Sample Pages: Pisanello and the Grounds of Invention

Pisanello and the Grounds of Invention

C. Jean Campbell

“Lovers

and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

William Shakespeare

Introduction

It has been more than half a century since Michael Baxandall identified what he called ‘one of the more disconcerting facts of Quattrocento art history’, observing that ‘more praise was addressed by the humanists to Pisanello than to any artist of the first half of the century’.1 For Baxandall, this heaping of praise on Pisanello suggested that, for fifteenth- century humanist observers, ‘Pisanello, not Masaccio, is the “humanist” artist’.2 Today, those modern narratives that placed the primary emphasis on Masaccio and found Pisanello’s documented fame difficult to fathom, or to explain in positive terms, are eroded to the point where Baxandall’s contradiction no longer holds. Yet, aspects of Pisanello’s art remain resistant to the interpretative habits of the discipline of art history.

The fame of the painter named Pisanello cannot be doubted. Although little is known of the origins of his family, save for the hints that it came from Pisa or Cereto preserved in the different forms of his name (Antonio di Puccio Pisani, or da Cereto), Pisanello’s association with Verona is certain. He both identified himself as a Veronese citizen and was identified as such in the late 1430s, during the conflicts between the Sforza rulers of Milan and the Venetian Republic. Pisanello’s earliest works, which date to the 1420s, are located in Verona. During his lifetime, he worked for many of the prominent courts of the Italian peninsula. His patrons included the Este of Ferrara, the Gonzaga of Mantua, the papacy in Rome, and the Aragonese King of Naples. Almost all of the documentation concerning his life and work emerged from these courtly contexts. The records generally take the form of rhetorical exercises that praise him as one of the greatest painters of his time. Pisanello is identified as such in Bartolommeo Fazio’s De viris illustribus, where he appears alongside Gentile da Fabriano, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden.3

Despite Pisanello’s importance as an artist in his own time, and despite the efforts of many eminent scholars of the twentieth century— George Hill, Giovanni Paccagnini, Bernhard Degenhart, Annegrit Schmitt, Michael Baxandall, Dominique Cordellier, Joanna Woods-Marsden, and others—Pisanello’s art remains enigmatic.4 Part of the problem may be that so few of Pisanello’s official commissions have survived intact. Perhaps the greatest loss is the fresco decoration that he completed after the death of Gentile da Fabriano for San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome.5 With the exception of the framework that Pisanello painted for the Brenzoni Monument at San

Fermo in Verona, the commissioned works that do survive are incomplete or fragmentary. The Arthurian cycle that he painted for a reception hall in the Castello di Gonzaga (later Palazzo Ducale) in Mantua was left unfinished and subsequently whitewashed, and the fresco of Saint George and the Princess, painted to span the arch of the Pellegrini Chapel in Sant’Anastasia in Verona, has suffered major water damage. The fresco was removed from the wall and replaced in two pieces, one of which has lost much of its surface. In addition to these monumental frescoes, only a handful of small panel paintings have survived. Among them are two exquisite portraits, one of Leonello d’Este and the other of Cecilia Gonzaga, that witness his association with the court of Ferrara. Aside from the portraits, we have three devotional panels (the Madonna of the Quail, the Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George, and the Vision of Saint Eustace) and the many medals that Pisanello designed and cast for princely patrons. Fi nally, there is a large, unwieldy corpus of drawings, many of which were featured in a series of exhibitions in Paris, Verona, and London in the 1990s.6 Dominique Cordellier’s careful catalogue for the Paris exhibition is, indeed, a treasure trove of technical information on the drawings and their supporting materials, most of which has been left untouched by subsequent scholarship.

Beyond the problem of survival is the question of where to place Pisanello’s works within our understanding of the art of his time. As Patricia Emison rightly notes, previous attempts to accommodate painters like Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello within a narrative history of style by labelling their manner ‘International Gothic’ have only ‘disguised the fact that, by fifteenthcentury standards, these poet-painters were practicing a fundamentally novel theory of art’.7 While Baxandall’s sympathy for Pisanello’s art is apparent throughout Giotto and the Orators, his critical stance remains ambivalent. In the end, he delivers a negative model as far as Pisanello’s art is concerned. For Baxandall, Pisanello’s art and its rhetorical celebration by Guarino and his followers are representative of something dissolute that Leon Battista Alberti sought to counteract by writing his treatise On Painting (1434).8

If it is true that Pisanello was practicing ‘a novel theory of art’, it will never be enough simply to accommodate that art within existing interpretative models. A new account of his place within the history of fifteenth- century Italian art is needed. The construction of such an account might begin by admitting that, however much we stretch them, our analytical tools, and their inherent critical biases, are not well adapted to the task of recognizing the value of Pisanello’s contribution.

The present project developed from a meditation on the limit that is so often masked by the assertion that there is a difference between iconographic interpretation and formal analysis. We might adduce numerous examples to illustrate this general issue, but the Arthurian cycle that Pisanello painted in the reception hall of the Castello di Gonzaga is a good case in point (fig. 1). The frescoes, which are dated either between 1430 and 1440 or in the late 1440s, were left unfinished. What survives of them is the mere suggestion of an opulent multi-media painting that would have wrapped all four walls of the room, like a tapestry woven with a deep blue ground and animated by clusters of figures. Here, as is the case with all of Pisanello’s monumental paintings, the term ‘fresco’ is inadequate to describe the working of the wall, which, in its finished state, would have featured significant passages of relief work in gilded pastiglia. As is evident

in the upper regions of the three walls on which traces of the paintings survive, the whole composition would have been bound together by the fluttering ribbon with pendant collars that wraps around the room. The subject matter of the painting has been identified by WoodsMarsden as a rendition of the tale of Lancelot’s cousin Bohort at the Castle of Brangoire— a story derived from the medieval Prose Lancelot.9

Although Woods-Marsden’s identification of the subject matter provides one sort of interpretative handle and a means of connecting the project to the Gonzaga patron, a focus on the story limits our exploration of other aspects of these paintings, for instance their material makeup and composition. Turning a blind eye to the subject matter, at least momentarily, brings other things into view, especially their decorative order or decorum. A concentrated effort to make sense of what is going on, or what Pisanello puts before us in his paintings, pays off as order gradually surfaces from the figural knots. As we will see, this order does not derive from some external topic or material of invention (for example, the Grail legend). Nor is it fully captured in a structural comparison with the medieval Lancelot cycle of the sort that Woods-Marsden offers. The pictorial order of the tournament scene partakes of the decorative logic of the borders: the fluttering ribbons and intertwined collars reiterate, with subtle variations, the heraldic devices

Fig. 1. Pisanello, Arthurian Tournament, wall painting: fresco and secco, 1430–40, Castello di Gonzaga, Mantua (Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Fig. 4. Giotto, Lioness and Her Cubs (detail of border), fresco, c. 1306, Arena Chapel, Padua (Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Temper

Cennino Cennini’s Arte

The proposal to use Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte as a primer for a new study of Pisanello’s work is motivated by the necessity of replacing Alberti’s De pictura as the pre- eminent model for the assessment of mid-fifteenth-century Italian painting. Admittedly, there are grounds upon which such a proposal might be challenged. While Alberti’s De pictura is contemporary with Pisanello’s practice, Cennini’s book was composed around the year 1400, more than a generation earlier than Pisanello’s documented activity. Furthermore, as Roberto Bellucci and Cecilia Frosinini have observed, many of the techniques that Cennini recommends, while common in fourteenth- century Florence, were themselves outmoded by the time the Libro dell’arte was written.1 The particulars of Cennini’s technical advice are therefore not directly applicable to Pisanello’s practice. Indeed, the model of imitation that Cennini advocates in his chapters on drawing is highly selective (and based on judicious copying from the work of recognized local masters). It is, thus, a far cry from Pisanello’s wide-ranging accumulative practice. Fi nally, even if aspects of Cennini’s book suggest that he was familiar with the theories of imitation current in the court in Padua,2 the Libro dell’arte is clearly framed as a product of Florentine artistic culture. Since Cennini names himself as an apprentice of Andrea Gaddi, and thereby places himself in the Florentine lineage of Giotto, it follows that his would-be apprentice will also be part of that lineage.

If the Libro dell’arte is to be used as a primer in the present context, therefore, it needs to be reintroduced as something other than an artifact narrowly tied to a specific place and time. We might begin by asking two questions: first, whether earning one’s place in Giotto’s lineage necessarily entails being either a Florentine or a painter; second, whether the benefits of working closely with Cennini’s book are necessarily limited by its ostensibly conservative agenda. The first question is relatively easy to answer. After all, by the time Cennini was writing, Giotto’s example had accrued cultural authority well beyond Florence, particularly in the places he had worked, including Naples and Padua.3 Furthermore, as Marco Cursi’s research demonstrates, people other than painters had an interest in the book.

The earliest extant transcription of Cennini’s book, now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, was probably not made for a practicing painter. It was one of a group of manuscript copies made by inmates of the Stinche (the central Florentine prison),4 all of which were

Fig. 31. Pisanello, A Dormouse in Four Positions, black chalk, pen and brown ink, and watercolour on paper, 25.5 × 18.1 cm, 1440s, Musé e du Louvre, Paris (Credit: RMN- Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

Fig. 32. Pisanello, Striding Boar, pen and brown ink on parchment, 9.8 × 16.9 cm, 1430s, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Credit: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / Art Resource, NY)

through which the artist gained the knowledge that he would represent (along with any externally determined subject matter) in his finished paintings.

Another place we can go to find the history of the Louvre boar is a drawing of very dif ferent character now in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum (fig. 32). That drawing, which shows a male boar, is done in ink on parchment and is a remarkable piece in its own right. Unlike the carefully layered and meticulously grounded Louvre boar drawing, this one gives the appearance of spontaneous, all-at- once composition, even if, as turns out to be the case on close examination, it too is carefully layered. The effect of spontaneity in producing the drawing corresponds to the liveliness of the creature depicted. Pisanello’s drawing seems to catch the boar in mid-stride and palpably alive—an effect that is communicated in part by the bristles that describe the line of the creature’s spine. Beyond defining the upper contour of the boar, these bristles function as an index of the ground of the drawing, which, in this case, is a rather coarse piece of parchment. The visible veins throughout and the rough patch at the bottom left—where larger hair follicles mar the smooth surface of the prepared folio like a stain— give evidence of the ground’s former life as animal skin. But the parchment does not simply speak for itself as a material; it is made to speak by the painter. Pisanello’s intervention is most apparent in his replacement of the real bristles, scraped away when the animal skin was prepared, with pen-work bristles. Perhaps even more remarkably, Pisanello, in drawing the unruly strands of the boar’s tail, re-iterates the contours of the veins that run through the parchment

Chapter 3

Threshold

Pisanello’s Frameworks

As noted in my introduction, the well-known passage of Natural History in which Pliny uses the term ‘parerga’ is primarily an account of the work that was the crowning achievement of the painter Protogenes. The passage introduced a term that would ultimately be given an impor tant place in the history of modern European philosophy, where it took on a sense that Pliny (the working rhetorician) could not have predicted. Whatever else the term may have come to mean, it is important to note in the present context that, for Pliny, Protogenes’ parerga are explicitly part of a physical environment. He writes:

Some people say that until the age of fifty he was also a ship-painter, and that this is proved by the fact that when he was decorating with paintings, on a very famous site at Athens, the gateway of the Temple of Athene, where he depicted his famous Paralus and Hammonias, which is by some people called the Nausicaa, he added some small drawings of battleships in what painters call the ‘side-pieces’ (parergia), in order to show from what commencement his work had arrived at the pinnacle of glorious display.1

Like the painting to which they relate as side-works, Protogenes’ parerga are situated within a monumental gateway that presented and regulated access to a sacred precinct. Their function as a framework for the painting of the sacred ships Paralus and Hammonias is thus analogous to the function of the gateway that framed the entrance to the Acropolis. As part of a physical apparatus, or gateway, that articulates the momentous passage from one place to another, Protogenes’ parerga position the painter, alongside the architect, as someone who gives significant shape to a site.

Like Protogenes, Pisanello was a painter of ‘gateways’ that frame and give shape to places of significant passage. In the two monumental works that survive in the city of Verona, the Brenzoni Monument in the Church of San Fermo (fig. 36) and the arch of the Pellegrini Chapel in the Church of Sant’Anastasia (fig. 37), Pisanello quite literally fabricated frames for transitory events. At San Fermo, where the central event has to do with resurrection, Pisanello’s work takes shape as an elaborate bower crowned by a scene of the Annunciation. This framework presents, but cannot quite contain, the relief sculpture of the Resurrection by the Florentine workshop of

Fig. 36. Nanni di Bartolo (sculptor) and Pisanello (painter), Brenzoni Monument, c. 1428, San Fermo Maggiore, Verona (Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Fig. 37. Pisanello, Saint George and the Princess (detail of right half), wall painting: fresco, secco, gilded pastiglia, 1433–38(?), arch of the Pellegrini Chapel, Sant’Anastasia, Verona (Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Nanni di Bartolo (‘il Rosso’).2 In its lower regions, Nanni’s relief erupts from the wall like a wellorchestrated efflorescence. At Sant’Anastasia, where the central event is not overtly represented in an image, Pisanello made a wall painting of Saint George and the Princess to span the arch and frame the entry into the Pellegrini Chapel.

The present chapter will consider Pisanello’s contribution to the Brenzoni Monument as an early and formative stage in a painting practice that gave external form to thresholds of various kinds, the culmination of which was the arch painting of Saint George and the Princess for the Pellegrini chapel. At the same time as they decorate the built fabric of their respective churches, Pisanello’s monumental frameworks, beginning with the tomb monument, are filled with things that, like Protogenes’ ships, tie them indexically to places (of passage) in the artist’s life and work.

Although the Brenzoni Monument contains some of the most visually striking moments in fifteenth-century European painting, not least Pisanello’s breathtaking portrayal of Gabriel arriving to share the news of the Incarnation with Mary (figs. 38), the work has received surprisingly little attention from scholars (fig. 39).3 Admittedly, the monument is easy to miss upon entering the ship-like vessel that is the church of San Fermo, being tucked just inside the west wall. The son of Nicolò Brenzoni commissioned the monument as a family tomb in 1422 and the

Pisanello, Annunciation (detail of Gabriel), Brenzoni Monument (Credit: Mario Bonotto / Scala / Art Resource, NY)

ensemble of painting and sculpture was completed in 1426. Pisanello’s portion of the ensemble includes a depiction of the Annunciation framed by a representation of Paradise in the form of a verdant bower. Since my question concerns the status and function of the framework as a vehicle for Pisanello’s inventive devotional work, I will not dwell on the question of the Brenzoni Monument as a collaborative complex. However, approaching Pisanello’s part necessitates a brief characterization of the monument as a whole.

The devout spectator standing before the Brenzoni Monument is invited to assume a role in a drama that is framed as an encounter with a fictive garden, the gates of which are guarded, in the uppermost register, by two standing archangels. The scenario recalls an event described in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea in which Adam’s son Seth appears as both spectator and

Fig. 38.

Chapter 4

Agon

Pisanus Pinxit

One of the few surviving documents related to Pisanello’s oeuvre provides a starting point for the consideration of the reception of his works in the fifteenth century. The document in question is a letter of uncertain date written by Leonello d’Este in Ferrara and addressed to his brother Meliaduse, who was then in Rome. In it, Leonello asks his brother to act as his agent in the conveyance of a painting that had been promised to him by Pisanello.

Pisanello, most distinguished of all the painters of this age, when he moved from Rome to Ferrara, promised me, of his own accord, a certain panel painted by his hand, in which was the image of the Blessed Virgin. And since this panel was in Rome in the house of one of his friends, he offered to provide him a letter, as soon as he arrived in Verona, so that that he [the friend] would entrust it [the panel] to you as my brother, so that you might send it to me immediately. Being parted, I don’t know if I told you what I had intended to tell you. Therefore, if, as I believe, it [the panel] has been delivered to you, I implore you to send it safely to me. Indeed, I am extraordinarily desirous of seeing it, both for the ingenium of the excellent painter and, above all, for devotion to the Virgin.1

Several observations may be made about the special nature of Leonello’s request, the first being that the painting in question is described as an unsolicited gift from the painter to a patron. The painting is, moreover, part of a carefully guarded exchange involving friends and close relations whose trustworthiness must be secured along a path that connects Rome, Verona, and Ferrara. The circuit described, along with the urgency expressed by Leonello, suggest that something more precious than a simple object, however splendidly wrought, is at stake. The importance of the gift is confirmed in Leonello’s expression of uncertainty and of the urgency he feels not just to have the panel safely within his hands but also to have it within his sight. The desire to see the painting is not just a question of possession, it is bound up for Leonello with a desire to establish relationships, one with the illustrious painter and the other with the Holy Virgin. The painting is more than an object of finite value, it is a medium that allows Leonello to access, in intimate terms, the ingenium of the painter, while also paying devotion to the Virgin. Significantly, although the recognition of the painter’s ingenium and the exercise of praise due to the

Virgin are not identical acts in Leonello’s mind, they are explicitly linked in the expression of his desire to see Pisanello’s painting. In the process of prompting Meliaduse to fulfill his role as agent, Leonello’s request articulates the relations among three subjects whose roles may be taken as exemplary for a model of reception: the would-be recipient of a painting, the painter, and the holy personage whose attention they both seek.

There is no certainty as to which, if any, of the painter’s surviving works is at issue in this letter. Two panel paintings featuring the Virgin survive from Pisanello’s hand, though the painter undoubtedly made many other portable devotional paintings of the sort indicated. Even it is not the specific work mentioned in the letter, one of the extant works, the Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony and George of c. 1435–41 (now in the National Gallery, London) is surely the type of work involved in the exchange between Leonello and Pisanello (fig. 53). That panel belongs to a tradition of late-medieval and Renaissance objects featuring Marian imagery that were used as instruments of prayer.2 Like many objects of this type, the London panel shows Pisanello creatively exploiting what Anthony Cutler described as the potential for syncretistic treatment inherent in the loosely defined image types that were adapted to the praise of the Virgin in the late Middle Ages.3 Pisanello’s painting might be considered a predecessor of sixteenth- century Marian altarpieces like Raphael’s Foligno Madonna of 1511 and Parmigianino’s Vision of Saint Jerome of 1526,4 but it did not carry the official institutional burden of the later works. As a smallscale portable object, Pisanello’s panel is more closely allied with personalized devotional instruments like books of hours. It also differs from the sixteenth- century altarpieces as far as the role of the artist’s style is concerned. On one hand, the charge of Pisanello’s painting is unlike that of the sixteenth-century Marian altarpieces of Raphael and Parmigianino, in which the outward beauty of the representation, as governed by a self- consciously cultivated style founded in the selective and combinatory imitation of nature and art, came to stand for the beauty of the Virgin.5 On the other hand, Pisanello’s painting is also not one of the fifteenth- century Marian pictures wherein, as Regina Stefaniak puts it, ‘a collection of small icons and scriptural captions compensate for the indifferent beauty of the representation’.6 If, as suggested in Leonello’s letter, the recognition of Pisanello’s ingenium matters, it remains to explain how the act of recognition might have operated within an intimately framed economy of grace of the sort described by Leonello.

Among the many striking features of the painting—an extravagant straw hat, a blazing aureole, a deafeningly silent bell, a wildly gesticulating dragon—the artist’s relatively quiet signature elicits a special sort of attention (fig. 54). It invites the carefully reflexive kind of thinking that Louis Marin brought to the phrase ‘c’est mois que je peins’ in his consideration of the figurability of ‘le moi’ (or selfhood) in Montaigne.7 Despite its location in the centre foreground, Pisanello’s signature on the London panel is, at first, easily overlooked because it is assimilated in its morphology and its colouration to the plants that spring up from the dry pebbled terrain of the painting’s foreground. In fact, the signature shares both its space and its pictorial role with a remarkably verisimilar portrait of alpine gentian. Even once the vivid blues, greens and yellows of long-faded pigments are imagined back into view, the signature stands as a relatively restrained element in an other wise flamboyant painting.8 While other features, including the ‘Flemish’ straw hat sported by Saint George, may reflect the social styling of a princely patron,9

Fig. 53. Pisanello, Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George, tempera on poplar panel, 46.5 × 29 cm, c. 1435–41, National Gallery, London (Credit: National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY)