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Lot Essay
This is a key late work by one of the most successful painters of the second half of the quattrocento in Siena. A pupil of Vecchietta, himself significantly responsive to external influences, Benvenuto's development was forcefully affected by the advent in his native city of Liberale da Verona and Girolamo da Cremona, who settled there in turn in 1466 and 1470. Such dramatic late works as the Lamentation (Christiansen, op. cit., no. 63), datable to the 1480s, established that age only strengthened Benvenuto's dramatic gifts. Although allowance has to be made for its condition, the present altarpiece justifies Christiansen's statement that, of the Sienese of his generation:
'Benvenuto was the most successful in combining an interest in perspective and distinctly Renaissance decorative details with a typically Sienese feel for pattern and colour, creating works notable for the inventive compositions, their crisp, elegant design, and their brilliant landscape and architectural settings' (op. cit., p. 300).
Van Marle, followed by Fredericksen and Davisson, suggested that Benvenuto may have been assisted by his son, Gerolamo di Benvenuto, but the former's responsibility for the execution of this altarpiece has otherwise found unanimous acceptance.
The Virgin was the patron of Siena, and this no doubt helps to explain why many altarpieces of the Assumption were commissioned for churches in the Senese during the quattrocento. Benvenuto himself must have been aware of a number of these, including those by Vecchietta in the Duomo of Pienza (1461-2) and by Matteo di Giovanni from Asciano (1474, now in the National Gallery, London): he himself painted a fresco of the subject in the church of S.S. Fabiano e Sebastiano at Asciano. His son and sometime partner, Gerolamo di Benvenuto, painted a marginally larger altarpiece of the same iconography and format as the present work for the church of the Osservanza at Montalcino (Montalcino, Museo diocesano d'arte sacra), which is also dated 1498. Either father or son, if not both, must have been aware of the other's composition. Benvenuto's, in which the angels surround the Virgin in an implied semi-circle, is the more powerful. A revealing distinction between the two pictures is in the landscapes; Gerolamo places the action in a valley flanked by wooded hills, clearly in evocation of the country around Montalcino; Benvenuto's landscape, with its hillside town and cliff-shadowed domed sanctuary, falls away to the sea where ships ply between dramatic promontories in a setting no doubt thought appropriate for a work intended for Grosseto, which is less than ten miles from the coast. Despite the closeness of the association between father and son, the differences, both in style and detail, between their Assumptions of 1498 help to distinguish their individual development and to indicate that although in his sixties, and thus an old man by the standard of the times, Benvenuto remained a powerful and inventive master.
'Benvenuto was the most successful in combining an interest in perspective and distinctly Renaissance decorative details with a typically Sienese feel for pattern and colour, creating works notable for the inventive compositions, their crisp, elegant design, and their brilliant landscape and architectural settings' (op. cit., p. 300).
Van Marle, followed by Fredericksen and Davisson, suggested that Benvenuto may have been assisted by his son, Gerolamo di Benvenuto, but the former's responsibility for the execution of this altarpiece has otherwise found unanimous acceptance.
The Virgin was the patron of Siena, and this no doubt helps to explain why many altarpieces of the Assumption were commissioned for churches in the Senese during the quattrocento. Benvenuto himself must have been aware of a number of these, including those by Vecchietta in the Duomo of Pienza (1461-2) and by Matteo di Giovanni from Asciano (1474, now in the National Gallery, London): he himself painted a fresco of the subject in the church of S.S. Fabiano e Sebastiano at Asciano. His son and sometime partner, Gerolamo di Benvenuto, painted a marginally larger altarpiece of the same iconography and format as the present work for the church of the Osservanza at Montalcino (Montalcino, Museo diocesano d'arte sacra), which is also dated 1498. Either father or son, if not both, must have been aware of the other's composition. Benvenuto's, in which the angels surround the Virgin in an implied semi-circle, is the more powerful. A revealing distinction between the two pictures is in the landscapes; Gerolamo places the action in a valley flanked by wooded hills, clearly in evocation of the country around Montalcino; Benvenuto's landscape, with its hillside town and cliff-shadowed domed sanctuary, falls away to the sea where ships ply between dramatic promontories in a setting no doubt thought appropriate for a work intended for Grosseto, which is less than ten miles from the coast. Despite the closeness of the association between father and son, the differences, both in style and detail, between their Assumptions of 1498 help to distinguish their individual development and to indicate that although in his sixties, and thus an old man by the standard of the times, Benvenuto remained a powerful and inventive master.