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"It really is beautifully preserved," said Peter Blume, the museum's director.
As he spoke, he was standing near Taddeo di Bartolo's Madonna and Child, which hung on a gallery wall with soft luminescence, the same way it has hung on one wall or another, beginning in the Italian city of Sienna, for some 600 years.
In it, Mary and the Christ child, who holds a small bird, share placid looks, the colorful richness of tempera on wood and more,
"In looking at this," Blume explained, "you've got beautiful flesh tones, as well as a three dimensionality that was the big advancement in the Renaissance, having figures occupying real space, naturalistically. This was a big breakthrough, making a nose project from the face, having chubby cheeks."
For now, the painting is being shared with the museum by David T. Owsley, grandson of Frank C. Ball. Its owner, however, intends to eventually give it to the museum in memory of his mother, Lucy Ball Owsley.
Blume couldn't be happier about that.
"I think it's an extremely important addition to this collection," he said of Bartolo's work. "This is a key addition. ... He's an artist who deserves to be better known than he is."
Believed to have lived between 1363 and 1422, the painter's career took a hit, Blume explained, when the city of Florence exerted its dominance over Sienna and its skilled artists, a sort of geographical/artistic case of one-upmanship.
"There were whole generations of artists who were pushed into the background," he said.
While Bartolo was one of them, he was a major artist, with commissions in many other Italian cities.
As for Madonna and Child, it has been pristinely kept.
Referring to another nearby painting, Blume noted how the faces had a greenish tint that came from over-cleaning the work.
Bartolo's colors still looked natural, and lush.
"It looks like a painting that's 600 years old should look," the director said
While in appearance, the Madonna hearkens to one of an earlier period, the Christ child, a little boy holding a bird, advanced the work, stylistically.
"It's a progressive painting ... in the robustness of the Christ figure," Blume explained.
While the work's ornate frame is not from the same time period as the painting, he continued, it is true to the type of painting.
As for its wooden, gold-gilt surface, it is fascinating in itself, its border and the haloes being ornately punched with intricate designs of holes and flowers. Back in 1400, Blume said, they would catch the illumination of candlelight and natural light to create an almost magical, shimmering effect.
This was, he added, a painting that would have hung in a home, albeit one belonging to a very well-to-do person.
Its subject, rife with spirituality, would have gone to the heart of its owner's beliefs.
"It was a central concept to everybody's life at that point," Blume said, of this impressive work of art.
So, we wondered, would it be crass to ask the painting's value?
"Yes," he assured us.
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