Reunited

In the 17th-century Bernardo Strozzi painting "Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene and Her Maid," one of the greatest Italian treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts, the saint looks up -- but there's nothing there.

Even in 1972, when the MFA bought the painting, there was scholarly speculation that it was incomplete. The hunch was based on Strozzi's much larger version of the same subject, painted for a church in Venice. In that altarpiece, the saint is looking up at three pudgy putti, winged angelic figures hovering protectively overhead.

Did the MFA's Sebastian also once have the fluttering attendants?

Yes.

The journey to that definitive answer began two years ago, when a German collector-dealer wrote to the MFA to say he'd bought the top of the picture at a small provincial auction.

"He knew exactly what he was looking at," MFA curator Ronni Baer said the other day, adding that "the market value of his discovery was entirely different for everyone else than it was for us."

For "everyone else" the fragment was only that. For the MFA, it represented the possibility of reuniting the two halves of a masterpiece separated a couple of centuries before; no one knows exactly when. So last year, the museum bought the fragment, for an undisclosed price.

The moment it was unpacked in Boston, "We knew instantly that it was the missing piece," Baer says.

Since then, it's lived in a conservation lab at the MFA, where Baer, her fellow curator Frederick Ilchman, and Rhona MacBeth, the museum's head of paintings conservation, have been studying it. Last week, the two parts of the work were still there, propped up on easels, side by side. The rich, luscious colors; the bravura handling of paint in cascading folds of silk; lace that looks like frosting casually squirted onto the canvas; the feathery delicacy of the putti wings: All are characteristic of Strozzi's style -- and all are present in both halves of the painting.

Those wings, by the way, are in fanciful pastel tones; Strozzi showed great imagination in matters of color. Faces are another story. He recycled a single type: beady eyes, little red upturned nose, round cheeks, and small mouth with puffy lips. The putti answer that description; so does Saint Irene.

"This," says Baer, "makes Strozzi's work among the easiest in the world to identify."

A few days ago, the two halves of the Strozzi were once again hung in a single frame, in the MFA's Koch Gallery, with a thin horizontal band of wood replacing the very small strip of canvas that was lost when the painting was divided. It will remain in the Koch Gallery for a year. Then it goes on loan to the Worcester Art Museum for six months, to be in a show about the plague that recurred in Italy from 1500 to 1800. After that it comes back to the MFA, to undergo conservation estimated to last at least another year.

In the interim, Baer and MacBeth will go to Venice to research other Strozzi paintings."We need to see the altarpiece," Baer explains, "which seems to be the definitive version of the subject in our painting."

Many mysteries still surround the MFA's Strozzi. Why it was made in the first place, and why it was subsequently cut up, are among the biggest. It could be a modello, a study for the other, bigger work in Venice. But for such a study, it is unusually large and refined. Perhaps it wasn't a preparatory study at all, but an after-the-fact response to the success of the big altarpiece in the church of San Beneto. Someone else just had to have one, and Strozzi complied.

In any event, Ilchman says it wouldn't have been designed for another church in Venice. If that were the case, there would be written records of its presence. Venetians kept track of things. Perhaps it was made for a more provincial, out-of-the-way place, either as an altarpiece or for a palazzo.

If indeed it was a modello, as Baer believes, what happened to it after the completion of the bigger piece? The trail is cold from the 17th century until the late 19th. On the back of the painting was an inscription that disappeared when the painting was relined, given a new canvas backing to reenforce it, in the 1970s: "St Sebastian, 1883, East wall," written in English. So the painting had by then presumably arrived in an English-speaking country, where, in 1883, it was probably either put up on, or taken down from, that east wall.

The painting eventually surfaced in a 1971 sale of works from a Scottish private collection at an auction at Sotheby's in London. It was bought by the Hallsborough Gallery, also in London. In 1972, Perry Rathbone, then the director of the MFA, bought the piece from Hallsborough.

In an article that same year in the Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, historian Barry Hannigan posited that the painting had had a top, whose whereabouts were unknown. But the matter remained murky. This was partly because a 1920s black-and-white reproduction in a book on Italian painting showed what looked like the missing piece -- but it was an oval, which meant it couldn't have fit atop a rectangular canvas.

But it could. It was merely framed as an oval, a false lead. The painting that arrived at the MFA is a rectangle. There is, however, an arch painted at its top, with clouds on one side and foliage on the other. Baer speculates that Strozzi was offering options to whoever commissioned the work. "It's easy," she says, "to imagine him asking, `You want a rounded top or a straight one? With trees or clouds?' "

Whatever the reason for cutting the work in two, the surgery was a careful one. "Whoever divided it up," Ilchman says, "made it into two good independent paintings." Possibly it was cut up to maximize profits from its sale: Ilchman offers the example of the antiques dealer with a set of 10 chairs who can get more money by selling them as sets of four and six than by selling all ten together.

Large paintings of that era were also cut into fragments to make them fit domestic settings. Maybe someone just wanted those adorable putti for over the bed.

The reunion of the two halves of the Strozzi is the kind of event curators live for. "This never happens," Baer marvels. "It just doesn't." This time, it did.