Mallorcan or Sardinian School, circa 1415-1430

With Galerie Saint Michel, Marseille, by 1949;

Louis-Pierre Bresset (1902-1988), Château de la Rochelambert, Saint-Paulien, by 1952;

John and Johanna Bass, New York, by 1962;

By whom bequeathed to the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, 1963 (inv. no. 63.37).

Marseille, Galerie Saint Michel, Arts du Moyen Age, 1949, no. 15;

Marseille, Musée Cantini, L'Art du Moyen Age dans les Collections Marseillaises, 20 May - 20 June 1952, no. 21 (lent by Louis-Pierre Bresset);

Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Human Rites, 25 June - 3 October 2010.

L'Art du Moyen Age dans les Collections Marseillaises, exhibition catalogue, Marseille 1952, p. 18, cat. no. 21 (as Central French School, 15th century);

The John and Johanna Bass Collection at Miami Beach, Florida, Miami 1973, p. 14, cat. no. 28 (as Aragonese School);

M. Russell, in Paintings and Textiles of the Bass Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection, M. Russell (ed.), Miami 1990, p. 32, reproduced (as Attributed to French or Spanish School, second half of the 15th century).

Produced in early fifteenth-century Mallorca or Sardinia, this refined panel depicts the Madonna of Humility, an iconographic type distinguished by the Madonna’s placement on the ground, or in this case on rather elaborate white cushions, rather than enthroned. The Madonna tenderly supports the Christ Child, who holds on to his mother’s breast while gesturing outward. Behind them, two angels hold aloft a scarlet, checkered cloth of honor. The polyptych’s borders feature full-length saints and martyrs, including a Dominican nun in a white habit and a male saint in red holding a sword, perhaps Saints Paul or Julian.

The work reflects the dynamic artistic exchange between Catalonia and Aragon that flourished during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The panel's refined linearity and rich surface ornamentation recall Joan Massana’s Santa Maria del Camí , executed circa 1395 (Town Hall, Santa Maria del Camí), while its composite structure and typology bear similarities with Francesco Comes’ Virgin and Child, circa, 1390 (Pollensa Museum, Mallorca). The panel also finds close parallels in the Master of Alaró’s Virgin and Child, produced in the early fifteenth century, and today in the Llullian Archaeological Society, and the slightly later Virgin and Child with Saints Blaise, Magdalene, Lucia, and Anthony Abbot in the Church of Montsió.

We are grateful to Antoni José i Pitarch, Professor of Art History at the University of Barcelona, for his assistance cataloguing this work.