Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 98. (Budapest, 2003)

SALLAY, DÓRA: A Proposal for a Baptism of Christ-Lunette by Guidoccio Cozzarelli

perceptible in the expression of the angel on the right confirm the established attribution. Moreover, it is also an early work, as will be discussed below. The hypothesis that the Budapest Angels and the Moscow Baptism were cut from the same work is confirmed by a series of further indications beyond the common authorship, compatible dating, and the fact that they are complementary to each other from an iconographie point of view. They also match in scale. The direction of light, coming from the left, is identical in the two paintings. The pattern of the halos is similar, particularly in those of the left angel and St. John the Baptist. They are a rare type: a disk shown in perspective with punched decoration running around the rim, but leaving the disk surface unadorned. Finally, both fragments were originally painted on wood with a horizontal grain. Although the Moscow piece has now been transferred to canvas, the marks caused by damage along the juncture of the planks survive imprinted in the painted surface and make it clear that the grain of its original wooden support was horizontal.

12 This latter feature proves decisive for the common provenance of the fragments, and merits further attention, since panels on a large scale with a horizontal grain were rare and usually reserved for special functions in Quattrocento Sienese painting. This observation, then, also allows us to make a proposal in regard to the original format and function of the work. Precisely because of the direction of the grain it seems unlikely that the two fragments were cut from the central register of an altarpiece, like, for example, the tavola quadrata of the Sinalunga altarpiece. A horizontal layout of the planks would be highly unusual for the main register of a Sienese altarpiece at that time, when - regardless of format - a preference for vertical planks was customary. Also, the fragmented Baptism seems too small for an altarpiece: the four preserved figures are significantly smaller in scale than those in the Sinalunga altarpiece.

13 Moreover, the composition suggests that the Budapest-Moscow Baptism of Christ was probably not much higher originally than its preserved central section now in Moscow. The horizontal grain, as well as the scale of the figures and some technical observations, point instead to the original format as probably a lunette-shaped crowning element of an altarpiece. Lunettes were used in Sienese altarpiece-structures from the late 1450s to the early sixteenth century; their size usually ranged from about 60 to 140 cm in height and from 170 to 280 cm in width. They survive in a large enough number (more than two dozen examples) to allow for general observations about their structure and morphology; in fact, they are the only large-scale forms of panel painting with a sufficient number of known examples - thus, probably, the most frequent type - that regularly show a structure composed of horizontal planks. The approximately half life-size scale of the Moscow and Budapest fragments is consistent with the lunette-size. 12 Gosudarstvenniy Muzey Izobrazitelnich Iskusstv Imeni A. S. Puskina. Katalog kartinnoj galerei, Moscow 1986, 98; Markova, 2002 (n. 7) pp. 147-148. The dark line crossing at the height of the chest of the figures is due to this damage. An inscription on the back of the present support states that the transfer was carried out in 1889 by A. Sidorov. 13 The visible painted surface of the Sinalunga altarpiece is 187 by 182 cm (measurements after Paardekooper, loo.

cit. [n. 1] p. 63, n. 30.) 3 S