Christ in the House of Simon Levi With Mary Magdalen Anointing his Feet

Christ sits, like a medieval lord, before a fine canopy of patterned, dark green cloth, surrounded by the haloed heads of his Apostles and with the weeping Magdalen at his feet, in this magnificent panel-painting that has proved, to my mind, one of the most mysterious and fascinating works in the Gallery’s col­lection. A work that has underlined just how art history can surprise us, and how new discoveries often lie just beneath our fingertips.

 When this work was first acquired by Anastasios G. Leventis in 1967, it was bought under a hazy attribution to a follower of Martin Schongauer, with the powerful draughtsmanship, expressive faces and bold handling of patterns and textures intriguing the collector, inducing him to acquire this eloquent retelling of one of the most emotive scenes of Christ’s teachings. The attribution was later revised to the German School, and to the artists from Swabia or the Upper Rhine, working in the environs of Strasbourg. But the story of the work had not yet been told.

 Several years later, the work of Frédéric Elsig of the Université de Genève put forward a new attribution to the hand of Jacquelin de Montluçon – a leading master active in Savoie between 1496 and 1498 – which led to the identification and reattribution of nine panels, dispersed in the collections of four museums: the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the A. G. Leventis Gallery. This unexpected turn enabled the retracing of the long-lost Retable des Antonins, shedding light on the tumultuous history of this celebrated altarpiece commissioned by the Antonine monks of Chambéry. It linked the dispersed, now rediscovered panels, also brin­ging in science (the Louvre laboratories, and the help of C2RMF) to support the findings of scholarship through the study of materials and techniques. It enabled us, collectively, to join forces in this story of ‘rediscovery’ that remains to be sha­red with the world in both an exhibition and an academic publication – which will ultimately allow a broader public to appreciate the complexity of this beauti­ful work, and the eight panels connected to it, beyond Nicosia, in Lyon, Chambéry and London.