His estate sale, New York, Parke Bernet, 26 April 1963, lot 6 (as Cosimo Rosselli);

Where acquired by Acquavella Galleries, New York;

From whom acquired by the family of the current collectors, 1965.

Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, Grandes Maestros, 5 November - 17 December 1967 (lent by the Altamirano-Otero Silva Collection, Caracas).

B. Berenson, Italian Paintings of the Renaissance, Oxford 1932, p. 492 (as Cosimo Rosselli);

Connoisseur (August 1963), p. 263, reproduced fig. 8 (as Rosselli);

B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, London 1963, vol. I, p. 207 (as Rosselli);

Grandes Maestros, exhibition catalogue, Caracas 1967, n.p., cat. no. 3, reproduced (as Rosselli);

E. Fahy, Some Followers of Domenico Ghirlandajo, New York and London 1976, p. 170 (as Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

N. Pons, “Una bottega fiorentina di pittura nella seconda metà del XV secolo: Jacopo del Sellaio e compagni,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rome, La Sapienza 1992, p. 66, reproduced pl. 135 (as Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

E. Fahy, “The Este Predella Panels and Other Works by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany,” in Nuovi Studi 6/7 (2001/2002), p. 24 (as Master of the Fiesole Epiphany);

C. Daly, "Thinking Through a Tondo by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany," in Journal of the Walters Art Museum 77 (2024), under Appendix II (as Master of 1493).

Active in and around Florence during the final decades of the fifteenth century, the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany worked in a stylistic idiom closely aligned with Domenico Ghirlandaio, while also demonstrating an awareness of the pictorial language of Jacopo del Sellaio and Cosimo Rosselli, to both of whom the present panel was attributed in the early twentieth century.  Everett Fahy first delineated the artistic personality of this anonymous Florentine master, assembling a coherent corpus around an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi with Saints Francis, Paul, and John the Baptist, painted circa 1490 for the Benedictine convent of the Murate in Florence, now in the church of San Francesco, Fiesole. Since Fahy’s foundational study, more than one hundred works have been attributed to the artist, whose identity remains unresolved but whose stylistic profile is increasingly well defined.