The Coronation of the Virgin
Tommaso del Mazza (active late 14th century) · c. 1350-1375
Christ places a crown on the head of his mother, who bows towards him with joined hands, both seated on a throne against a gold ground. The subject, the Coronation of the Virgin in heaven, was one of the favourite themes of Florentine painters in the fourteenth century, and it usually occupied the centre of a large altarpiece with saints in the side panels. That is the case here: the panel is the central fragment of a polyptych whose other parts are lost, and its top, once a pointed Gothic arch, has been cut straight.
The painter is Tommaso del Mazza, a Florentine active in the later fourteenth century, who was known for decades only as the Master of Santa Verdiana before his name was recovered from documents. The panel was in the convent of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence in eighteen thirteen, and in eighteen fourteen it was removed and sent to the Louvre under Napoleon, catalogued as a work of the Sienese painter Lippo Memmi. Look at the delicate patterns tooled into the gold and the tender inclination of the Virgin, which show how the Giottesque tradition softened into elegance towards the end of the century.
Did You Know? The panel travelled to Paris in eighteen fourteen under the name of the Sienese painter Lippo Memmi, and it took more than a century to find its real Florentine author.
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