In his description of Lorenzo's technique, Vasari appreciates the smoothness and impeccable finesse of the surfaces, but he does not hide a certain intolerance for the painter's slowness and fussiness, and for his specialism: I remember that Lorenzo only worked as a draughtsman and as a painter on wood, preferring the small size. But it goes without saying that Vasari felt far from a sort of meditas crediana, or rather an orientation that tended to choose moderation and sobriety, with respect to complication and excess. It is no coincidence that he chose to decorate the Virgin's room with small bunches of flowers placed in a glass of rustic manufacture, discarding elaborate containers: the only vase of a certain value made by Lorenzo (Madonna di Magonza), evokes, but does not imitate, the splendid jug of Leonardo (Madonnadel garofano, Monaco), sophisticated in form but also in the choice of flowers that make up the bouquet.
Finally, I come to the unusual component that characterizes the New York round in decisive form: two oaks, one intact and one cut off a short distance from the ground, which Lorenzo places near the Madonna, to the left and right of her, at different depths and in suitably reserved spaces; two oaks that are not reflected in the dense catalog of the artist's paintings. In the landscapes introduced in the portraits and in the works of sacred subjects and traditional planting (Madonnas, Adorations) Lorenzo proposes in fact arboreal forms tending to be uniform, trees and bushes with expanded foliage, where the foliage varies in relation to the light, oscillating from dark green to gold, but not in the type, which alludes in a conventional way to the Tuscan landscape: citrus, myrtle and laurel in the gardens (with reference to the symbolic greenery of the 'Medici' area), beeches, poplars and cypresses in the countryside6.
Until today there was only one autograph painting by Lorenzo in which the vegetation was specifically characterized, et pour cause: the Portrait of a Woman in Black (New York, Metropolitan Museum), whose name is evoked explicitly by the presence, in the background, of a few heads of juniper: an inscription on the reverse (characters of the fifteenth century) attests to the identity of the effigy, "Ginevra d'Amerigo Benci "7. And I do not see why we should consider this indication to be false, entirely consistent with what we know about the plot that links the names of Verrocchio, Leonardo and Lorenzo di Credi both to each other and to the members of the Benci family, especially Giovanni and Ginevra8; the latter, recognized in the demanding Portrait of Leonardo (Washington, National Gallery of Art) and in the verroque-like Dama col mazzolino (Museo del Bargello).
The round piece that has re-emerged from the private American collections now seems to have to be placed alongside the Portrait of the Woman in Black as a work containing a vegetal element that alludes to the name of a client. The oak with the trunk cut off, from which, however, a luxuriant sapling emerges, is, in fact, the recognised emblem of a member of the Florentine banker-merchant family residing in Bruges, the Portinari family, namely Benedetto, son of Pigello (director of the Milan branch of the Medici family) and nephew of Tommaso, who commissioned the monumental Gothic Triptych9. Benedict himself is portrayed in one of the three panels that made up a minor triptych by Hans Memling, now divided between the Uffizi and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin10, and the panel with the image of the patron, dated in the foreground to 1487, preserves on the reverse side a splendid image of Portinari's oak trunk, around which are articulated the elegant scrolls of a phylactery that bears inscribed Benedict's personal motto, "de bono in melius".
- In the New York round, our attention is drawn to the emblematic cut-off trunk and the intact oak tree, whose presence is probably due to the need to make the identity of the other better recognizable: the definition of the knotty stems and large golden leaves stands out against the brown tones of the ground and the blue-grey of the landscape, testifying to the highest style of the painter and the concentration that can be seen in the bunches of unpretentious flowers placed near some of the Madonnas. All this could justify, therefore, the lack of definition of the surrounding environment: a way to give maximum prominence to the oaks and to link devotion to the Virgin to a request for protection for the client and his family, visualized through the emblem and the sapling.
- To complete the plot of information gathered here, it is worth remembering that Benedict was well known to Leonardo, patron saint of Lorenzo di Credi at the Verrocchio: in a memorandum of the Codex Atlanticus, dated 1489, the Vinci, who by now had moved to Milan, mentions him as a person to whom he should have turned for information on the use of ice skates in the Netherlands.
And finally, one last consideration. The triptych by Benedetto Portinari, although executed by Memling in Flanders, had to return soon to Florence, since at the beginning of the sixteenth century it was located at the Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova, an institution of great importance in the life of the city, founded at the end of the thirteenth century by a Portinari12. It is possible that the commission of the tondo to Lorenzo was motivated, in some ways, by a link with Santa Maria Nuova: in fact, in 1486 he stayed as a tenant in a room belonging to the Hospital; and it is always at the Hospital that the artist over seventy 'committed' himself in 1531, renouncing his possessions in exchange for a modest annuity. There, the painter died five years later.
A set of data that confirms the dating of the Portinari roundabout at the end of the eighties, when Benedetto, a little over twenty years old but already well inserted in the world of business that took place along the circuit Italy-France-Flanders, probably stopped in Florence, after leaving Milan and before moving to Bruges.