The Prophet Baruch
Bologna, Great Chapel in the Rocca di Galliera, 1334; Bologna, Church of San Francesco,1335-post 1568; subsequently, Church of San Domenico; dispersed in 1604; first documented in the Pinacoteca in 1889
The Pinacoteca di Faenza is home to one of Giovanni di Balduccio’s most prestigious works, once part of a major polyptych commissioned by the French Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget for the Great Chapel in the Rocca di Galliera in Bologna to mark Pope John XXII’s return from Avignon. A fragment of a marble pinnacle portrays the Prophet Baruch, as a scroll informs us. Baruch was the scribe of the Prophet Jeremiah and faithfully recorded every prophesy that Jeremiah dictated to him. The figure’s gaze and foreshortening instantly reveal the position of the pinnacle, which stood to the right of the polyptych’s main axis. After the Rocca di Galliera was destroyed in the course of an uprising by the people of Bologna against the papacy in 1334, the polyptych was assigned to the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna and re-erected on the high altar, where it is mentioned by an anonymous 14th century Roman author in the Vita di Cola di Rienzo and by Giorgio Vasari in the 1568 edition of his Lives of the Artists. By 1605 the polyptych had been dismantled and dispersed, until this fragment resurfaced in the Pinacoteca di Faenza where it was identified by Cesare Gnudi in 1949 through comparison with the figure of St. Joseph in a fragment of a predella with a Nativity scene in the Poggi Cavalletti collection, a private collection in Bologna. A reconstruction of the work’s original aspect was proposed, along the lines of an existing polyptych by Tommaso d’Andrea Pisano in the church of San Francesco in Pisa, in the course of an exhibition in Bologna entitled Giotto and the Arts (Bologna, December 2005 – March 2006).