The Way to Calvary

Andrea di Bartolo’s panel bearing a bustling and vibrantly colored depiction of Christ’s procession to Calvary, carrying the cross upon which he would soon be crucified, originally belonged to a predella dedicated to scenes from Christ’s Passion. The artist’s lively approach to this dramatic narrative was clearly influenced by Lippo Memmi’s fresco of the same subject in the Collegiata in San Gimignano, painted around 1340, which was itself in turn inspired by Simone Martini’s panel of 1335 depicting the same subject, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Indeed, throughout Andrea di Bartolo’s career, the artist looked closely at the models offered by his Sienese predecessors, especially when painting Passion scenes, though always rendering them in a distinctive visual language instantly recognisable as his own. Similar adaptations of the Lippo and Simone’s precedents may be found in other Way to Calvary scenes by Andrea di Bartolo, including the panel in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and in a predella panel of his altarpiece for the Duomo in Tuscania.

The attribution of the present panel was first published by Bernard Berenson (op. cit.). While Laurence Kanter (op. cit.) attempted to give the work to Andrea’s son Giorgio d’Andrea di Bartolo, the group of paintings Kanter ascribed to this documented but little-known figure have since been returned to the late career of Andrea. At the same time, however, Kanter produced a definitive reconstruction of the predella to which the present panel belonged. Reading from left to right, it consisted of the Last Supper (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna), the Betrayal of Christ (formerly in the collection of Edoardo Ruffini, Rome), the present panel with the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio), the Deposition, the Resurrection, and the Descent to Limbo (all formerly in the Ruffini collection). Altogether, the panels would have formed the base of an imposing altarpiece, with a width of around 290 centimeters.

As noted by Gaudenz Freuler (written communication) the predella series to which the present panel belonged can be seen as a reinterpretation of the artist’s earlier predella for the large altarpiece in Tuscania, which can be dated between 1410-15. The Tuscania panels themselves anticipated another predella with a Passion series dated around 1415-20, now divided between the Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza, Madrid (the Way to Calvary mentioned above), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the Crucifixion), the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (the Lamentation), the Walters Art Gallery (the Resurrection), and a Betrayal of Judas (on the Paris art market in 1972). Both of these series stand as precursors to the one to which the present panel once belonged, likely executed at the end of Andrea di Bartolo’s career, prior to his death in 1429.

Freuler has proposed that the predella to which the present panel belonged was the base of an altarpiece painted by Andrea di Bartolo for San Domenico, Bologna, as the Last Supper from the predella series and a Coronation of the Virgin that Freuler associated with the complex, both now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, came from the Dominican church in that city during the Napoleonic suppression of religious houses. Earlier suggestions that the predella belonged to the artist’s altarpiece for Sant’Angelo in Vado could thus be ruled out, as that assemblage already includes a Coronation. (The San Domenico altarpiece is hypothetically reconstructed in Freuler 2007 (op. cit.)).

Andrea di Bartolo, together with various members of his family, enjoyed significant patronage on the part of the Dominican order, which included commissions not only in his native Siena, but also in Venice, Treviso, throughout the Veneto, and in Croatia. Freuler has suggested that the Bologna altarpiece might have been painted as the artist returned home to Siena in 1428 from a sojourn in Venice.