New York: the missed Donatello’ is likely not alone

This afternoon, at Moretti Fine Arts in New York, the lost wooden Spiritello that experts have recently attributed to Donatello is going to be presented to the public by scholar-dealer Andrew Butterfield, who may have found something more than a beautiful and very well preserved sculpture “in motion” by the renaissance master.

 

As reported by the New York Times last week, Mr. Butterfield bought the gilded spiritello in 2012, from the collection of the Italian art dealer Giancarlo Gallino, mainly thanks to his intuition and a black and white photograph he saw several years before. Then he made research, and asked for the advise of three respected scholars such as Eike Schmidt, recently appointed director of the Uffizi, David Ekserdjian, and Francesco Caglioti, who was also behind the attribution to Donatello of the extraordinary wooden crucifixion in the Church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Padua, restored and officially presented last summer to the public as a masterpiece by the master.

 

As Mr. Butterfiled points out in his introduction for the catalogue that accompanies the show and includes essays by Caglioti himself, Ekserdjian and Schmidt, “The Spiritello exemplifies Donatello’s creativity and importance”. In Renaissance period the artist was effectively renown for using for the first time sipiritelli and putti to enrich his compositions.

 

The sculpture, originally in the collection of art historian Luigi Grassi, was probably made in the 1430s. According to Caglioti’s extensive research it originally formed part of an architectural ensemble decorating an interior space, possibly a sacristy in a church or a room in a palace. This ensemble would have featured several putti, not just a couple of them, dancing on the top of the room, and carrying garlands, festoons or armorial shields.

 

“The provenance from the architectural decoration of a room – writes Caglioti – is again, in my opinion, the most plausible, especially after the reappearance of the Grassi Spiritello. […] The two figures are so closely linked not only in terms of design and dimension, but also in execution and technical details, that one must conclude they came from the same location. And since they are practically interchangeable and therefore couldn’t form a pair, we must leave open the idea of a more numerous group, which included the repetition of some elements within the set. ” (p.24 of the catalogue)

 

The second figure Caglioti writes about, and that is strictly linked the one now presented in New York, was acquired between 1886 and 1898 by Adolf von Beckerath from the Roman painter and art dealer Attilio Simonetti; now it is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has not updated the info on its web site yet, but is likely to do so very soon.

 

Effectively, continues Caglioti “it is impossible to imagine anyone more skilled than Donatello in inventiveness and experimentation in this sort of arrangement, and in my opinion, from the evidence we possess, the Beckerath and the Grassi Spiritelli are extremely rare surviving examples of this genre, and are historically very important.”

 

Caglioti declares to have examined and compared both objects at length in the conservation laboratory at the Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2013 and is convinced that the two pieces have crucial technical similarities. As, for instance, in regards with the internal structure, that new scientific analysis revealed to be made in both cases by several different pieces of wood.

 

Even if no other element of this decoration is known at the moment, Caglioti’s conclusions about it couldn’t have been more clear: “I believe that we can safely attribute to Donatello not only the invention and design of the Beckerath and the Grassi Spiritelli, but also the personal responsibility for their execution in his workshop and directly under his eyes, for a decorative project he devised and followed through to its completion. To attempt to say that both the Spiritelli, or simply one of them, were executed by the master alone would require too much faith, in light of there being two identical figures. But the fact remains that, in the context of the great history of Florentine Renaissance sculpture, we do not know any other object as early and as meaningful in its genre, and no other piece better preserved and more expressive than the ex-Grassi Spiritello.”

November 25, 2020