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Courtyard Scene


Italian, Early Renaissance
1450 - 1460
23.7 x 23.7 cm (9 5/16 x 9 5/16 in.)
tempera on panel
HC.P.1929.03.(T)

Not on view


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Description
Mattia Vinco has identified this round-format or tondo painting as coming from an Italian early Renaissance cassone, a hinged-lid chest. Vinco suggests that the iconography of the tempera painting is a banquet of the suitors of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, taken from Homer’s Odyssey. This identification is plausible, and the scene may represent the moment when a suitor, the man standing near the center in parti-colored hose, discovers that Penelope has been nightly unravelling the shroud she was weaving for Laertes as a ploy to put off the suitors. The standing man holds a spindle wound with white yarn, which may be the proof of her deception. The man’s black servant boy in the foreground feeds a dog, possibly Argos, Odysseus’s faithful dog who will recognize him on this return. The same dog may be represented to the left barking at the suitor’s horse.

Much of the activity of this scene takes place in a courtyard in a Renaissance cityscape. In a room to the right, a woman and a man, presumably Penelope and a suitor, sit at table possibly being served by another woman. In the middle ground, a servant woman carrying a rod with two suspended pails mounts the stairs to a domed rotunda building. This may be Odysseus’s housekeeper Eurycleia, who, upon Odysseus’s return, will recognize him by washing his feet and remembering an old scar.

The Dumbarton Oaks panel painting has affinities with paintings made in Ferrara in the mid-fifteenth century. Already in 1946, Bernard Berenson thought the figures were close to those of Francesco del Cossa of Ferrara (ca. 1430–ca. 1477). Indeed, the unknown Dumbarton Oaks artist may have been associated with the Ferrarese court painters Francesco del Cossa and Cosimo Tura (ca. 1430–1495), for his style is in the manner of their frescoes in the Palazzo di Schifanoia in Ferrara. This painting also has similarities to the paintings of Bartolomeo degli Erri who was active in Modena between 1430 and 1479 and also worked for the d’Este family in Ferrara.

Although the painted area is round, the panel itself is unevenly octagonal and was likely cut down from a larger cassone panel; four pieces have been added at the corners to enable the octagonal panel to fit a square frame. When acquired in 1929 the tondo appeared to be in near-perfect condition, but an examination in 1951 revealed extensive repaint which was removed at that time, and the original panel was found to be in poor condition, its surface abraded and with large areas of paint loss.

J. Carder


Bibliography
Uguccioni, Alessandra. Salomone e la regina di Saba. Ferrara: Gabriele Corbo & C. Editori, 1988, 65-67, pl. 4.

Vinco, Mattia. Catalogo della "pittura di cassone" a Verona dal Tardogotico al Rinasciments, XXIV ciclo (Doctoral Dissertation, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2012), 98-99, cat. 43.



Exhibition History
Washington, DC. Dumbarton Oaks, "75 Years/75 Objects: Celebrating 75 Years of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum," September 8, 2015 - May 22, 2016.


Acquisition History
Gift of the Walter L. Ehrich Galleries, New York, New York, to Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, 1929.

Collection of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, Washington, D.C., 1929-11/29/1940.

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, House Collection, Washington, D.C.


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House Collection