This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep this painting – a superb demonstration of the inventive powers, profound spiritual empathy and technical virtuosity of Pietro Orioli (1458-1496) – in the United Kingdom.
The Minister's ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred on the grounds that the painting is of outstanding significance for the study of Italian art.
Pietro Orioli was the pre-eminent painter of his generation in Siena at the end of the fifteenth century. His work, long neglected, has been rediscovered within the last 25 years. The Adoration of the Shepherds is a beautiful example of the highly expressive, richly inventive, deliberately non-realistic style favoured by Sienese painters of the period. Its energetic drawing, passages of exquisite detail contrasted with highly expressive use of paint in other areas, and compositional unity all argue for its importance. There are parallels between Orioli's work and the non-realist style of the Florentine Sandro Botticelli and the painting provides scope for further study of the influence of Sienese artists in Florence.
The decision on the export licence application for the Adoration of the Shepherds by Pietro di Francesco degli Orioli will be deferred for a period ending on 15 November inclusive. This period may be extended until 15 January inclusive if a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase the painting at the recommended price of £580,000 (excluding VAT) is expressed.
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the painting should contact the owner's agent through:
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council
83 Victoria Street
London
SW1H 0HW
Notes to Editors
1. From April 2005, responsibility for administering the work of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art was passed by DCMS to the Museums, Libraries And Archives Council (MLA). Media enquiries on the operation and casework arising from RCEWA and from the Acceptance in Lieu and Government Indemnity Schemes and the export licence system should go to Emma Poole/ Gemma Crisp on 020 7273 1459, email emma.poole@mla.gov.uk and gemma.crisp@mla.gov.uk
2. Pictures of these items can be downloaded free of charge from the MLA site on Pixmedia. Please go to the MLA Website situated within the Arts section of Picselect at http://www.pixmedia.co.uk/25/folder/340
3. The painting is in good condition for a painting of its period. It is painted on a very solid panel, on a single plank with no significant cracking, and which has never been cut or thinned. It was conserved in the late 1980s.
4. Orioli was a pupil of Matteo di Giovanni, though he also worked with the multi-talented Francesco di Giorgio. He is thought to have been independently active from the 1480s; his first documented work is the 1489 Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles in the Baptistry in Siena and he executed paintings for many other prominent sites in and around the city until his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven.
5. The Adoration belongs to the last part of Orioli's short career and was intended for display in a palace bedchamber or a small oratory, meant for sustained devotion within a domestic context.
6. The Adoration of the Shepherds is intentionally visionary, rather than worldly and its iconography is paralleled by the mode of painting. Orioli extended the possibilities of the egg tempera medium like no other artist of his day. Unusually long and refined, controlled and densely applied strokes of tempera are applied in the areas of most narrative and symbolic importance – above all, in the Virgin and Child. These contrast with more apparently improvisational aspects – the electrified hair of the shepherd to the left, the exceptionally energetic use of highlights, cross-hatched on the chest of the shepherd on the left – to bring out the relief of the figures and establish their separation from the background. This and the similar contrast between the angular, daringly cropped figures of the Shepherds and the typically Sienese elegance of line of the elongated Virgin combine to create an urgent excitement in the narrative, while preserving its appropriately still centre. Orioli's technique seems to reflect a newly discovered notion of what an artist was – a master of disegno rather than a mechanical craftsman. His perceived God-given talent therefore becomes an essential ingredient in the devotional significance of the Adoration.
7. The very particular style and artistic ambitions of the painters of Quattrocento Siena have come to be appreciated only recently. Orioli's paintings, and this one in particular, show how the painters of Siena, while absorbing some of the naturalistic lessons of Florentine late-Quattrocento art, deliberately rejected others.
8. This picture was painted at the period of Savonarola's preaching. There are parallels between Orioli's painting and the non-realist style of Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine, working at the same period. Indeed the use of a pale hatching, unrelated to the landscape or architecture, to reinforce the contours of figures can be paralleled only in Botticelli's Saint Zenobius panels at the National Gallery, painted later than the Orioli and suggesting a dialogue between the two painters.
