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italiano

III. The Icilio Federico Joni Section (Siena, 1866-1946)

Icilio Federico Joni
Madonna and Child, Saint Maria Maddalena and Saint Sebastiano
From Neroccio di Bartolomeo Landi
Tempera on wood, 109,2 x 72,1 cm
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection 1975

This section is devoted to the work of the leading figure of the Sienese forgers. His «imitations of ancient works» are arranged in chronological order: from his book covers, imaginative copies of the ancient Biccherne of the Commune of Siena, to the triptychs executed between the 1890s and the early 1900s, regularly exported to Europe and the United States. Of particular note is the small triptych from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

A particularly evolutionary phase in Joni's production took place around 1910-1915, during which time he carried out the Madonna and Child, Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Sebastian in the style of Neroccio di Bartolomeo Landi which, together with three fragments from a predella in the style of Sano di Pietro, come from the Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Next on display are works from the 1920s and 30s carried out in the style of the greatest 14th and 15th-century Sienese painters and others. From Duccio di Buoninsegna to Pietro Lorenzetti, from Sano di Pietro to Francesco di Giorgio Martini , Beato Angelico and a painter close to Giovanni Bellini. These works show, in the later years of his career, Joni's self-assured manner in working with various stylistic registers and his surprising philological attention, worthy of the best art historians of the time, his friends and contemporaries such as Bernard Berenson and Frederick Mason Perkins.

Note in particular the small fragment depicting St Ansanus, granted on loan by the heirs of the antiquarian Carlo De Carlo of Florence; this work is still considered to be by a painter akin to Duccio di Buoninsegna, the so-called "Master of Tabernacle n. 35" created by the American scholar James H. Stubblebine in his essential monograph Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School (Princeton, 1979).

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