(active Pisa and Lucca, 1397 – circa 1463)
Saint Stephen,
oil on panel, gold ground, 63.5 x 24.3 cm, in an integral frame

Inscribed on the reverse: ‘A N˚. 2. / A Monsieur l’Abbé Etienne Schaeffer /nel giorno III Xbre, 1895 / L. Sermarini e famiglia / in segno di sincera gratitudine / e / memoria imperitura

Provenance (according to the inscription on the reverse):
Collection Livio Andreani Sermarini, Como (1866–1936);
given to Monsignor Etienne Schaeffer, 3 October 1895;
Private European collection

We are grateful to Andrea G. De Marchi for suggesting the attribution after examining the present painting in the original and for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Borghese di Piero of Pisa was active during the first half of the Quattrocento and his identity was clarified in 1995 by Maria Teresa Fileri who published documents establishing him as the artist who executed the altar piece for the church of San Quirico in the Capannori, near Lucca (see M. T. Filieri, Proposte per il maestro dei Santi Quirico e Giulitta, in: Arte cristiana, 83, 1995, pp. 267–74). Previously the works of Borghese di Piero were assembled under the moniker ‘Maestro dei Santi Quirico e Giulitta’ assigned to the then anonymous master by Roberto Longhi and Carlo Volpe on the basis of the panels representing these two saints conserved in collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (see C. Volpe, Alcune restituzioni al Maestro dei Santi Quirici e Giulitta, in: I quaderni di Emblema, 1973, pp. 17–21).

The present painting can be compared to the Saint Lawrence conserved in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore and to a Saint John the Baptist and a Saint Benedict (see Fototeca Zeri nos. 11889, 11890). These works are refined, and their similarities include style, size, manner of outlining, as well as the method used to work the gilding. De Marchi has suggested that the four panels were part of a polyptych, two on each side, flanking a larger central altar panel.

Borghese spent the significant part of his career working in Lucca, where at the end of the 1450s he completed the cycle of frescoes in the Chapel of Santa Caterina in the Carmelite church of San Piero Cigoli. Although he is presumed to have trained in Pisa, his style is more specifically Florentine, tempered by a tenderness in the way he characterises his figures, as exemplified by the present Saint Stephen. The manner in which he renders volume refers to Massaccio’s Carmelite Saint in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, which formed part of the Pisa Polyptych of 1426, thereby underscoring and explaining the cross-fertilisation of geographic and cultural currents in the work of Borghese di Piero.