An indisputable leader of late-Gothic painting in Bologna, who reached a qualitative peak between 1410 and 1420, Giovanni Falloppi was capable in his youth of visionary fantasies in which the potent neo-Giottesque and Burgundian style of Alberto da Campione and Antonio di Vincenzo was charged with fiery expressive power. 

The horizontally veined panel belonged to a predella, no other parts of which are known at present, most probably beneath a depiction of John the Baptist. The thin support is original and presents a break in the back corresponding to the position of the rompitratta, that is, the board normally attached perpendicularly to strengthen the projecting case of the predella. This was secured with a nail, now sawn off, to be seen 13.5 centimetres from the left-hand side. These boards were generally carefully distanced from each other, one on the central axis and two at the sides in a small-sized polyptych like this. It is therefore possible to suggest that the Baptist was located in the vicinity of the central panel, as is in any case normal given his pose as the forerunner pointing to Christ. Removal of the barba, that is, the raised section of gilded plaster on the original frame, has left highly uneven and fragmented remains visible on either side. A linear incision on all the edges appears to be later and connected with the modern reshaping of the panel. The patina has been lost on the surface in a number of places, especially on the figure of Herodias, but the gold leaf of the haloes and crowns and the silver of the knives, jugs and goblets remains intact together with the black varnish used for shadows and outlines after the fashion started in Venice. Black is also used for the arches of the banquet hall, the door and the small window of the prison as well as the line corresponding to the frame that delimited the pictorial surface on either side. 

The painting was owned by the antiques dealer Julius Böhler in Munich around 1957-61, when it was fancifully attributed to the Zavattari family by Giuseppe Fiocco. The present author published it in 2000, on the basis of an archival photo in black and white, with an attribution to Giovanni da Modena, whose stylistic characteristics can be discerned in every detail, albeit in an objective situation of general syntactical uncertainty. One of these is the bold line, following the jagged creases of the robes trailing on the ground and the outlines of rounded volumes, animated by his characteristic vigour in the sidelong gazes, like the pitying and slightly bewildered expression of Herod, and the sharp profiles, like that of Salome picking up the saint’s severed head and bearing it to the table. (This soft and fleshy female physiognomy is characteristic of the artist and related in some way also to his contact with Jacopo della Quercia, bearing comparison, for example, with his Ecclesia in the Cristo brachiale of 1420 in the chapel of the Dieci di Balia in San Petronio). 

An indisputable leader of late-Gothic painting in Bologna, who reached a qualitative peak between 1410 and 1420, Giovanni Falloppi was capable in his youth of visionary fantasies in which the potent neo-Giottesque and Burgundian style of Alberto da Campione and Antonio di Vincenzo was charged with fiery expressive power. In the last two decades of his long career, under the pressure of innovative approaches of very different naturalistic and illusive maturity, he must in some way have lost his original vigour and fallen back on a vernacular full of humour but increasingly marginal when seen in a broader and more balanced historical perspective. Feeble humour and awkward breaks of perspective are elements that this panel shares with the master’s very late works, as attested by the Eight Episodes in the Life of St Bernardino, identified by Fabio Bisogni in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, where it was incorrectly attributed to Michele di Matteo.¹ The master was in fact paid for the canvas in 1451, a year after the canonisation of the Sienese saint, by the Compagnia di San Bernardino of the church of San Francesco. No one before Bisogni had ever attributed it to Giovanni da Modena because it displays an objective degeneration of the painter’s pungent and powerful expressiveness into an etiolated, rambling kind of language, at a time when Paolo Uccello had already worked in Bologna and Donatello was working in Padua.² The predella panel therefore fits in well with the work of the previous decade, for example the clumsy Scenes from the Passion in Santo Stefano³ and the drawing with a study for The Three Dead Kings (Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, inv. no. C. 150)⁴, after the more telling frescoes for the nuptial chamber in the Passerino Tower of the Castle of Carpi, which are unquestionably his work, and the incisive panel The Marriage of the Virgin, formerly owned by Sambon in Paris but now lost, which could date rather from the fourth decade, where we find - albeit with a firmer hand - a way of emphasising the recesses of the architectural mouldings in the pendentives and cornices that is identical to what we see in the panel examined here. 

While Herod’s rosy palace is more like a somewhat precarious tenement, it does rekindle memories of the more impressive compositions of the series in the Bolognini Chapel, especially the scene of Herod Receiving the Magi, through details like the framing of the chamber between two piers crowned by large modillions, the foreshortening of the recesses in the wooden coffered ceiling and the minute crenellation at the top. Memories revealing that the artist is still Giovanni, albeit in his old age, are involuntarily triggered by the darting silhouette of the executioner, twisting as though in a dance, legs swaying, with a narrow waist, rounded breastplate and skirt, similar in all respects, albeit more slapdash and disjointed, to the execution of the pages that appear in the Sighting of the Star on Monte Vettore and Herod Receiving the Magi in the Bolognini Chapel of San Petronio (1411-12). 

Given these necessary preliminary considerations, we must in any case acknowledge the narrative freshness to be found also in the late work of Giovanni da Modena, glaringly anachronistic though it was in the period when Donatello cast the imposing holy theatre of the saint’s altar in bronze. In this predella panel, the story is picturesque and fragmented, juxtaposing the completed beheading, the brisk realism of the executioner sheathing his sword (an idea taken up by Pisanello in the lost fresco of St George sheathing his sword on the outer wall of the Pellegrini Chapel in Sant’Anastasia in Verona around 1436)⁵, and the unusual banquet for two with a sumptuously laid table on two shaky trestles, where the forthright gesture of a plump Herodias contrasts with the perplexity of Herod. 

Andrea De Marchi

¹ In Pavone, Pacelli 1981, p. 43.

² See G. A. Calogero, in Bologna 2014-15, pp. 210-211, cat. 17. As in all the other descriptions of the work, and as pointed out in vain by Strehlke 1988, no identification is provided of the scenes depicted.

³ See P. Cova, “Una testimonianza della tarda attività della bottega di Giovanni da Modena: l’Andata al Calvario e la Crocifissione nel complesso di Santo Stefano”, in Bologna 2014-15, pp. 111-133, whose attempt to attribute part of the execution of the Crucifixion to his son Cesare Falloppi cannot be endorsed.

⁴ See Melli 2006, pp. 30-35.

⁵ See H.-J. Eberhardt, “Sulle tracce degli affreschi scomparsi di Sant’Anastasia”, in Verona 1996, pp. 165-182.