Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance
Court (London and New Haven: National Gallery Publications/Yale
University Press, 2001), xi+264pp, 286 colour illustrations, ISBN
185709946X [paperback] 525081, 185709932X [hardback] 525082
This sensitively written and lavishly illustrated volume was written to
accompany the National Gallery’s exhibition of the work of Pisanello (24
October 2001—13 January 2002). Many of the works on show in London
were recently exhibited in shows at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona
and the Louvre in Paris (1996), for which scholarly publications and
complete catalogues were prepared. Consequently, Luke Syson and Dillian
Gordon have decided to bring together many of the new findings from these
exhibitions, making them available to an English-language audience in the
form of a monographic study, rather than an exhibition catalogue. This
innovative decision allows the authors to present a coherent picture of the
artist and his work, a task which is often avoided by multiple-author
catalogues.
As Neil MacGregor reminds the reader in the foreword, ‘we have
been taught to view Italian Renaissance art through Florentine tinted glasses
… Pisanello introduces us to an alternative, imaginative, more inclusive
Renaissance’. In turn, Syson and Gordon guide the reader through the
alternatives, revealing through their own imaginative choice of supportive
materials and carefully researched text the realities of the political and
cultural context in which Pisanello moved so deftly.
While the book is not written like a catalogue, it is ordered to give a
full commentary to the exhibition, providing a readable account for the
selection and arrangement of the works on display in each of the gallery’s
five rooms. In chapter one, Gordon provides a helpful survey of Pisanello’s
life and works, from which the reader is immediately made aware of the
mobility of this gifted and much respected artist. While his name suggests
that Antonio di Puccio was very much a Tuscan, Pisanello worked almost
exclusively in the northern Italian court cities of Mantua, Milan, Ferrara,
Pavia as well as in papal Rome and at the court of the King of Naples.
Chapters two and three, by Syson, reveal the ways in which Pisanello’s
minute attention to detail in both painted and medallic sculptural media
relate to courtly interests in chivalric culture and the refinement of classical
humanist learning. Thus, on the one hand armour and chivalric devices are
carefully represented, while on the other the medium of the medal itself, the
Latin inscriptions and numerous iconographic allusions to ancient
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prototypes display an all’antica refinement. Pisanello’s intimate knowledge
of life at court is not only displayed in these details, however, as we are
shown how he ingratiated himself with his employers, improving the profile
of Leonello d’Este, for example. Chapter four by Gordon concentrates on
the National Gallery’s two panels by Pisanello: The Virgin and Child with
Saints Anthony Abbot and George (c. 1435-41) and The Vision of Saint
Eustace (c. 1438-42). Uncertainties regarding patronage of these works, so
evident when compared with the medals and portraits discussed in previous
chapters, are left open to debate as the author concentrates instead on
technical observations and a careful analysis of the exquisite animal
drawings which were used for the paintings. The final chapter, again by
Syson, examines Pisanello’s workshop and inheritance, discussing the use
and circulation of drawings among his apprentices and proposing that his
influences was perhaps greatest in the field of manuscript illumination.
One of the strengths of this book is that it provides a helpful
chronology at the outset and then concentrates on thematic groups in the
subsequent chapters: an approach which clearly derives from the exhibition
format. This allows for subtlety and complexity in the artist’s work to
emerge and be discussed; as Syson puts it ‘a single explanation may never
have existed: the meaning of an image might be nuanced, shifting, fugitive,
a deliberate challenge to beholders …’. Such openness to interpretation lies
at the heart of both authors’ approach to Pisanello, just as they argue it had
been for his original patrons and viewers. Far more than an exhibition
catalogue, this book is the result of a well-managed partnership between
specialists in painting and medals, who have been able to build on recent
scholarship to produce a monographic study the scope of which goes
beyond that of describing the artist, to discussing the whole cultural
environment within which he worked.
Fabrizio Nevola
University of Warwick
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