Treasures from Nickels and Dimes Gifts of Italian Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

In 1953, the Mead’s first director, Charles H. Morgan, wrote to the Kress Foundation’s art director, Guy Emerson, requesting a “Kress Study Collection” of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art for Amherst College. Morgan explained that Amherst could preserve and use such a gift: in 1951, the College’s Fine Arts Department had taken up residence in the new, fireproof, Mead Art Building which—in its various capacities as an art gallery, auditorium, slide library, artists’ studio space, faculty offices, and classroom building— attracted 1,000 undergraduate students each week and some 20,000 outside visitors a year. Crucially, the department’s program of instruction considered first-hand association with original art objects to be its cornerstone.

At the time Morgan wrote, the Kress Foundation was ideally positioned to assist Amherst. Founded by Samuel H. Kress in 1929 to “promote the moral, physical and mental welfare and progress of the human race,” the foundation had two mandates: to convey Mr. Kress’ art collection to the public, and to support medical research. Kress (1863-1955) had made a fortune by revolutionizing the five-and-dime variety store. By stocking fewer types of items and buying in bulk directly from manufacturers, Kress’s stores offered comparatively high quality merchandise at relatively low prices. The stores’ window displays were equally innovative—one celebrated example contained nothing but pots and pans priced at a nickel.

Kress became interested in art in 1921, when, on a visit to , he met the art dealer Count Alessandro Contini- Bonacossi. The American merchant quickly amassed a large collection, focused initially on Italian Renaissance paintings but soon expanding to include other European art of the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. Kress envisioned his collection as a gift to the nation. Rather than donating all Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955) of his collection to a single museum, or building his own (as his present day counterpart, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, has done) Kress initiated the disbursal of his collection throughout the United States. Between 1939 and 1965, in a project described in 1994 by Newhouse News Service’s Byron Belt as the “largest philanthropic sharing in the history of art here or abroad,” the Kress Foundation donated 3,000 works of art to ninety-six museums, universities, and other institutions ranging geographically from Atlanta, Georgia to Honolulu, Hawaii. The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. received 376 paintings, ninety-four sculptures, 1,307 bronzes, thirty-eight drawings and prints, and 108 frames. Eighteen regional museums received an additional 785 objects, and twenty-three college and university museums received the remaining 285 objects for use in the teaching and study of art history. Amherst’s Mead Art Museum ranked among the latter group.

The decision had been an easy one for Guy Emerson, Charles Morgan’s summer neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard, and a long-time friend of former Amherst President Stanley King. Upon receiving Morgan’s letter in 1953, Emerson replied, “Dear Charley, your letter was no surprise to me . . . I shall see that it is kept in the active file and not buried.” Despite Emerson’s assurance, the complex schedule of the foundation’s donation program delayed attention to Amherst for seven years. Finally, in May 1960, only eighteen months before the planned completion of the donation program, Morgan made his first trip to the Kress storage facilities in Huckleberry Hill, PA. Upon his return to campus, Morgan and the other members of the Fine Arts Department used photographs of the paintings that had attracted his interest to develop an annotated “wish list” of paintings, organized in nine categories, each containing two or three artworks. For example, the first category, tempera and gold leaf paintings, named Sano di Pietro’s Adoration of the Child with Saints Bernard and Bernardino (displayed nearby) as Amherst’s first choice, citing its importance as a demonstration of the transition between the middle ages and the early Renaissance, and as an example of the Sienese style.

In December 1960, Morgan returned to Huckleberry Hill. The Mead’s first choice in its list of romantic landscapes had gone to Bucknell University, and a Napoleonic portrait to Rutgers, but paintings recently returned from Kansas City and Honolulu made compelling additions to Amherst’s wish list. By January 1961, the Kress and the Mead had agreed to twelve paintings spanning 300 years and valued at over $100,000, making the foundation’s gift among the most notable donations of artwork received by Amherst College at that time. The Mead celebrated the Kress gift, which arrived in April, with an illustrated catalogue and a festive opening attended by Emerson in May 1961.

Even after this celebration, however, the opportunity to receive a few more gifts from the Kress Foundation remained. In November 1961, Morgan traveled to New York City to review the remaining options. Three Italian paintings, from the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, each corresponding in some meaningful way to American and Flemish artworks already in the Mead’s collection, would arrive in January 1962, together with a personal gift from Guy Emerson of Giovanni Santi’s Madonna and Child. Finally, six antique picture frames arrived in May 1962.

Three dozen letters, four trips, and innumerable telephone conversations had yielded a total gift of fifteen paintings and six frames—making the Kress Foundation’s gift to Amherst College not only the largest made to any institution in the state Charles H. Morgan (1902-1984) of Massachusetts, but also the largest made to any liberal arts college, a tribute to the diplomacy and vision of the Mead’s extraordinary first director.

Four paintings from the Kress Foundation gift to Amherst College hang in this room.

In Mariotto di Nardo’s Crucifixion (ca.1400), a sculptural Christ hangs from the cross while Mary Magdalene, in red, kneels at the base. , to the right, admonishes a soldier while the Virgin Mary, in a dark blue mantle, swoons at the left. A pelican perched atop the cross pecks her own breast, drawing blood with which to nourish her young. Like the nearby angels who catch Christ’s blood in vessels, the pelicans would have struck early viewers as a reference to Christ’s sacrifice and the Eucharist. The painting’s slender figures, rich colors, and flowing lines characterize a style popularized in the middle ages that would, in the years immediately following this work, loose favor to the volumetric figures, symmetrical compositions, and classical forms that distinguish the art of the Florentine Renaissance.

In Sano di Pietro’s late Madonna and Child with Saints Bernard and Bernardino (ca.1480), an angel raises the Christ Child, using a cloth as a priest would lift the Eucharist bread during Catholic Mass, before the adoring Virgin. The composition—in which an angel, rather than the Virgin, lifts the Child—is unusual for the artist, and for altarpieces of this era. Beneath a host of angels and slate-blue cherubim two saints kneel: Bernard (behind the Virgin) and Bernardino (behind the angel), a saint canonized within Sano’s lifetime and a favorite subject of the artist. The painting’s exquisite details repay close looking. Painted flower garlands crown the angels, whose wings resemble peacock eyes. Punchwork patterns stamped into the gold leaf form stars in the angels’ wings; different brocades in Mary’s dress, the angel’s robes, and the golden background; and leaves bordering the halos. Text is inscribed into the Virgin’s and Child’s halos. (Hers, from Luke 1:28, reads “ave Maria gratia plena” or “Hail Mary full of grace”; his, from John 8:12, reads “ego sum,” or “I am.”) Even among Sienese art of this period, celebrated for its abundance of rich detail, Sano’s painting ranks as a masterpiece of its kind.

Guidoccio Cozzarelli’s Madonna and Child with Angels (ca. 1485) presents a simple composition focused on a few figures rendered with the seeming individuality of portraits. Lightly grasped in the Virgin’s long, slender fingers, the Child tilts his head in an inquisitive gesture; his features seem childlike, but his eyes suggest deep wisdom. While the halos of the Virgin (which reads “ave Maria gratia plena”) and Child (decorated with ornate punchwork) appear conventional, the angels’ halos present less measured lines whose expressive appearance may represent an attempt to render effects of perspective. Are they a bold experiment by the master? An assistant’s rougher workmanship? An addition by a later hand? Further research may yield an answer.

Girolamo da Santacroce’s Madonna and Child with Saint Ambrose (ca. 1549) shows the fourth- century Roman bishop (one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church) holding a scroll which reads, “mo(n)stra te esse matrem,” or “show thyself a mother”—words from the hymn Ave Maris Stella (Hail Star of the Sea), recited at Marian feasts from the eighth century onward. While the Virgin Mary gazes into the distance, the Child lifts his hand in the sign of benediction. Girolamo may have included the soldiers and travelers in the landscape only to create a realistic background. The presence of nuns, however, suggests that the setting of this scene, and perhaps the patron of this work, may have been a convent. The different colors of the nuns’ robes probably function as indicators of status within their community. Their animated conversation may refer to actual discussions within the convent, perhaps concerning the life and writings of St. Ambrose, who was influential in the theological study of Mary, writing three books on the significance of virginity, dedicated to his sister, the nun Marcellina. The throne on which Girolamo’s Virgin sits is rendered in a style unique to the Veneto area near , the prosperous city in which the artist worked. Likewise, the classically inspired architecture recalls examples by , perhaps the most influential Venetian painter of the previous generation. Yet if the architecture appears distinctly Venetian, the monumental scale of the Virgin, the atmospheric coloring of the distant landscape, and the use of one-point perspective in the floor tiles and architecture (although not in the throne) present qualities associated with Florentine art of the same era.

Written by Maggie Dethloff, Andrew W. Mellon Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow, October, 2010

The Kress Study Collection at Amherst College

Giuseppe Angeli, Laughing Boy, 18th century, AC 1961.74 Giuseppe Bazzani, attributed to, Apollo (Phoebus), ca. 1750, AC 1961.75 Guidoccio Cozzarelli, Madonna and Child with Angels, ca. 1485, AC 1961.76 Dosso Dossi; (or) Battista Dossi, Saint James, late 1530s, AC 1961.77 Carlo Maratti, The Madonna, 17th century, AC 1961.78 Mariotto di Nardo, The Crucifixion, ca. 1400, AC 1961.79 Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli, Portrait of a Monk, ca. 1550, AC 1961.80 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Portrait of an Old Woman, 18th century, AC 1961.81 Follower of Raphael, The Massacre of the Innocents, early 16th century, AC 1961.82 Sano di Pietro, The Adoration of the Child, 15th century, AC 1961.83 Girolamo da Santacroce, Madonna and Child with Saint Ambrose, ca. 1549, AC 1961.84 Pietro della Vecchia, Portrait in Profile of a Bearded Man, 17th century, AC 1961.85 Agnolo degli Erri, Portrait of a Beardless Man, probably ca. 1465, AC 1962.1 Francesco Guardi, Landscape with Ruins, 18th century, AC 1962.2 Follower of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Child Moses Spurns the Crown of Pharaoh, ca. 1750-1755, AC 1962.3