Provenance:   

William Drury Lowe (1803–1877), Locko Park, Derbyshire, acquired in Italy between 1840 and 1865[i]; thence to his son:

William Drury Nathaniel Drury-Lowe (1877–1906), Locko Park, Derbyshire, thence to his son:

William Drury Drury-Lowe (1877–1916), Locko Park, Derbyshire; thence to his brother:

John Alfred Edwin Drury-Lowe (1881–1949), Locko Park, Derbyshire; thence to his son: 

John Drury Boteler Packe-Drury-Lowe (1905–1960), Locko Park, Derbyshire; thence to his son:

Patrick John Boteler Drury-Lowe (1931–1993); Locko Park, Derbyshire; thence to his daughter:

Lucy Belinda Drury-Lowe Palmer, Locko Park, Derbyshire; until sold at:

Bonhams, London, 4 July 2012, lot 33, as Niccolò di Segna; where acquired by:

Private Collection, Florence, until 2025.

Exhibited:

“Pictures from Locko Park, Derbyshire: Collections of Captain P.J.B.  Drury-Lowe,” Nottingham University Art Gallery, Nottingham, 9 February – 19 March 1968, cat. no. 4, plate 4, as Niccolò di Segna.

“Masterpieces from Great Houses in the East Midlands,” Nottingham University Art Gallery, Nottingham, 1981.

Literature:

Jean Paul Richter, Catalogue of Pictures at Locko Park, London, 1901, p. 87, cat. no. 214, as “painted in the manner of Duccio, founder of the school of Siena.”[ii]

Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, The Hague, 1924, vol. 2, “The Sienese School of the 14th Century,” p. 156, n.2, as school of Segna di Buonaventura.

John Cornforth, “A Victorian Collection rediscovered, pictures from Locko Park,” in Country Life, vol. 113, no. 3703 (22 February 1968), p. 404, as Niccolò di Segna.

Alastair Smart, “The Locko Park Collection,” Apollo, vol. 87, no. 73 (March 1968), pp. 205-206, fig. 3, as Niccolò di Segna. 

Luisa Vertova, “La Raccolta di Locko Park,” Antichità Viva, vol. 7, no. 3 (May–June 1968), pp. 24-26, fig. 3, as Niccolò di Segna.

Richard Calvocoressi, “Locko Park, an important Family Collection,” The Connoisseur, vol. 192, no. 772 (June 1976), p. 145, as Niccolò di Segna. 

Cristina De Benedictis, La Pittura Senese 1330–1370, Florence, 1979, p. 94, as Niccolò di Segna.

James Stubblebine, “Duccio di Buoninsegna and his School,” Princeton, 1979, vol. 1, p. 154, vol. 2, fig. 478, as Niccolò di Segna.

Beatrice Franci, in Duccio: Alle Origini della Pittura Senese, ed. Alessandro Bagnoli, Roberto Bartalini, Luciano Bellosi, and Michel Laclotte, Milan, 2003, p. 364.

Beatrice Franci, ad vocem “Niccolò di Segna,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Rome, vol. 78, pp. 425-429. https://www.treccani.it/
enciclopedia/niccolo-di-segna_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.

Alastair Smart, “Drury Lowe (Holden), William,” Grove Art Online, 2003. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/
9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000023750.

Nicoletta Matteuzzi, Niccolò di Segna e suo fratello Francesco: Pittori nella Siena di Duccio, di Simone e dei Lorenzetti, Florence, 2018, pp. 108-111, cat. no. 10.

Nicoletta Matteuzzi, in La Galleria di Palazzo Cini: Dipinti, Sculture, Oggetti d’Arte, ed. Andrea Bacchi and Andrea De Marchi, Venice, 2016, p. 46.

Niccolò di Segna was an accomplished painter of mid-14th century Siena and one of the last exponents of the artistic lineage that began with the founder of the Sienese school, Duccio di Buoninsegna. Duccio likely trained Niccolò’s father, Segna di Buonaventura, and together they were among the elder artist’s most faithful stylistic inheritors. Niccolò belonged to the generation of Sienese painters that was wiped out by the Black Death of 1346. With the arrival of the plague in Italy that year, one of the most sublime chapters in the history of Italian painting came to an abrupt close. Works by Niccolò di Segna are rare, likely due to the brevity of his period of activity, which began only in 1330 or 1331.

Both Segna di Buonaventura and his son Niccolò had an archaizing tendency, given the central importance of the works of Duccio to their artistic output. However, Niccolò di Segna’s style was by no means retardataire. The beauty of his art is that he was able to maintain the hallmarks of early Sienese painting and blend this with the stylistic developments of the generation that came after Duccio—principally Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti. His participation in and response to the rapid progression of style and technique in Siena over the course of only a few decades speaks to his great skill as a painter.

This stunning painting depicts the Virgin and Child against a masterfully tooled gold background. The artist’s dependence on Duccio’s revolutionary treatments of this subject is most evident in comparison with the Stoclet Madonna in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1). Niccolò di Segna similarly presents the Virgin standing and depicted two-thirds length with her head inclined, but with her gaze now turned out towards the viewer rather than towards her son. The position of the Virgin’s proper left hand (grasping the cloth beneath Christ’s leg) and the fact that Christ reaches up to touch his mother’s veil both reflect innovations introduced in the Stoclet Madonna.

The Virgin is in many ways the focus of the composition, which is in keeping with the local religious and civic veneration of her in Siena, known as the “City of the Virgin.” In addition to the elaborate halo and the sensitively rendered ruffle of her white veil, the Virgin’s blue mantle is trimmed with gold leaf, a detail that serves as a marker of her special importance and sanctity. Our Madonna likely served as the central panel of an altarpiece, the lateral panels of which have not yet been identified.[iii] It must have been among the artist’s most important commissions given the extensive use of lapis lazuli in the Virgin’s cloak.

The painting dates from the early stages of Niccolò di Segna’s career, ca. 1330, as the rounded features and overall composition reflects the influence of his father’s Ducciesque idiom. It is comparable in date and style to the artist’s (badly damaged but restored) Madonna and Child from the chapel of San Galgano in Montesiepi (Fig. 2) and to the Madonna #44 in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena. Our panel was first published while in the collection of the Drury-Lowe family at Locko Park in Derbyshire, where it remained until 2012 (Fig. 3). Since its acquisition by a private collector in 2012, the painting has undergone a transformational conservation treatment (Fig. 4). Old restoration of the gilding and the paint surface has been removed, and in the process, the original hand-tooling and punchwork of the haloes was revealed.[iv] Artificial 19th-century framing elements were also removed, returning the panel to its original dimensions. The painting can now be appreciated for its manifestly high quality.

Niccolò di Segna was first identified as the author of this work by James Stubblebine at the time of the 1968 exhibition of the Locko Park collection. The attribution has been sustained in all subsequent scholarship, and most recently confirmed by Nicoletta Matteuzzi in her publication on Niccolò and his brother Francesco (who was also a painter). Matteuzzi has noted that following the conservation of the panel, we can now appreciate the original features of the Virgin’s face, which had been flattened by retouching. The Christ Child has also regained his chiaroscuro modelling, with soft and fleshy eyes with thick eyelids, as well as the original nose, whose profile is more clearly in line with Niccolò’s style. These features all point towards a dating in keeping with the artist’s youthful production.

[i] The painting came into the collection of William Drury Lowe during one of his trips to central Italy between 1840 and 1865, when he acquired many works of the 14th and 15th centuries, particularly in the cities of Rome, Pisa, and Florence. Most of the early Italian paintings were bought in the early 1860s. On William Drury Lowe, known as “The Collector,” see Charles Sebag-Montefiore, “William Drury Lowe and the Locko Park Pictures,” in Sotheby’s, London, Old Master Paintings sale catalogue of December 6, 1995, when 27 paintings from the collection were offered for sale. The present work was lot 14 but remained unsold.

[ii] The original Locko Park brass label bearing the number “214” is affixed to the verso of the panel.

[iii] Recent X-radiographs have uncovered holes on the sides of the panel that contained the pegs that held together the various elements of the polyptych.

[iv] Although it has been suggested that the punch marks in the gilding that overlap certain areas of the painted areas are not original, because punchwork is undertaken before painting, it is possible that Niccolò may have decided to paint the drapery and the figures wider than originally planned and painted over some of the gilding (as sometimes occurs in paintings of this period).