The present triptych is a typical example of a work made in the Embriachi workshop, active in the final decades of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth century in Florence and Venice. The workshop was founded by Baldassare Ubriachi, a Florentine nobleman and entrepreneur whose surname later evolved into a generic name for objects carved in bone and framed by geometric intarsia (alla certosina) in wood. The actual work was overseen by one Giovanni di Jacopo, also known as the maestro de’ miei lavori dell’osso (master of my works in bone). Thanks to an efficient, standardized production line and a relatively limited repertoire, the Embriachi workshop marketed small-scale altars like the present one, intended for private use, but also a vast selection of objects secular in nature, such as mirrors and engagement/marriage caskets (forzierini), often decorated with mythological scenes. The workshop sometimes also produced monumental altars for highly prestigious clients, including Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy (1342-1404), his brother Jean duc de Berry (1340-1416) and Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351-1402), Duke of Milan. The success of Baldassare Ubriachi’s enterprise lay in the maximum effect of luxury achieved by means of an efficient, serialized production combined with relatively simple, low-cost materials – bovine bones and tinted woods, partly polychromed and partly gilded – further bolstered by a sophisticated marketing strategy to facilitate distribution across much of Europe.
The excellent condition of the Rijksmuseum triptych – with its crowning prophets, fleurons and original iron lock for the outer panels still fully intact – possibly suggests it was made for a monastery. This notion is additionally sup- port ed by the iconography of the carvings: flanking the Virgin and Child in the centre are St Anthony Abbot, St John the Baptist, the apostle Bartholomew and St Catherine of Alexandria, all associated with a life of asceticism and martyrdom and more closely aligned with monastic life versus that of the devout layperson. The exterior of the triptych’s outer panels bears an enigmatic depiction of the head of a man wearing a hood, encircled by an aureole of light rays – a blessed or holy monk? The back of the altar is painted in imitation porphyry. As far as is known, the painted decoration of the outer wings is unique within the Embriachi group. The brisk, fairly simple painting style is in keeping with the altar’s character and can be tentatively attributed to a Florentine bottegafrom the first quarter of the fifteenth century. One possibility is the workshop of the painter Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, to whom the rather uniform painting on seven other Embriachi altars has also been attributed (Tomasi 2007, p. 172; my thanks to Belle Röling and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls).
Frits Scholten, 2026
This entry was first published as a ‘Recent Acquisition’ in The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 74 (2026) no. 1, pp. 70-71 (no. 2)
Literature
Michele Tomasi, Monumenti d’Avorio: I dossali degli Embriachi e i loro committenti, Pisa 2010, pp. 66-83
Michele Tomasi, ‘Angeli per gli Embriachi’, in Daniele Parenti and Angelo Tartuferi (eds.), Nuovi studi sulla pittura tardogotica: Intorno a Lorenzo Monaco, Livorno 2007, pp. 168-75
Michele Tomasi, La bottega degli Embriachi, Florence 2001 (Specchio del Bargello, vol. 49)
Elena Merlini, ‘I trittici portabili delle “Bottega degli Embriachi”’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 33 (1991), pp. 47-62
Julius von Schlosser, ‘Die Werkstatt der Embriachi in Venedig’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen der allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 20 (1899), pp. 220-82
