This Crucifixion is the central panel of the predella of a dismembered polyptych. The figures in despair at Christ’s feet are St John on one side and the swooning Virgin in the arms of the holy women on the other. Behind them, the bearer of the sponge observes the crucified body. The scene is watched over by two groups of Roman soldiers (fig. 1), in which those on horseback with haloes can be identified as Longinus with a spear on the left and the centurion commanding the guard on Mount Calvary on the right. 

The slightly warped horizontal panel has been planned down at the sides to fit into the modern frame. A label on the back attests to previous ownership by the Parisian antiques dealer Edouard Bouet and the inscription “Gioto” to an early attribution to the father of Florentine painting.

The work was presented in the catalogue of the Sotheby’s auction in 1980 with an attribution to Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, whose name also appears on one photograph of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (no. 399840) and two in the archives of Miklós Boskovits,¹ where its location is given as the collection of Marino Dall’Oglio in Milan. In the subsequent Christie’s auction of 1987, Everett Fahy instead put forward an attribution to Spinello Aretino and dated the predella to the artist’s Pisan period. It is with this attribution, endorsed by Mauro Natale,² that the work is also recorded in the Fototeca Berenson (no. 104342). The Crucifixion was reattributed to Gerini more recently by Stefan Weppelmann.³ Comparison of this panel with the works by Spinello of similar size and subject matter, such as the panel from a predella known from a photograph in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute in London (present location unknown),⁴ reveals the markedly paratactic conception of the former, as exemplified by the fact that the figures juxtaposed on either side of the cross are equal in number even though this sometimes means affording only glimpses of their haloes or helmets. The arrangement of bystanders is instead more natural in the latter. Moreover, the figures in the Cerruti Crucifixion stand out against the background above all in virtue of the drawing and the somewhat condensed modelling of the drapery, while the latter presents gentler and more nuanced chromatic transitions accentuated by delicate highlights to emphasise the hair of the figures and the folds in their garments. 

In the Cerruti Crucifixion, the motif of the swooning Virgin concealing the face of the woman supporting her appears to be a replica of the one in the work by Spinello, to whom the panel may also have been attributed on the grounds of certain facial features, such as those of St John, which are softer than the generally stern and elongated visages of Gerini, to which the grim soldiers are more akin. These elements do not so much bear out the attribution to Spinello as suggest a date during the years of collaboration between the two artists. This relationship is documented by the polyptych for the high altar of the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, painted between 1399 and 1401 with the assistance of Lorenzo di Niccolò (Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia),⁵ and the fresco Scenes from the Passion in the sacristy of Santa Croce, which they must have painted side by side, probably during the 1390s.⁶ This is just one of the many artistic partnerships into which Gerini entered during his long career in order to complete his numerous commissions. 

Certain lapses in execution, such as the hurried decoration of the haloes, also suggest the involvement of what must have been the painter’s large and well-organised workshop, above all on comparison of this panel with a similar Crucifixion7 attributed to Gerini and dated in the first decade of the 15th century.⁸ 

[Silvia De Luca]

1 Florence, Archivio del Corpus della Pittura Fiorentina, Fondo Boskovits, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini.

2 Natale 1991, p. 250.

3 Weppelmann. 2011, p. 366.

4 Id., p. 240.

5 Boskovits, Parenti 2010, pp. 163-169.

6 G. Giura, “Spinello Aretino e la sacrestia di Santa Croce”, in Droandi 2016, pp. 73-84.

7 Sotheby’s, Old Master Paintings, London, 10 July 2003, lot 29.

8 Boskovits 1975, p. 412.