Master of
San Jacopo a Mucciana

Looking at the back of the panel we can clearly distinguish the joints of the three wooden portions of which it is composed, two of which are almost the same size and one very small which, on the front, crosses the book hold by Christ. In the past, the inevitable movements of the wood have caused slight damage to the pictorial surface, as can also be seen in correspondence with the face of Christ, crossed by the junction of the two largest portions of the panel and also not free from minor abrasions. On the back there is also a wax seal, difficult to interpret, which perhaps could be that of the English Consulate of Northern Italy, when Turin was the capital.

         The medium size of the tondo allows us to hypothesize that it originally belonged to the cusp of a panel, which could have been a simple altarpiece for private devotion, or the central element of a triptych, with or without sides, or even of a polyptych. Less likely, in this case, is that it was a roundel at the top of a painted Crucifix, given the absence of any trace of anchoring on the back of the panel and the linearity of the external moulding.

The stylistic features of the panel refer to the Florentine culture of the late fourteenth century and in particular to the large circle of artists gravitating around Agnolo Gaddi and his workshop. More in-depth comparisons, both stylistic and morphological, lead us to suggest the attribution to the so-called Master of San Jacopo a Mucciana, a Florentine petite-maître who derives his name from the triptych (fig. 1), identified for the first time by Richard Offner, once in the destroyed church of the same name, which bears the date of 1 January 1398 (modern style, 1399), today in the Giuliano Ghelli Museum of San Casciano Val di Pesa. The painter’s catalogue was subsequently expanded above all by Federico Zeri[2] and by Miklós Boskovits. A more recent examination of his activity is due to the writer.