Saint Peter
Michele Giambono·c. 1445/1450
Historical Context
Michele Giambono painted this Saint Peter around 1445-50, representing the late Gothic tradition in Venetian painting just before the transformative influence of Mantegna and the Bellini family. Giambono was a leading Venetian painter and mosaicist who maintained the ornate, decorative style of International Gothic even as Renaissance naturalism was spreading from Florence. His richly patterned surfaces and elegant figures represent the final flowering of medieval Venetian painting.
Technical Analysis
The tempera on poplar panel demonstrates Giambono's characteristically lavish use of gold and ornamental detail derived from his work as a mosaicist. The figure combines the elegant linear rhythm of International Gothic with the richer coloring specific to the Venetian tradition.
Provenance
Probably Marchese Galeazzo Dondi dall'Orologio, Padua, by 1871;[1] sold probably in the late 1800s and, in any case before 1912, to (Stefano Bardini [1836-1922], Florence);[2] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); purchased September 1931 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1939 to NGA. [1] There described by Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, _A History of Painting in North Italy, Venice, Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Ferrara, Milan, Friuli, Brescia, from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century_, 2 vols., London, 1871: 1:295 n. 1: "There are pictures in Padua which have the stamp of Gentile, and may for want of a better name be called by that of Nerito: ex.gr. Padua, Marchese Galeazzo Dondi Orologio, _St. Michael enthroned_ with a dragon under his feet, natural in pose. His dress is that of an ecclesiastic; with much embossment. The manner of the artist is a mixture of Guariento and Michele Giambono, perhaps a little better than that of the pictures by the latter. Were not our attention called to Nerito, we should say this was a work by Giambono... Further _St. John the Baptist_, _St. Peter_, and a _bishop_, oblong panels, in possession of Conte [sic] Galeazzo Dondi-Orologio." On the Dondi Dall'Orologio family, see Vittorio Spreti, _Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana_, 9 vols., Milan, 1928-1931: 2:623. [2] Tancred Borenius (ed.) in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _A History of Painting in North Italy..._, 2nd ed., 3 vols., New York, 1912: 3 n. 1) was unable to trace the panel, which had probably already been sold by 1895. Another painting from the same altarpiece, _Saint Michael the Archangel Enthroned_ (Biblioteca Berenson at Villa I Tatti, near Florence), also from the Dondi dall'Orologio household, was by 1895 in London in the collection of Jean Paul Richter (see Bernard Berenson, _Venetian Painting, Chiefly before Titian, at the Exhibition of Venetian Art_, London, 1895: 6). [3] The bill of sale that includes the painting is dated 13 September 1931 (copy in NGA curatorial files); see also the Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/1882.
