1961.100.1
Scenes from Boccaccio's "Il ninfale fiesolano"
Artists
Fra Angelico (Guido di Piero da Mugello)
(Vicchio, Italy, ca. 1400 - 3/18/1455, Rome, Italy)
[
formerly attributed to Toscani prior to Fra Angelico attribution
Master of the Griggs Crucifixion (Toscani) (Giovanni di Francesco Toscani)];
Title
Scenes from Boccaccio's "Il ninfale fiesolano"
Creation Date
ca. 1415-1420
Century
15th century
Dimensions
11 3/8 in. x 49 13/16 in. (28.9 cm. x 126.5 cm.)
Object Type
painting
Creation Place
Europe, Italy
Medium and Support
tempera on panel
Credit Line
Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1961.100.1
This panel once formed the front of a cassone, a chest used in a Florentine household for storing fine clothes. A bride’s dowry traditionally included such cases. This panel depicts scenes from Giovanni Boccaccio’s poem Il Ninfale Fiesolano (The Nymphs of Fiesole), written ca. 1343. The painting recounts the tale of the tragic love of a mortal youth (Africo) for one of the nymphs (Mensola) in the entourage of goddess Diana. In the first scene, Diana holds court in a verdant garden, warning the nymphs to beware of men. The heroine Mensola, to the right, points to the second scene, in which Venus, the goddess of love, appears to the handsome Africo in a dream. In scene three, his parents warn Africo not to pursue Diana’s nymphs. Finally, he reveals himself to Mensola (swimming with her companions), who falls in love at the sight of him. A companion chest, now lost, might have completed the tale with additional scenes, including the transformation of the nymph Mensola into the river of the same name. In 2005 Laurence Kantor, a noted scholar of early Italian art, hypothesized that this work was painted by an adolescent Guido di Pietro, later known as Fra Angelico, then learning his art in the workshop of Lorenzo Monaco.
Object Description
cassone panel possibly from a marriage chest