Resumen de Donatello misconosciuto: il 'San Lorenzo' per la Pieve di Borgo San Lorenzo
Donatello unacknowledged: the 'Saint Lawrence' for the Pieve in Borgo San Lorenzo.
This is the first publication, as an autograph work by Donatello, of a life-size terracotta bust of Saint Lawrence, formerly in the collections of the Princes of Liechtenstein (1889-2003), and it's proved here that it was orininally placed in the lunettte over the main door of the Pieve di San Lorenzo in Borgo San Lorenzo (Province of Florence), for which it must have been executed shortly before 1440 at the request of the rector Jacopo di Giovanni Ugolini.
In 1889 Johann II of Liechtenstein acquired the 'Saint Lawrence' from the art dealer Stefano Bardini in Florence; it was then dated to the 1400s but had no attribution or precise provenance. The purchase, approved in advance by Wilhem Bode, was part for an extensive acquisition campaign undertaken by the Prince in order to enrich his dynastic treasure with examples of sculpture and applied art from the Early Renaissance in Italy, and especially Tuscany, following the dictates of taste cultivated by Bode himself, and which passed fifteen years later into the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin. Bode believed that the 'Saint Lawrence' was a work close to Donatello, yet did not ascribe it directly to the master; but such a precise reference was upheld soon thereafter by scholars and curators in the circle of the Prince, who in 1904 sent the terracotta to Saint Petersburg, as a Donatello, for a temporary exhibition. After the deaths of Johann II in 1929, and his immediate heir, his brother Franz I in 1938, the 'Saint Lawrence', whose existence has never been noted in Donatello studies, gradually lost its prominence within the Liechtenstein collections (as was the case for all the other Italian Quattrocento sculptures), until it was deaccessioned in 2003 as a nineteenth-century, free imitation of a presumed work by Donatello.
Archival research carried out by the author, and published here, enables one to ascertain that Bardini obtained the 'Saint Lawrence' in 1888 from the Pieve in Borgo San Lorenzo, whose rector, Vittorio del Corona, was in direct contact with Domenico Magno, then Bardini's principal agent for acquisitions in the provinces. It is not immediately clear whether the passage of ownership took place by sale, with each party knowingly involved, or through the fraudulent substitution of the work by a terracotta copy which has ever since that year stood over the door of the Pieve, replacing the original, and which Bardini had made for this purpose. The disappearance of the XVth century 'Saint Lawrence', which no one has noticed until now, was facilitated by the fact that in 1888 the Pieve had for some time owned (and still does, in the interior of the church) another replica of the work, datable to the 1600s or 1700s; and since the 1888 copy was made after both the original (Liechtenstein) bust and its old replica, it seems likely that Bardini obtained the loan of both versions for some months (with the pretext of restoring the first one, weathered by the centuries), and that he then returned both the old copy and the new one to the priest, confusing him. On the same occasion Bardini must have had prepared another copy of the 'Saint Lawrence', based above all on the seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century replica, a work now housed in the Princenton University Art Museum, after passing through the collection of Edgar Speyer (1862-1932) in London as a piece by Luca della Robbia. The cunning dealer naturally sought to remove any trace of all these operations, which explains why Johann II bought the original -only a few months after its disappearance from Borgo- without any information regarding its provenance.
Significantly, between 1888 and the present at least two scholars, knowing nothing of the 'Saint Lawrence' that ended up in Vienna, have sought, unsuccessfully, to connect the two replicans that remained in Borgo with Donatello: Hans Semper (1892) fleetingly attributed the 1888 version to the master, while Ugo Procacci (1933), having understood that this was a modern copy, studied the older one.
A very substantial and potentially infinite series of comparisons with the secure oeuvre of Donatello demostrates that the 'Siant Lawrence' formerly owned by the Liechtenstein has the style and quality of an autograph work by the master. There are multiple reason why such parallels have escaped the realm of scholarship until now, the gravest of which is that in 1889, and then until 1957-58 (but even as late as 2003, when the Liechtenstein sale took place), another, far more celebrated terracotta bust, believed to be of Saint Lawrence or Saint Leonard, and located in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, was attributed to Donatello, entirely inappropiately. That work, however, is not only by Desiderio da Settignano, as was demostrated by scholarship in 1957-58 (H.W. Janson, M. Lisner), but it does not even represent the saint, instead being a portrait of the young James of Portugal, Cardinal Deacon of Sant'Eustachio (m. 1459), reused as a 'Saint Leonard' after his premature death. The author intends to offer definitive proof of this, point by point, elsewhere; but the fact that the presumed 'Saint Lawrence' by Desiderio is extraneous to the Florentine tradition of busts of the holy martyr, launched by Donatello himself with the Borgo-Liechtenstein terracotta, is quite clear when compared with other fifteenth-century examples of the kind, in Prato and San Giovanni Valdarno (themselves treated somewhat confusedly, again because of the presumed 'Saint Lawrence' by Desiderio and the disappearance of the true Donatello's 'Saint Lawrence' from Borgo).
A highly notable artifact, not only as progenitor of Renaissance busts of Saint Lawrence, but also as an extremely rare terracotta in the round by the hand of Donatello, the 'Saint Lawrence' formerly in Borgo San Lorenzo and later in the Liechtenstein collections can be dated for stylistic reason to the end of the 1430s. Its provenance from the portal of the Pieve directs one's search for patronage to the rector of that time; in 1437 the position was taken up by Florentine Jacopo di Giovanni Ugolini -that is, the only fifteenth-century "pievano" (in an illustrious sequence that included Leon Battista Alberti) who appears to have left a trace of himself in Borgo through artistic patronage. Hitherto an almost unknown figure in the history of art, Ugolini is shown to be an important member of the papal court of Eugenius IV, which resided in Florence during the period of the Borgo 'Saint Lawrence'; and together with Popes John XXIII, Martin V and Eugenius IV, Cardinal Rinaldo Brancaccio, and the Apostolic Secretaries and Abbreviators Bartolomeo Aragazzi and Giovanni Crivelli, Ugolini now enriches the array of great prelates who directly or indirectly engaged Donatello during the 1420s and 1430s as an eminent sculptor of the Roman Curia.
