Sull’‘Annunciazione’ del Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum di Jacopo della Quercia, in Ad Alessandro Bagnoli. Scritti di amici, “Prospettiva”, 181-182, 2021 [ma 2022], pp. 36-46

The article draws attention to a wooden group of the ‘Annunciation’, bought in Florence in 1880 by Wilhelm Bode for the Royal Museums in Berlin, as a work of the school of Jacopo della Quercia, of which the ‘Angel’ has survived, while the ‘Virgin’ was destroyed during the Second World War. At the centre of considerable critical debate in the first half of the 20th century, the ‘Annunciation’ was subsequently forgotten about, even being believed to be a fake by Giovanni Bastianini. More recently two ‘Virgins of the Annunciation’ similar to the one lost in Berlin have reemerged – one made of wood in the Château de Villevêque of Angers and the other in terracotta in the Museo della Castellina of Norcia – and have entered the catalogue of works by Jacopo della Quercia. Although devoid of polychromy, the group formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin is of no lesser quality, standing as a noteworthy accomplishment of Jacopo and datable to around the end of the first decade of the 1400s, the time when the sculptor worked at the Tomb monument of Ilaria del Carretto in the cathedral of Lucca and started planning the Fonte Gaia for Piazza del Campo in Siena. It represents a fundamental precedent for Jacopo’s later ‘Annunciations’, like those in the 1420s of the collegiate church of San Gimignano and the Sienese church of the Santuccio. Before leaving Italy, our ‘Annunciation’ belonged to the Florentine sculptor Cesare Brazzini, who in 1875 tried to sell it to the Italian State for the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, where it was in fact exhibited from that year until 1880. The Ministry of Public Education, however, showed very little interest in it and, lacking the necessary financial resources, allowed its owner the possibility of selling the two sculptures abroad.