Word: giovanni
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...relative lack of interest in the 15th century. It is, in a way, a show for escapists -- for what could be more pleasant than to flee the brutish realities of modern life for the enameled, fictive grace and small harmonious scale of these predella fragments and miniatures by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo and Girolamo da Cremona...
...John Pope-Hennessy, formerly chairman of the department of European painting at the Met and one of the great scholars of the Italian Renaissance. No doubt the Pope, as Hennessy is known, will be happy: when he was 23, he wrote his own book on the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo...
This emblematic world is at full intensity in the Met's own The Creation, and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, circa 1445. God the Father hurtles down from heaven, supported by blue cherubim and bowling before him an immense wheel depicting the concentric divisions of the universe -- the earth, the spheres of water, air and fire, those of the seven planets, the zodiac and the dark blue primum mobile. On the right, an angel chivies our first parents -- pale, forked creatures -- out of a tapestry paradise of emblematic plants...
...outcrops that appear in the background of Saint Anthony Tempted by a Heap of Gold are hardly the result of fantasy and are recognizably based on the gullies and crests of Le Crete, the bare hills southeast of Siena. And by the end of the quattrocento, in Benvenuto di Giovanni's image of Christ on his way to Calvary, the landscape is real and full of fantastical character: a Roman soldier like an armed Boschian lobster, tormentors pulling and grabbing at Christ, knots of rope, pebbles underfoot -- each bearing its own color and polish, like a cabochon stone...
...fierce empiricism of Masaccio, determined to fill real space with real figures that the senses could know, made its mark on some painters but not others. Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with...