Pienza municipality purchases a panel painting by Pietro Lorenzetti, who returns to the place where he was born

Important purchase by the Municipality of Pienza , which manages to put together the resources to buy a panel painting by Pietro Lorenzetti (Siena, c. 1285 - 1348), a St. Luke that constitutes a fragment of the Monticchiello Polyptych: the operation, the cost of which, the Municipality of Pienza points out, is more than 120,000 euros, was made possible thanks to the intervention of two private sponsors, Distribuzione Italia and Fabbrica - Pienza , who took up the appeal launched by the Municipality in the spring and thus made it possible for the panel to return to Tuscany. The work had been offered for sale by the Frascione gallery and had been presented at the Florence Biennale Internazionale dell’Antiquariato. It was the art historian Gabriele Fattorini, a professor at the University of Florence and director of the Diocesan Museum of Pienza, who had pointed it out some time ago to the City of Pienza after its return to the market.

A story with a happy ending, then, that allows the return to the territory of Pienza of a panel with strong ties to the area: the small triangular panel, depicting the evangelist Luke in half-length on a gold background, was in fact part of the polyptych that in the second decade of the 14th century a young Lorenzetti painted for the church of San Leonardo in Monticchiello, a medieval village not far from Pienza, and today a hamlet of the municipality. The fragments that remain are preserved in several museums: the Madonna and Child is in the Diocesan Museum in Pienza, three saints are in the Horne Museum in Florence, a Saint Agatha is in the Musée de Tessé in Le Mans, and another cusp similar to the one just acquired by the Pienza municipality is in Villa I Tatti in Florence.

The St. Luke was published in the volume The Bernard and Mary Berenson collection of European painting at I Tatti (2015) by Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, where it was juxtaposed precisely with the cusp that once belonged to the Berenson collection and is now owned by Harvard University but preserved, as mentioned, at the Tatti in Florence, which was the residence of the American art historian. It was Brüggen Israëls herself who proposed a reconstruction of the Monticchiello Polyptych with the cusp purchased from Pienza. This panel, said the Dutch scholar at the BIAF presentation of the purchase, “augments the known elements of the Monticchiello Polyptych of which it was a part. Its reconstruction is a detective story that ranges from the territory of Pienza in 1315 to nineteenth-century Pisa, full of collectors and restorers to conclude, for the moment, in Florence.”

Now, the painting will be displayed at the Diocesan Museum itself, where it will find the Madonna and Child that was part of the same complex. Satisfaction from Mayor Manolo Grossi: “It is not only a work of art, of extraordinary value to re-enter our heritage, but it is an important piece of our history and culture.”

Pienza municipality purchases a panel painting by Pietro Lorenzetti, who returns to the place where he was born

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