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Interview
Tw o S ai n t s -- H om e A t L a s t
an interview with michael liversidge by darrelyn gunzburg
On Thursday 19 April 2007, Duke’s
Auctioneers offered two fifteenth-
century Italian painted panels for
sale at their rooms in Dorchester, UK. The
two panels, measuring fifteen inches by
five inches, each depicting a saintly
Dominican, had been identified by
Michael Liversidge, Emeritus Dean of Arts
and a former head of art history at Bristol
University, as being from the frame of Fra
Angelico’s altarpiece for the high altar of the
church and convent of San Marco, Florence.
Originally commissioned by Cosimo de’
Medici and consecrated on 6 January, 1443,
the altarpiece was thought to have contained
18 individual panels set in an elaborate
architectural frame. After it was dismantled
during the Napoleonic occupation of Flor-
ence at the end of the eighteenth century, the
components had been widely dispersed and
only 16 panels had been documented. In the
1960s an academic named Jean Preston
unknowingly bought the two missing pa-
nels. They remained unidentified until 2006.
Darrelyn Gunzburg spoke with Michael
Liversidge in Bristol in June 2007 about their
identification.
DG: Michael, how often does it happen in
the art world that a piece of work from a major
artist from an important altarpiece such as this is
identified and what does it mean to you to have
been the means of identification?
ML: Well, it’s just luck really. Sometimes
something just turns up and if you happen
to be at the right place and you can work out
what it is, then you just have the good
fortunetohavebeenpartofthebiggerstory
and played a small part in an interesting
historical sequence. I think that is just a
happy, fortuitous chance, coincidence, be-
cause there are lots of altarpieces which we
know can never be completed because the
panels have been cut and changed so totally.
With this one it’s really rather gratifying that
the complete set has been recovered and
that all the panels, although they have
suffered different vicissitudes of time and
damage and, in the case of the main panel,
some pretty brutal cleaning and nineteenth-
century restoration, nonetheless have sur-
vived intact. It is also a very important
altarpiece because not only is Cosimo de’
MedicithepatronforSanMarco,which
became a great symbol of Medici power,
faith and patronage, but it is also an
altarpiece which is among the earliest to
be composed with the central sacra conversa-
zione. The myth of Fra Angelico as the
simple, spiritual, pious figure who paints
very sweet pictures is, to a degree, trans-
mitted by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the
Artists published in 1550. The exhibition at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York in 2005–6, curated by Lawrence Kanter
and his associates, showed very clearly that
Fra Angelico is nonetheless one of the artists
whoisattheforefrontofnewdevelopments
and who, along with Massaccio in the 1420s
and other artists through the 1430s, ’40s,
’50s, is a major innovating figure.
Since the sale, another document has
turned up in the San Marco archives and it
shows that whilst the predella panels had
largely been dispersed by 1809, the main
panel, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with
Angels and Saints, and the eight small single-
figure panels were, in fact, all still in San
Marco. It would be fascinating to know
what happened to them between 1809 and
the early part of the twentieth century, as
they are recorded as passing to a Mrs Hilda
Brown, the widow of an American who was
living in Switzerland when he died in 1924.
ShereturnedtoAmericaandleftthemtoa
Mrs Maria Teweles, who had been her
companion, and she then sold them in
1964 to Jean Preston, who was in California
at the time and bought them for her father
in England, Kerrison Preston, an eclectic
collector of manuscripts, rare books,
Victorian paintings and objets d’art from
different periods. Jean had a great interest
in medieval history and culture as well as
ecclesiastical history and I think her
interest was probably stimulated by the
Newly-discovered Fra Angelicopanel from the San
Marco altarpiece ofc1438 --40. Courtesy of
Duke’s FineArt Auctioneers,Dorchester.
Newly-discovered Fra Angelicopanel from the San
Marco altarpiece ofc1438 --40. Courtesy of
Duke’s FineArt Auctioneers,Dorchester.
r2008 the authors. journal compilation r2008 bpl/aah volume 15 issue 1 february 2008 The Ar t Book 27
fact that these were Dominican saints.
When her father died she inherited them
and when she retired from Princeton,
where she was the librarian in charge of
manuscripts, archives and rare books, they
came home with her to Oxford.
DG: How was it that you came to be the one
to identify the panels?
ML:IgottoknowJeanoverthelastfour
to five years of her life. That was just chance.
Jean Preston had graduated from Bristol
University with a history degree in 1951.
Bristol University at the time and indeed ever
since has had a very distinguished succes-
sion of medievalists. It’s one of its areas of
excellence and strength. Indeed, we have
since developed the Centre for Medieval
Studies, to which pretty well every depart-
ment contributes. After graduating, Jean
went on to train in palaeography and archival
work and then her career led her to the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
to the rare books library at Yale, to the
Huntington in California, which is where she
foundthesetwopanels,andthento
Princeton. When she came
back to England she contacted
Bristol University through our
alumni office and asked if
there was anybody interested
in pictures as she had some
that may be of interest. So
theyaskedmetogodownand
visitherandshedidhave
many interesting pictures but
she didn’t show me the Fra
Angelicos. Those were tucked
away upstairs behind the
door. It was only about the
second or third time I visited
her when she went upstairs to
her study to look at something
else that I saw these hanging
on the wall. My first response was that they
had obvious quality, a bit of damage but they
had all the indications of age and authenti-
city and I said, ‘Those look very intriguing’
and she said ‘Oh really? How nice of you to
say so because I found those in California.
My father bought them’. On a subsequent
visit I asked her if she would let me take
them away to research and she said yes. So I
took them away in my briefcase, not really
thinking that they were going to turn out to
be quite what they did, and they spent a few
months in my briefcase being shown to odd
people from time to time.
I thought they looked like Florentine
paintings by rather a good artist who must
have seen what Domenico Veneziano had
been doing when he was in Florence in the
early 1440s. From there one started looking
at the Tuscan artists who were operating at
that period and then fairly quickly I saw
there were similar little panels by Fra
Angelico from various altarpieces. It was
then that I realised that there was a group
of six that were exactly the same size.
Actually physically handling them and
living with them for a period, you do get a
sense of what is rather special about them.
Of course one could do it entirely from
photographs with the measurements and
the documentations but it was an interest-
ing experience to have them alongside one
and take them out from time to time. They
are painted in tempera on panel and I got to
know the physicality of the brush marks.
Thesehadoneortwoverysmallretouch-
ings, probably nineteenth-century, and they
had worm-holes but otherwise they were
completely untouched.
I had the good fortune to train at the
Courtauld in the 1960s and in those days
one was not trained with quite the degree
of specialisation that is the norm today.
One was taught techniques of authenticat-
ing, attributing, and dating works of art as
part of one’s degree. One was also taught
to be very, very cautious and to challenge
one’s own beliefs and recognition. It did
mean that I was able to at least to come to
my own tentative conclusions before I took
them to specialists in Quattrocento paint-
ingtoconfirmwhatIthoughttheywere.
The two panels are clearly a left and a
right, and I proposed that they fit in at the
bottom of each side of the front view, above
the predella, facing down the church. Again
this is speculative but there are lots of other
altarpieces like that and to be perfectly
honest, after the amount of publicity they’ve
had, you would think that if there were
other panels lurking about someone would
have said, ‘Oh I’ve got another three’. So I
think these complete the sequence of 18 for
the whole altar in total. Certainly, on the
basis of the surviving pieces that we’ve got
now, that seems to be a perfectly reasonably
hypothesis. Of course, one can always be
proved wrong but I am not expecting to be.
Sadly Jean Preston died in July 2006 before
the results could be published. Hopefully, it
will be possible one day to establish exactly
what the iconography is and who all these
saints are.
DG: Michael, thank you so much for your time.
Michael Liversidge.Photo by DarrelynGunzburg.
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28 The Art Book volume 15 issue 1 february 2008 r2008 the authors. journal compilation r2008 bpl/aah
Inter view