A Peruzzi for Belfast

1. Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536)
The Nativity, c. 1515 (before restoration)
Oil on panel - 100.6 x 76.4 cm
Belfast, Ulster Museum
Photo: The National Gallery

See the image in its page

8/1/24 - Acquisition - Belfast, Ulster Museum - There are Christmas tales that last a whole year: in December 2022, we thus learned that a superb painting (ill. 1) by Baldassare Peruzzi had been assigned to the Ulster Museum in Belfast after being refused export by the British Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), a sort of equivalent of our Advisory Committee on National Treasures. Its quality was already apparent in this photograph taken before its restoration (ill. 1): the serene atmosphere of Christmas night was enlivened by a few touches of light, the light emanating from the Infant Jesus echoing that of the moon that dominates the scene. It was the gallery Agnew’s that offered this panel at the time, to which it devoted a rich note from which we have drawn extensively: we learn thus that it was published for the first time by John Pope-Hennessy in The Burlington Magazine in 1946, shortly after its acquisition by the important art historian Philip Pouncey (1910-1990), who was able to return to Baldassare Peruzzi this composition previously given to Giovanni Francesco Penni. Never disputed since, this attribution has been validated by other specialists and has continued to accompany the painting exhibited in Manchester in 1965, in Ottawa in 2009 and in Rome in 2011-2012, after having been the subject of a loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge between 2006 and 2009, which already held two landscapes - drawings - by this particularly rare artist [1].

2. The painting being restored by Olivia Stodart in London
Photo: The National Gallery

See the image in its page

As Christopher Rowell, a member of the RCEWA, points out, Philip Pouncey was a connoisseur of Baldassare Peruzzi, one…