Barnaba Da Modena (c.1328- c. 1386), Saint Catherine on the throne, 1375 – 1380, Tempera and oil on wood, 106x 73 cm, The Palazzo Spinola di Pellicceria, Genoa
When Roberto Longhi published a notice in Paragone in 1960 drawing attention to a panel of Saint Catherine then in Santiago de Chile, the painting must have seemed a strangely displaced thing: a work of fourteenth-century Genoese devotion, steeped in the gold and solemnity of Byzantine tradition, sitting in a private collection at the far end of the world. The panel has since returned to Italy. Acquired by the Ministry of Culture and installed in the Galleria Nazionale at Palazzo Spinola di Pellicceria, it now hangs within a few streets of the churches and confraternity oratories for which Barnaba da Modena once painted.
The painting shows Saint Catherine of Alexandria enthroned, attended by kneeling devotees at her feet. The composition is governed by hieratic frontality and symbolic legibility rather than any interest in spatial depth or naturalistic observation. A richly patterned cloth of honour, set behind the figure against the gold-leaf ground, carries the ornamental arabesques characteristic of Barnaba’s output throughout the 1370s, where gold striations animate the surface of drapery and background alike. The handling of the blue fabric and the treatment of Catherine’s robes show a decorative refinement that draws on both Byzantine pictorial convention and the ornamental vocabulary of Italian Gothic painting, though without subordinating the panel’s devotional clarity to stylistic display.
The painting dates from the later phase of Barnaba’s career, placed by scholars between the late 1370s and early 1380s. By this point Barnaba had been a Genoese citizen for nearly two decades, first documented there in 1361, and had established himself as the leading painter in the city. His success rested, in considerable part, on his willingness to satisfy the tastes of Genoese patrons who continued to prize the spiritual authority and iconic stillness of the Byzantine pictorial idiom at a time when Florentine and Sienese workshops were pursuing markedly different pictorial goals. Whether one reads this as conservatism or as a sophisticated response to the religious sensibilities of a great maritime republic remains an open question. Barnaba was certainly aware of Tuscan developments: around 1380, possibly prompted by contacts with Pisa (where, in 1379, he was invited to complete frescoes left unfinished by Andrea da Firenze in the Camposanto, a commission he ultimately declined), his later works show a heightened concern for volumetric modelling and spatial structure. Yet the Saint Catherine still belongs firmly to the earlier, more hieratic register.
Barnaba’s position in Genoa was that of an outsider who came to define local production. A native of Modena who had received his artistic formation in Emilia, he arrived in a city where Sienese and Byzantine painters were already active, and he synthesised their legacies into a personal idiom of considerable authority and consistency. His prolific output (some fifty works survive or are documented) set the prevailing standard for religious painting in Genoa over more than two decades. The Ligurian painter Nicolò da Voltri, active from the mid-1380s, took Barnaba as his principal point of reference in his formative years before later absorbing the influence of the Sienese painter Taddeo di Bartolo. Through such lines of continuity, the Italo-Byzantine tradition that Barnaba had refined in Genoa persisted in Ligurian painting into the early fifteenth century.
References
Gordon, D. (2011) National Gallery Catalogues: The Italian Paintings before 1400. London: National Gallery
Pitto, N. (2022) ‘La Santa Caterina e l’attività pisana di Barnaba da Modena’, in Guerrini, A. and Zanelli, G. (eds) Nuove luci. Acquisizioni, donazioni e restauri. Galleria Nazionale della Liguria 1958–2021. Genova: Sagep, pp. 19–31. Available at, https://www.academia.edu/74452140/2022_N_Pitto_La_Santa_Caterina_e_lattivit%C3%A0_pisana_di_Barnaba_da_Modena_pp_19_31 (Accesed 07 October 2024)
White, J. (1993) Art and Architecture in Italy 1250–1400. 3rd edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press