MASTER OF THE STERBINI DIPTYCH (SECOND QUARTER 14TH CENTURY)

This refined panel forms part of a small group of works given to the Master of the Sterbini Diptych, a hand named after the work formerly owned by Giulio Sterbini (now Rome, Palazzo Venezia), whose collection was significant in both its scope and quality (see D. Farabulini, La pittura antica e moderna e la galleria del Cav. Giulio Sterbini, Rome, 1874). Probably a Greek master who worked in Venice and the south of Italy, he was active in the second and third quarters of the fourteenth century and was originally identified by Edward Garrison, who grouped four pictures, including this Madonna and Child, under ‘Adriatic School: Group C’ (op. cit.), reflecting the Adriatic influence that distinguished them from other Venetian panels of the time. The body of work was later expanded to include a triptych in the Museo Regionale, Messina, whose central Madonna and Child is close in composition to the present lot. In particular, the delicate handling of the folds here reveals an artist who managed to skilfully combine local Venetian duecento tradition with a marked Byzantine technique. Other proposals have been put forward as to the master’s origins: Miklós Boskovits (in a private communication at the time of the 2006 sale) suggested he may have been from Liguria and subsequently settled in the Veneto.
The panel was formerly owned by Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Saltwood, one of the leading figures in the British art world in the twentieth century. At the age of only thirty-one he was appointed Director of the National Gallery, London (1934-45), and also Surveyor of the King's Pictures (1934-44). He was a distinguished patron of the arts as well as an author, impresario and broadcaster. The landmark television series Civilisation, written and presented by Clark himself, in 1969, was one of the most influential arts programmes ever aired. He was also a collector in his own right, acquiring, mostly during the 1920s and ‘30s: ‘examples of almost every kind of artefact and almost every epoch’ (K. Clark, ‘Upper Terrace House: An Attempt to Keep Alive a Tradition in English Art’, House and Garden, II, no. 4, 1947, p. 27); and he noted that there were two kinds of collector: ‘those who aim at completing a series, and those who long to possess things that have bewitched them’ (K. Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait, London, 1974, p. 193).