Bartolomeo Ghetti - Works in Fucecchio

Works in Fucecchio

Ghetti’s largest work is his Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist, Mark, Andrew and Peter and Baptism of Christ now in the Collegiata of Fucecchio. This work was evidently admired by early viewers, since a partial copy of the picture made in 1641 by Andrea di Giovanni Battista Ferrari exists at the nearby church of San Bartolomeo at Gavena. More recently, Sydney Freedberg has justly called Ghetti’s Fucecchio altarpiece a work of ‘great force and originality’ (though he incorrectly attributed the picture to Francesco Granacci).

The patron and date of Ghetti’s Fucecchio altarpiece are identified by an unpublished deliberation in the records of a confraternity in that town, the Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista, under the date of 10 June 1525. The Compagnia, whose residence was adjacent to the Collegiata of Fucecchio, appointed three of its members as procurators to commission ‘a new, suitable and elegant panel for the altar of the said Compagnia, with those figures and ornaments which shall seem fitting to the said procurators’. The procurators were also given the authority to negotiate the price of the new altarpiece they were commissioning. In all likelihood they commissioned Ghetti’s altar-piece shortly after the deliberation was made in the summer of 1525, and the San Pietro a Selva lunette was probably painted not too long before the laudum of September 1527, the similarities between the two pictures are easy to comprehend. Together these two works represent the cornerstones on which any chronology of Ghetti’s stylistic development must be based.

A passage from the 1541 statutes of the Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista at Fucecchio reveals that the altar of their oratory, adjacent to the Collegiata but deconsecrated in the late eighteenth century, had a dual dedication to the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. Since both John appears prominently in Ghetti’s Madonna and Child at Fucecchio and in the Baptism now displayed above it, there is good reason to believe that both these panels were made to be displayed over the altar of the oratory of the Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista.

The original format of the Fucecchio altarpiece is not entirely certain, though it is probable that the lunette with the Baptism of Christ was always located above the lower panel depicting the Madonna and Child with saints. Both panels have been cut down drastically from their original dimensions, and the lunette — apparently chopped down to an uncomfortable and much smaller arched format at an unknown date — was subsequently reintegrated with new spandrels in order to fill it out as a rectangle. An inventory of artworks transferred to the Collegiata of Fucecchio by the Opera di San Salvatore after the latter’s suppression by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo(2 June 1790) describes the altarpiece in essentially its present configuration, with the Baptism of Christ above the sacra conversazione. The condition of the whole is described by the inventory as ‘middling’ (mediocre). This seems to accord with the state of the surface as we see it today; the results of a previous overcleaning were revealed during the course of a restoration by Sandra Pucci in 1995.

The composition of Ghetti’s altarpiece at Fucecchio — featuring the Virgin on an elevated throne and covered by a canopy, set against a colonnaded apse and flanked by standing saints — reflects Raphael’s unfinished Madonna del Baldacchino, a work that cast a long shadow in early-Cinquecento Florentine painting. Ghetti copied the figure of St. Peter at lower right from Granacci’s Madonna and Child with Sts. John the Baptist, Nicholas of Bari, Anthony Abbot and Peter at Montemurlo — curiously, the same figure that his fellow Florentine Giovanni Larciani had copied in his own Fucecchio altarpiece only a few years earlier.

Like his work at nearby San Pietro a Selva, Ghetti’s commission at Fucecchio may have come about (in part, at least) by way of local family connections. Archival records reveal that Florentine nun by the name of Margherita di Domenico Ghetti — quite possibly a relative of the painter — was in the Clarissan convent of Sant’Andrea at Fucecchio from at least April 1529 through the end of the 1530s, serving as its abbess in 1531-32; the circumstance suggests some ancestral connection between the Ghetti clan of Florence and the town of Fucecchio. In any event, the extent of Bartolomeo Ghetti’s activity in the lower Valdarno suggests that his family may have had roots in this region. Parallels could be drawn with Ghetti’s contemporaries. Larciani who found a ready market for his work in the Arno valley from which his ancestors had migrated to Florence. And Rosso Fiorentino migrated during this period to Arezzo and its surrounding towns — from one of which, years earlier, his father had emigrated to Florence.