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Cola di Fuccio (Maestro di Sant’Eugenio)
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Cola di Fuccio (Maestro di Sant’Eugenio), Italy, Siena, c. 1340
Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon in an Initial ‘B’ from a Choir Book
184 × 140 mm
Cola di Fuccio (Maestro di Sant’Eugenio)
Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon in an Initial ‘B’ from a Choir Book
Italy, Siena, c. 1340
184 × 140 mm
$125000.00
This vibrant cutting of Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon in an initial ‘B’ from Psalm 102:20, “Benedicite dominum omnes angeli” (Bless the Lord, all ye his angels), illustrates the Mass of the Dedication of Saint Michael the Archangel. As the story goes, the military saint and the weigher of souls at the Last Judgment, Michael, was one day called upon to fight against Satan, who had transformed himself into a dragon.
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This vibrant cutting of Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon in an initial ‘B’ from Psalm 102:20, “Benedicite dominum omnes angeli” (Bless the Lord, all ye his angels), illustrates the Mass of the Dedication of Saint Michael the Archangel celebrated on September 29 from the Proper of the Saints in a Gradual. As the story goes, the military saint and the weigher of souls at the Last Judgment, Michael, was one day called upon to fight against Satan, who had transformed himself into a dragon. Of course, Saint Michael was triumphant. Dressed in voluminous pink, green, and yellow robes, Michael twists sideways, his drapery dramatically fluttering behind him, as he thrusts a spear into the head of a fearsome dragon that curls around the lower bar of the ‘B.’ Saint Michael’s majestic, brilliant orange wings echo the vivid orange acanthus in the initial. The artist, Cola di Fuccio, conveys dynamic movement in a three dimensional setting with just a single figure staged against a rich blue lapis lazuli ground. The mastery of line, harmonious use of color, decorative details of the garment, and dramatic chiaroscuro characterize the illuminator at the top of his game.

In 1982, Giulietta Chelazzi Dini recognized this cutting as belonging to the group of miniatures from the dismembered Gradual now attributed to Cola di Fuccio (Siena 1982). Wrongly attributed to a follower of Niccolò di ser Sozzo Tegliacci, it was published in an exhibition of Italian painting from Florence and Siena in 1965 in London, where it was on loan from Sir Kenneth Clark of Saltwood Castle. Since then, the cutting has been extensively published and unanimously accepted as a member of the group. Although the cutting was not in the sale of Clark’s miniatures in 1984 (as others also were not), it was likely bound in the two-volume album he composed of cuttings he acquired in 1930 from the heirs of the Scottish antiquary James Dennistoun as “Uncle Denny’s scraps.” Between 1836 and 1839 Dennistoun had traveled through Italy, purchasing miniatures which he put into his own single-volume album of “miniature illuminations” to illustrate “the various schools from 1000 to the days of Raffael after which this, the parent of oil painting, fell into disuse.” (Signorello 2022) Regrettably neither dismantled album exists any longer.

 

The striking cutting of Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon joins a coherent group of others now in the Musée du Louvre, the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, the Free Library in Philadelphia, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Comites Latentes Collection on deposit in Basel, and the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne. They come from an Augustinian Gradual of the Proper of the Saints and the Proper of Time, of which the original volumes are now housed in Viterbo (for the Augustinian manuscripts, see Viterbo, Biblioteca centrale della Provincia Agostiniana d’Italia and Manus Online). There are a series of 15 manuscripts and 116 recorded fragments from them. Our miniature was probably on f. 6 of the Proper of the Saints in the Gradual (MS 15, fragment 1; Signorello 2022). In the same volume were found the Annunciation now in the Louvre (fragment 28, inv. 1331, MS 15, f. 45v) and Christ Appearing to the Apostles (fragment 27, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu, inv. 1182, MS 15, f. 32). The related miniature of Saint Michael in Cava dei Tirreni shows our artist at an earlier moment in his career.

provenance

Siena, Chiesa di Sant’Agostino;

Edinburgh, Scotland, James Dennistoun (1803–1844);

Auckland Castle, County Durham, England, Isabella Caroline Hensley-Henson (1869–1940);

United Kingdom, Saltwood Castle, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903–1983); exhibited 1965, The Art of Painting in Florence and Siena from 1250 to 1500, “lent by Sir Kenneth Clark”;

France, Private Collection.

literature

London 1965, p. 50, no. 87, fig. 86;

Bologna 1977;

Siena 1982, pp. 222–28;

Avignon 1983, pp. 201–14, cat. 74–8;

Lugano-Castagnola 1991, pp. 39–40;

De Benedictis in Boskovits 1994, pp. 21–25;

Labriola, De Benedictis, and Freuler 2002, pp. 107–13;

Freuler in Bollati 2004, pp. 705–708;

Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York 2003, pp. 51–52, cat. 28;

Freuler 2009;

Freuler in Paris 2011, cat. 17, pp. 47–49;

De Benedictis in Medica, Toniolo, and Martoni 2016, pp. 133–38, cat. 17a-d;

Freuler in Hindman and Toniolo 2021, pp. 134–35, 221–29;

Gazzillo 2021;

Gazzillo 2022; Signorello 2022; Manus 2025

learn

Cola di Fuccio (Maestro di Sant’Eugenio)

Italy, Siena, active c. 1316–1347
 
In 1977, Ferdinando Bologna first isolated a group of miniatures together with those in a Choir Book in Badia di Cava di Tirreni near Naples (Biblioteca Statale del Monumento Nazionale della Badia di Cava, Antifonario Sen. B) from the Benedictine monastery of Sant’Eugenio in Siena. He attributed them to two artists, whom he named the First and Second Masters of Sant’Eugenio, defining the first, more archaic hand as responsive to the impact of Duccio and influenced by the monumental art of Pietro Lorenzetti and the second, later hand as related to the young Lippo Vanni (active c. 1340–1375). Successive research by Cristina De Benedictis, Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, Pia Palladino, and Gaudenz Freuler has better defined the oeuvre and clarified the identity of the artist. Freuler and Palladino merged the two hands, which they considered to represent a distinct personality responsible for a homogeneous body of work. Freuler added to the oeuvre a 1329 biccherna cover (Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum, inv. K9222), suggesting the illuminator was also active as a painter. He further proposed the identity of the artist as Cola di Fuccio, documented as collaborating in the 1340s with Lippo Vanni on a series of Antiphonal volumes for the Collegiata of San Gimignano. Freuler further suggested a master-pupil relationship between Cola di Fuccio and Lippo Vanni, which would account for the stylistic similarities of the two artists. Recently, Agata Gazzillo has added to the artist’s corpus a hitherto unpublished volume with five miniatures (Florence, Santa Maria del Carmine, Gradual); she argues that the manuscript may have been intended for the Benedictine monastery of Saints Salvatore and Cirino in the Abbadia a Isola near Monteriggioni in the Province of Siena. Over the last four decades, scholars have expanded the key group of miniatures initially signaled by Bologna in 1977; cuttings from an Augustinian Gradual, these miniatures, of outstanding quality, are critical to our understanding of the artist. Thanks to Freuler, succeeded by detailed studies by Gazzillo (2022; 2023), this group – now totaling ten in number – is said to come from a Gradual that is missing many of its miniatures (Viterbo, Biblioteca centrale della Provincia Agostiniana d’Italia; Signorello 2022). The significant body of work leading up to the career of Niccolò di ser Sozzo Tegliacci (1334–1363), refines our understanding of the evolution of Sienese manuscript illumination after Duccio in the first half of the fourteenth century.

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