Bernardo Daddi’s narrative flair is evident in the everyday gesture of Mary who, after bathing and swaddling the Christ Child, is now lovingly laying him in the manger: a Giottoesque iconographic detail widely present in Daddi’s works, and not only those of his late maturity.

The Nativity is set in a stable whose wooden supports and thatched roof are visible, located in a rocky landscape. Mary is seated next to the manger, in which she gently lays the Christ Child, accompanied by the ox and the ass. Two hosts of angels, five on the right and five on the left, enter the picture, celebrating the birth of the Saviour.

The small panel, which has been cut at the top and bottom, but not the sides, presents vertical veining and must have been part of the left door of a triptych that could be closed. The painted surface is in fairly good condition, especially the rose-pink and milky flesh tones; the threads of oil gilding on the angels’ robes and wings can still be admired, while those on Mary’s robe and mantle are more abraded. The decoration of the aureoles is somewhat basic: those of the angels have a single line of dots along the outer edge, that of Mary two lines of dots with stamped rosettes in between. The cross on the nimbus of the Christ Child is simply “drawn” with a stylus and the arms of the cross are embellished with a small stamped double circle. The precious texture emerges in the pastel colours of the robes of the angels, who are arranged in a mirroring manner but whose poses are reversed; the intense blue of Mary’s mantle is enlivened by the translucent lining created with verdigris, now oxidised;¹ the warm orangey glazes on the robe are richer in the areas of shade and paler in the foreground.

The painting was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti on the Milanese market.² It had previously belonged to the art historian Bernard Berenson. He had given it to Nicky Mariano, from whom it had passed to her sister, Baroness Alda von Anrep, in Milan, and then to the baroness’s son Cecil, who still owned it in 1963,³ but not in 1965.⁴ The first critical mention of the work was made by Berenson, and its inclusion in Bernardo Daddi’s catalogue was subsequently accepted by various critics.⁵ Recently Carl Strehlke⁶ posited that the small panel comes from a triptych, the right door of which remains in the Berenson Collection (Villa I Tatti); it has the Crucifixion on the inside and St Christopher on the outside, and was to be completed above by an Annunciation that is now in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne (inv. no. 971), already associated with the Cerruti panel by Boskovits.⁷ This hypothesis is lent credence by the identical width of the fragments and their stylistic similarity, and also, we might add, by the use of the same rosetta stamp on the aureoles of the pious women to the left of the Cross in the Crucifixion.

The immensity of Bernardo Daddi’s oeuvre and the serial production of this type of artefact in his workshop, invite caution. In any event, a comparison with other pieces – like the dated works in the Museo del Bigallo (1333) and Courtauld Institute (1338), and also the one in the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg – suggest that the stable of the Nativity occupied the central, and not the upper, part of the door, and that above it there must have been a simplified Announcement to the Shepherds, with just one figure above the roof, looking up at the angel at top right, while below the rocky landscape would have been extended to accommodate the figure of St Joseph.⁸

Bernardo Daddi’s narrative flair is evident in the everyday gesture of Mary who, after bathing and swaddling the Christ Child, is now lovingly laying him in the manger: a Giottoesque iconographic detail widely present in Daddi’s works, and not only those of his late maturity. In fact, this small Nativity should be dated to slightly earlier than the second half of the 1330s proposed by Strelhke, on the strength of the still incisive shadows – reminiscent of his early apprenticeship with the so-called “fronda giottesca” or Giotto group – and certain outstandingly expressive details painted with a finely pointed brush, such as the straight hair of the donkey’s mane and the hay in the manger.

[Giovanni Giura]

¹ The detail appears unaltered in the Daddi altarpiece now in the Courtauld Institute, London.

² From Marco Voena, according to an oral communication from Annalisa Polesello Ferrari.

³ Berenson 1963, p. 55.

⁴ Wildenstein, The Art of Painting in Florence and Siena from 1250 to 1500, London 1965, p. 5, lot 4.

⁵ Among others, Boskovits 1984.

⁶ C. B. Strehlke, in Strehlke, Brüggen Israëls 2015.

⁷ M. Boskovits, in Offner 1989, p. 206 note 1.

⁸ For a summary of this iconographic scheme in Bernardo Daddi’s works, see: M. Boskovits in Offner 1989, pp. 46-47; A. Tartuferi, in Florence 2005, pp. 75-76, cat. 11.