Trecento panel painting between the courts of Naples and Hungary : a hypothesis for Simone Martini's Saint Ladislaus and a Painting of Christ on the Cross

Abstract

Taking as its point of departure Simone Martini's panel painting of Saint Ladislaus of Hungary (ca 1330s or early 1304s), held since the fourteenth century in Altomonte, and a panel painting of Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and John the Evangelist currently held in the Phillips Family Collection, this essay advances a hypothesis for a multipart dynastic icon commissioned by and intended for members of the Árpád or Angevin families. Elizabeth of Poland or Charles i of Hungary may have commissioned the icon for their son Andrew, endowing him with a work that served multiple purposes: tracing the Hungarian family's holy royal ancestry; demonstrating the cultural prestige of the Hungarian court; and supporting the continuation of the dynastic lines that would become intertwined by the marriage of the heirs to the Hungarian and Neapolitan thrones. This proposal thus begins to sketch a hypothetical reconstruction of a now fragmentary and partially lost object, and contributes to the larger project of assembling a corpus of panel paintings that emerged in the fourteenth century from the interconnected courts of Naples and Hungary.