Stories of unlikely yet joyous reunions are invariably heartwarming and, moreover, make for excellent copy: comrades-in-arms who, as survivors, embrace for the first time in decades; long-lost offspring rejoining a family incapable of comprehending its good fortune—the variations are both infinite and infinitely moving. Albeit with considerably less drama, The Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) was the recent venue where several paintings, rather than people, were reunited. It was a significant and satisfying event, both historically and artistically.
In the attractive and spacious second-floor area that the Museum occupies in the American Bible Society building at 61st Street and Broadway, curators of several institutions collaborated in bringing together for the first time fragments of a major fourteenth-century altarpiece: a masterpiece by the Sienese painter Bartolo di Fredi (c. 1330–1410) that was brutally dismembered and dispersed in the early nineteenth century. That deplorable event is yet another sad example of the carelessness, even contempt, with which early Italian “primitive” paintings were regarded in the waning years of the Baroque and Rococo age. Emblematic, in this respect, was the fate suffered by that absolute pinnacle of Medieval art, Duccio’s Maestà, installed in 1311, eventually demoted from the high altar of the Cathedral in Siena, and finally cut to pieces in 1771.
The focus and centerpiece of the MOBIA exhibition is the large main panel of the altarpiece depicting The Adoration of the Magi, painted around 1380 by Bartolo di Fredi. The stunning (and