Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   Middle Ages & Earlier  

Antonio di Puccio, otherwise known as Pisanello, after his native town of Pisa, was once the most celebrated artist in all of fifteenth-century Italy. Masaccio, Donatello, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi famously transformed painting, sculpture and architecture during the early Renaissance; yet none of that revolutionary gang of four was as famous, in his own time, as Pisanello. The forgotten man of the Renaissance, the neglected genius of the golden age of Italian art, his work is the subject of this autumn’s main exhibition at the National Gallery: a belated attempt to rescue a great man’s reputation, given that Pisanello died approximately 550 years ago, but none the less laudable for that.

“You equal nature’s works, whether you are depicting birds or beasts, perilous straits and calm seas”  the humanist poet Guarino wrote, in an encomium of Pisanello written around the middle of the fifteenth century. “When you paint a nocturnal scene you make the night-birds flit about and not one of the birds of the day is to be seen; you pick out the stars, the moon’s sphere, the sunless darkness. If you paint a winter scene everything bristles with frost and the leafless trees grate in the wind. If you set the action in spring, varied flowers smile in the green meadows, the old brilliance returns to the trees, and the hills bloom; here the air quivers with the song of the birds…”

Pisanello was, as Guarino’s words indicate, admired above all for his skill and accuracy in depicting the natural world, a talent most thrillingly displayed in his sketches of the flora and fauna of fifteenth-century Italy. So subtle is Pisanello’s draughtsmanship in these beautiful and rarely shown drawings and watercolours, so accurate his observation of the precise texture of a bear’s fur, the liquidity of a deer’s eye, or the motions of an egret’s wings in flight, that they were long assumed to belong to the much later corpus of scientific drawings by Leonardo da Vinci – a mistake symptomatic of Pisanello’s general bad luck with posterity.

Visitors to the National Gallery may know the artist as the creator of two small but charming paintings on panel, in each of which it is possible – albeit a little dimly, owing to their imperfect state of preservation – to discern why he might once have had such a remarkable reputation. The heavily restored Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George is memorable principally for its comical contrast between the two holy men, who embody respectively the contemplative versus the active life: the fiercely ascetic, white-bearded Anthony, in his plain brown hermit’s robes, seems positively scandalised by the opulence and splendour of St George, who appears resplendent in a gold and silver suit of armour and wearing the broadest-brimmed, most finely woven straw hat in all of Renaissance art. The Vision of St Eustace, another small panel painting apparently designed for the private contemplation of a wealthy patron, illustrates the story of the apocryphal saint said to have been converted to Christianity by a vision of a stag with a figure of Christ on the Cross between its antlers. Pisanello’s Eustace is an elegant knight on a splendidly caparisoned horse. Foot down in his stirrups, he has been stopped in his tracks by the supernatural apparition of the stag. Yet the picture seems more worldly than otherworldly in intent, genuflecting to the conventions of devotional art while setting out above all to delight with its cornucopian depiction of a well-stocked hunting ground. Hares, stags, bears and all manner of other game animals have been squeezed within the narrow compass of a craggy but fertile landscape, carpeted with grass and a multitude of wild flowers. Pisanello’s patron, whose name is unknown, will have resembled the Renaissance nobleman whom the artist cast as his St Eustace. He plainly prided himself on the quality of his thoroughbred hunting stallion, on the copiousness of the game to be found on his estates – and valued an artist able to conjure up such things so convincingly. He also presumably had a sufficiently earthy sense of humour to appreciate the small touch of realism with which the artist depicted one of his dogs smelling the behind of another.

The relative obscurity of Pisanello’s name today can in part be put down to misfortune. History is full of tantalising references to the works that made him famous: the great but now destroyed series of frescoes on which he laboured for so many years in Pavia; the cycle of paintings executed for Pope Martin V, as part of a great programme to restore papal Rome to its past glory, in the now vanished church of St John the Lateran; the many delightful portraits and landscapes done for his Este and Gonzaga patrons in Ferrara and Mantua. Almost none of his major works, apart from a fragmentary and damaged fresco scheme in Verona, have survived the ravages of time. So we can only know him in bits and pieces: little pictures, coins and medals, watercolours and drawings.

The history of taste has also conspired against Pisanello. He was more or less edited out of the canon of great Italian quattrocento artists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because his work did not conform to then prevailing ideas about how the Renaissance had shaped the modern world. Thanks largely to the writings of the rationalist scholar Jacob Burckhardt, the idea took hold that the story of Renaissance art was that of the evolution and eventual triumph of “rational” principles. In painting, that meant an ever-clearer articulation of space in the form of perspective compositions carefully mapped out in a mathematically precise way, together with a new, classically inspired emphasis on man as the measure of all things. But Pisanello plainly had precious little interest in mastering mathematically calculated perspective, so his intricate, depthless and almost miniature-like depiction of nature came to be seen as contemptibly retrograde. The chivalric overtones of a picture such as his St Eustace were also regarded with suspicion, far too “primitive” and “medieval” to be allowed a part in the progressive, forward-looking movement that was the Renaissance. So it was that Pisanello was relegated to the status of an also-ran, dismissed as something of a throwback.

Nowadays most scholars take a broader and less militant view. It is generally recognised that there was more to the world of the Renaissance than the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the calculation of perspective – and that when “Renaissance man” rediscovered the beauties of classical art and literature, he did not brusquely turn away from the intellectual and artistic inheritance of the Middle Ages, but forged instead a new, composite culture from his newly enlarged interests and enthusiasms. Pisanello’s work shows this with particular clarity.

Fifteenth-century Italian noblemen and women who read Cicero and Pliny, and who employed classically learned scholars to teach their children the rudiments of Greek and Latin, still preserved the traditional aristocratic passion for hunting. They may have read Plato, but they also remained in thrall to the tales of love and prowess recounted in the legends of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. These people were Pisanello’s patrons; and they valued him precisely because he satisfied so many of their complicated desires.

Pisanello captured the essence of fifteenth-century chivalry, showing knights on horseback, suits of armour painstakingly observed in every detail, falcons and hunting dogs, and their prey. His patrons’ keen interest in arms and armour and in hunting (which was widely regarded as the ideal training for military action) was by no means idle. The autocratic rulers of fifteenth-century Italian city-states, for whom Pisanello spent much of his life working, were more or less constantly at war with one another. In many cases they made their money as condottieri, mercenary commanders of standing armies, available for hire to the highest bidder. War was their trade, so naturally they appreciated an artist who depicted horses and weapons –  all the accoutrements of the modern soldier –  with such consummate skill.

But Pisanello was equally attuned to the new spirit of classical revivalism sweeping through Italy during his lifetime. Many of his principal patrons, such as Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, or Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, were brutal but also highly educated men. For these Renaissance soldier-princes, emboldened by their reading of classical literature to fancy themselves modern Scipios or even Caesars, Pisanello revived the form of the antique bronze commemorative medal. One side would be stamped with the likeness of the patron, seen in profile, just as the Roman emperors could be seen on their surviving coins and medals. For the reverse, Pisanello would design some pictogram or device of a suitably complex, learned, or tantalising nature: a classical column with a sail fluttering from it, or a three-faced deity, or a knight embracing the cross of Christ. The precise meanings of many of these picture-puzzles cannot always be determined with certainty. But their opacity was an intentional part of their original effect, too. They were designed to be puzzled over, to have their allegorical meanings teased out by the patron and his courtiers, as an enjoyable intellectual game, with the artist on hand to clear up any confusion. Pisanello’s finely worked medals put him at the forefront of advanced humanist taste in the Italian courts: a taste for subtle, sophisticated, difficult symbolism, “beyond the undertsanding”, as one of Sigismondo Malatesta’s courtiers expressed it, of “the common run of people”.

The National Gallery’s exhibition will contain all four of the artist’s known and securely attributed panel paintings. So as well as the two small pictures owned by the gallery itself, visitors to the exhibition will be able to inspect Pisanello’s two extant portraits: his exquisite depiction of an Este princess, who is probably Margarita Gonzaga, and a rather damaged, punningly leonine portrayal of Leonello d’Este. These are among the very earliest independent examples of the portrait as a genre, in Italian Renaissance painting – another indication of the artist’s status as an innovator.

But the chief resource for trying to put together the jigsaw puzzle of Pisanello’s world is the large and wonderful (literally, in the sense of being full of wonders) surviving corpus of his and his workshop’s drawings. These include some rarely seen works from British national collections, including a magnificent albeit chilling series of studies of a corpse dangling from a gibbet, seen from different angles and in varying stages of putrefaction – a disconcertingly vivid, documentary glimpse of a sight to be seen on the edge of every Renaissance city. By far the greatest repository of such drawings, however, is owned by the Louvre. The Louvre Pisanello album is one of the greatest treasures of the French national art collections, an endlessly fascinating encyclopaedia of the preconceptions, interests and experiences of elite fifteenth-century society. Pisanello draws a mongol archer, providing almost the only visual proof of the known links that once existed between Renaissance Italy and China; he draws the exotic eastern retinue of John Palaeologus VIII, head of the Byzantine church, who travelled to Ferrara and then Florence in the late 1530s, seeking aid from the Christian West against the ever-growing threat of Islam; he draws lizards, and buildings, and complicated machinery; he draws jewels and jousters and an executioner briskly beheading his victim. The Louvre regards this album with such reverence that as a rule of thumb even established Renaissance scholars are only allowed to inspect it just once in a lifetime. By no means all the drawings which it contains will be lent, due to their fragility and preciousness, but a very generous quantity will be on view in the London exhibition. Every sheet is a window on to the incorrigibly strange world of the past.