Madonna and Child with the Young St John and Two Angels

The panel depicting the Madonna and Child with the Young St John and Two Angels is undoubtedly one of the finest devotional pieces painted by Jacopo di Arcangelo, known as “del Sellaio”, during his career. A pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi who subsequently worked in the style of Sandro Botticelli, Sellaio was a very prolific painter whose work was much in demand among the numerous Florentine confraternities of which he was a member and among well-to-do citizens for the decoration of precious furnishings. As well as being of historic and artistic value, this painting also recalls some of the most dramatic events of the last century, being closely tied to the expulsion of the Unger family from Austria and the seizure of its art collection by the Nazi regime. Early in 1936, it was purchased as a work by Raffaellino del Garbo by the Viennese art collector Gustav Arens and was immediately sent for restoration to the Akademie der bildenden Künste, where it remained until after the death of Gustav Arens in March 1936. The restoration was carried out under the supervision of the art historian Professor Robert Eigenberger, who changed the attribution of the painting to Sellaio. Upon completion of the restoration, the painting was transferred directly to Esslinggasse 17 in the centre of Vienna, the apartment of Gustav’s older daughter Anna Unger, heiress of half of her father’s large art collection. It held pride of place in the Ungers’ spacious dining room, to the particular delight of the Ungers’ younger daughter. Within less than two years, Austria was annexed to Germany.

In April 1938, exactly one month after the Anschluss, Anna’s husband Friedrich was arrested on spurious political charges, and all the Ungers’ assets in Austria were expropriated. Two months later, Friedrich was saved from the Dachau concentration camp by a large ransom payment from outside the country to the Gestapo. His release coincided with the whole family’s expulsion from Austria. A second ransom to the Gestapo from the Ungers’ asylum in Switzerland allowed the contents of the Vienna apartment, including the paintings, to be shipped to Paris, where the Ungers were about to relocate, but only after the Kunsthistorische Museum extracted two paintings as a so-called “donation”. The Sellaio and the Tintoretto paintings barely escaped a similar last-minute seizure. The Ungers were unable to retrieve the shipment from the Paris customs warehouse for lack of a French residency permit. Ultimately, Friedrich and Anna and their daughters immigrated to the United States.

Their efforts to move the paintings to New York continued to be stymied by the French bureaucracy, while the Ungers patiently paid storage fees and sought ways to ship the paintings through neutral countries. They gave up on these efforts only after the US entry into the war cut off communications with Europe entirely. It was not until the liberation of France that the Ungers learned of the implacable action of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the office responsible for confiscating Jewish-owned assets and property in the occupied countries: while all the Ungers’ other possessions disappeared without a trace, the looted paintings were carefully labelled by the Germans, then sent by train to various destinations further East. Fortunately for the Ungers, the American Armed Services recovered the bulk of the paintings around the end of World War II and restored them to the Ungers after the war.

The paintings were displayed in the Ungers’ home in Berkeley, California, until the death of Anna Unger in 1994. However, the Sellaio and the Tintoretto, which were probably looted jointly, could not be recovered. For two decades, Friedrich and Anna Unger sought to track down these two works, which were itemised in an official French listing of art works looted by the Germans in France. It was subsequently ascertained that the Sellaio was at the Van Diemen-Lilienfeld Gallery in New York for an indeterminable period of time after the end of World War II and that it re-emerged in November 1974, when it was put up for auction by the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne (lot 1689), attributed to Francesco Botticini. Eleven years later, it found its way to the Christie’s office in London with the correct attribution, where it was sold on behalf of a Swiss collector with the mediation of the Harari & Johns gallery. In 1987, Rivier¹ mentioned it in the pages of L’Oeil as being in Florence with the antique dealer Gianfranco Luzzetti, from whom Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased it in that same year to add to his collection, being completely unaware of its original provenance. Friedrich Unger had died in 1954, his wife Anna died forty years later, both of them ignorant of their painting’s fate. Only in 1999 did their surviving daughter Grete discover the Sellaio’s sale at the 1985 auction, without being able to pin down its fate beyond its sale to Luzzetti. The Tintoretto remains in limbo.

Although undocumented restoration work to remedy the fractures and the warping of the support led to a traumatic marouflage, with the exception of a few areas of loss and abrasion, the paint film is still in an excellent condition. This is confirmed by the preservation of some of the gold decoration on the Virgin’s cuffs, hems, neckline and belt, and by the understated gold highlighting on the ripples in the fabric. The unusual arrangement of the figures, as well as the armrest of the faldistorium in the bottom right corner and the unresolved support beneath the Child’s feet, betray the fact that the panel draws inspiration from a sculptural work.² The tempera painting shares Jesus’s upright pose, with his left hand slightly stiffened, fingers outstretched, and his little body with its visible rolls of fat, and, to a lesser extent, that of the Virgin, whose embrace is much tighter and closer, with the marble relief now at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello (sculpture inv. 116) by Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. The success of this type of work within the sphere of Verrocchio, under whom Ferrucci worked, is demonstrated by the existence of a large number of sculptures and paintings, including the Madonna and Child in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie, no. 108), also by Andrea, and the one in Frankfurt (Städel Museum, no. 702), which can be attributed to the Umbrian artist Piermatteo di Amelia. It is interesting to note that Sellaio seems to have made a habit of borrowing individual ideas from more important artists and gained notoriety for redeveloping and reusing them over and over again in his compositions. The markedly Botticellian flavour of these two melancholy angels is therefore no surprise, and they feature again in countless tondos with the Madonna and Child surrounded by exedra with analogous angelic creatures. Nor is it surprising that the Virgin’s silhouette is so elongated, again the result of careful reflection on contemporary texts by Filipepi.

The half-figure of the young St John also lends itself to comparison with works by Sellaio’s close entourage: see, for example, the painting formerly in the Lazzaroni collection in Paris (Fototeca Zeri, inv. 41399, 41400) and another one sold at Sotheby’s auction in Monaco on 14 February 1983. The reference to a composition by Verrocchio,³ the dry and precise brushstrokes, along the lines of Botticelli, but yielding and refined in their fleshing out of firm, smooth skin, the veil in which we can still glimpse a distant echo of Lippi, and the fresh and palpitating St John, who recalls certain works by Ghirlandaio, suggest that the work can be dated to the first half of the 1480s. This date, between the Pietà formerly in Berlin, painted in around 1483, and the Crucifixion with Saints at San Frediano in Cestello (c. 1490), is supported by the delicate face of the Virgin, her long and elegant hands, and the unique focus on certain material effects, such as the gauzy shirt worn by the Infant and the glistening ecstatic gaze of the young St John, who is perhaps the most sanguine and lifelike figure in the entire work.

[Davide Civettini]

¹ Rivier 1987, pp. 49, 53.

² Pons 1992, pp. 33, 105-106, 358.

³ Ibid.