Il Vecchietta, Neroccio e l’‘Assunta’ per l’altar maggiore di Santa Maria del Corso a Lucca

Thanks to some unknown original documents and the re-reading of others, most of them known since the nineteenth century but not correctly or completely understood, the author reconstructs the origins of one of the principal fifteenth-century Lucchese altarpieces, the great wooden high relief Assumption carved and painted by Vecchietta and Neroccio, now reduced to two fragments in the Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi in Lucca (the Burial of the Virgin and the Virgin in Glory). Although the discovery of the initial documents had enabled post-war scholars to properly understand the work’s dual authorship, any other investigation into its beginnings was impeded by the unfounded nineteenth-century information that the fragments had come from the Buonvisi Chapel in the Basilica of San Frediano. The unpublished records assembled in the appendix of this article, together with other newly re-transcribed documentation, demonstrate that the Assumption was made between 1477 and 1482 for the high altar of the church of Santa Maria del Corso, just outside the Porta San Donato, a foundation dependent on the Abbey of San Salvatore a Sesto near the Lago di Bientina, and then subordinate (like the latter) to the jurisdiction in commendam of the Lucchese patrician Giannino Bernardi. It was he who fostered the costly enterprise of the Assumption, although this was carried out with the legal and financial involvement of Nicolao, a son of his brother Stefano and a leading light of the Republican oligarchy in Lucca. Immediately after the Assumption, as has already emerged in the research of the last thirty years, Giannino and Nicolao provided Santa Maria del Corso with another extraordinary altarpiece, again created by two non-local artists, Filippino Lippi and Benedetto da Maiano (1482-1483); likewise, this has come down to us in fragmentary form (the central statue of St. Anthony Abbot by Benedetto, still in Lucca, and two painted panels by Filippino in Pasadena, California). Notwithstanding the fact that Vecchietta died in the very midst of the Assumption’s execution in Siena (1480), it was completed, following a new contract, by Neroccio, who must however have been associated with the commission since the start. The early loss of Santa Maria del Corso, destroyed in about 1514 for defensive purposes together with other churches in the Western suburbs of Lucca, explains the cloud of oblivion that subsequently descended over its works of art. When Giorgio Vasari saw the Bernardi’s Florentine altarpiece, it was already in the church of San Ponziano, and there is every indication that the Assumption was transferred there too, since that Olivetan monastery had taken over the prerogatives of San Salvatore a Sesto and Santa Maria del Corso. The influential Apostolic protonotary Bartolomeo Arnolfini, the last commendatory abbot of these two sees, played the key role in the delivery; and his foundation of a chapel dedicated to the Assumption in San Ponziano, in which he was later buried (between 1536 and 1540), prompts the hypothesis that the Sienese altarpiece of the Bernardi family was re-erected there, before that chapel housed a painting of the same subject by Bernardino Poccetti (now lost) and one by Giuseppe Maria Crespi.