Word: sassetta
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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...
...since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence...
...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...
...green architectural frame, with its slender columns and bladelike ribs, in which the theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas kneels in prayer, is like a visual gloss on his own syllogisms. An educated Sienese would have known that Aquinas had the habit of praying before he wrote. In another panel Sassetta showed Aquinas asking Christ what he thought of his book on the nature of the Eucharist, and receiving the approval of the Supreme Editor. The Sienese sophisticate would also have connected the well visible in the courtyard with the sacrament of baptism, and the cloister itself with the Earthly Paradise...
...large stag, whose rack of antlers has a horrified, spiky erectness. We are shown a teeming, hostile world where everything studies the next species with blood or hunger in its eye; these acts of watching are traced out with lines, zapping like lasers-or the emblems of stigmatization in Sassetta's Saint...