Saint John the Evangelist

This Saint John has been passed back and forth between painters for a hundred years. In 1926 the critic Lionello Venturi gave it, with its companion the Mourning Virgin, to Lorenzo Veneziano. In 1931 the scholar Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà thought of Giovanni da Modena, a painter from Emilia, and the following year the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson said Paolo Veneziano. After that the two Venetians kept changing places, Lorenzo again for the historian Pietro Toesca in 1951, Paolo again for his colleague Michelangelo Muraro in 1969.

The two names are close in time. Paolo's last signed work dates from 1358, Lorenzo first appears in the records in 1356, and the museum dates the panel to about 1355 to 1357, right where one career meets the other. Its label names both men. Rodolfo Pallucchini, who argued for Lorenzo in 1964, was struck by the pose. Saint John turns so far, in a bold foreshortening, that we see him almost from behind, a turn Pallucchini found again in Lorenzo's Lion Polyptych, painted between 1357 and 1359 and now in the Accademia in Venice.