On view
Saint Bartholomew,
ca. 1497
In 2001, I started working as a provenance researcher at the Princeton University Art Museum. Museums were just beginning to examine the Nazi-era ownership histories of their holdings, and mine was one of the first specialized jobs at an American institution. The Museum had recently settled a claim for Pinturicchio’s Saint Bartholomew, which had been in the collection of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, a Jewish Italian businessman who lived in France, and was forcibly auctioned in occupied Paris in 1941. Saint Bartholomew reemerged at a New York gallery in 1994, when the Museum acquired it in good faith. The ownership resolution the Museum reached with the Gentili di Giuseppe heirs in 2001 was one of the first of its kind. To me, this painting represents the start of a new era of collecting ethics at American museums—and the very beginnings of provenance research, a field that has grown rapidly since.
Victoria Reed, Sadler Senior Curator for Provenance, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
More Context
Handbook Entry
The apostle Bartholomew appears only briefly in the Bible, but his cult became popular. He was said to have traveled through Armenia and India, spreading Christ’s word, and to have been flayed alive. In this painting by the Perugia native Pinturicchio (literally, "clumsy little painter"), Bartholomew holds the instrument of his martyrdom. Calm in the face of fate, he trains a reverent gaze on a Bible or prayer book. His demeanor is exemplary, reminding the viewer that concentration and forbearance are required of the faithful. Attention to the image is encouraged through texture (the gold and silver relief of the halo and knife) and color (the background cloth of honor, decorated with interlocking gold crosses and foliate designs against a green background, turned slightly to reveal its complementary red reverse). Bartholomew’s book is of rich materials, with slender braided tassels and a stamped gold pattern on its cover — details of particular significance for this patron saint of leather workers.
More About This Object
Information
ca. 1497
Collection Prince Marc Antonio Borghese, Rome, 1872-1891; [Paolo Borghese Sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, July 2-3, 1891, lot 124]; bought by Fauchez. Édouard Aynard Collection, Lyon. [M. Édouard Aynard Sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, December 1-4, 1913, lot 63, ill. p. 78]. Federico Gentili di Giuseppe (1868-1940), Paris, by 1917 [1]; seized and sold by order of the French courts under the Vichy government during Nazi occupation [2]; [Hotel Drouot, Paris, April 23-24, 1941, lot 61]. French & Company, Inc., New York; sold to the Princeton University Art Museum, 1994.
[1] See: Charles Oulmont, Collection M.-F. Gentili Di Giuseppe (Paris: Goupil et Cie, 1917).
[2] In 2001, the Princeton University Art Museum reached an agreement with the heirs of Gentili di Giuseppe which allowed the Museum to retain the painting.
- Corrado Ricci, Pintoricchio (Bernardino di Betto of Perugia) his life, work, and time, (London: W. Heinemann; Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1902)., p. 146-47, 239
- J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, A history of painting in Italy, Umbria, Florence and Siena, from the second to the sixteenth century, (London: J. Murray, 1903-14)., Vol. 5: p. 416, note 4
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Bernard Berenson, The central italian painters of the Renaissance, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909).
, p. 228 - Charles Oulmont, "Collection M.-F. Gentili di Giuseppe", Les arts 14, no. 162 (1917): p. 5-19., p. 13-14
- Umberto Gnoli, Pittori e miniatori nell’ Umbria, (Spoleto, Italy: C. Argentieri, 1923)., p. 296
- Raimond van Marle, The development of the Italian schools of painting, (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1923-1938)., Vol. 2: p. 654
- Tableaux anciens par Angelis, Bega, Berettini, Brouwer ... dessins, aquarelles, gouaches, pastels par Greuze, Giacomo Guardi..., (Paris: Impr. Lahure, 1941)., lot 61
- Bernard Berenson, Italian pictures of the Renaissance: a list of the principal artists and their works with an index of places. Central Italian and North Italian schools, (London: Phaidon, 1968)., p. 205
- Filippo Todini, La pittura umbra: dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento, (Milano: Longanesi, 1989)., Vol. 1: p. 291
- Chronique des arts: supplément à la Gazette des beaux-arts (Mar., 1995)., p. 36, fig. 145
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1994," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 54, no. 1 (1995): p. 40-79., p. 40 (illus.), p. 46
- Franco Ivan Nucciarelli, Studi sul Pinturicchio, (Ellera Umbra, Italy: Edizioni Era nuova, 1998-)., p. 290
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 189 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 411
- Norman Muller, "The Princeton Saint Bartholomew by Bernardino Pinturicchio: technical examination," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 73 (2014): p. 7–9., p. 7, fig. 4; p. 8, figs. 5–6
