Una sconosciuta icona opistografa del Maestro di Beffi

The Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraska houses a remarkable two-sided panel painting, one side of which represents the Virgin and Child, shown in the iconography of the Virgin of Tenderness, and the other a Veronica’s Veil. The painting, which passed through the collection of the dealer Elia Volpi in Florence at the beginning of the twentieth century, is here presented as an unpublished work by the Master of the Beffi Triptych, the undis- puted protagonist of late Gothic painting in the Abruzzo region. This panel shows the artist working in a truly unusual format and type. In addition to establishing the work’s authorship and its place in the master’s oeuvre, the article seeks to investigate its iconographic peculiarities, with a study of the spread of a certain type of private devotional painting, of which the work in Omaha is a very rare example.