GENTILE DA FABRIANO. - Gentile di Niccolò di Giovanni di Massio, painter, b. at Fabriano ca. 1370, d. at Rome in 1427. The biographical data are as follows: in 1408, at Venice, he painted an altarpiece for Francesco Amadi, and was paid twice as much as the painter Niccolò di Pietro. At Venice he also executed a fresco, now lost, in the hall of the Greater Council in the Doge's Palace, representing the naval battle between the Venetians and Otto III. On 17 April 1414 Gentile da Fabriano was at Brescia, engaged in painting a chapel, destroyed, in the old Broletto. The documents (Municipal Archive of Fano) indicate the progress of the works until 18 September 1419. He was invited to Rome by Pope Martin V; perhaps he returned instead to Fabriano (1420).
In any case, on 21 November 1422 Gentile was at Florence, enrolled in the registers of the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries. In May 1423 the Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi was completed. To 1425 belong three works by Gentile, which also document a journey of his to Siena and one to Orvieto: the "Quaratesi polyptych" for the Church of S. Niccolò Oltrarno in Florence, the Madonna dei Notai, in Siena (lost), the fresco (Madonna with Child) in the cathedral of Orvieto. Having returned to Siena in October 1426, Gentile was certainly at Rome in January 1427. The cycle of frescoes executed by him in S. Giovanni in Laterano, later continued (1431) by Pisanello, has been lost.
The tradition (later than Vasari) that sees Gentile's artistic origins in the fourteenth-century Marchigian pictorial current of Nuzi and Ghissi now appears unacceptable. In reality Gentile da Fabriano's altarpiece, formerly in the Federico Museum in Berlin (once in S. Niccolò at Fabriano), the earliest work of the artist known today (ca. 1390-95), demonstrates a precise reference to Lombard miniature painting and painting (that is, reminiscences of the Tacuinum sanitatis, of Giovannino de' Grassi, of Michelino di Besozzo) and the influence of "international" Gothic (through, perhaps, the school of Cologne). In the "polyptych of Valle Romita" (Milan, Brera; 1400-1405), Sienese motifs (from Taddeo di Bartolo) are inserted, together with a naive Lombard naturalism. Shortly afterward the artist must have executed the Madonna with Child, in the Pinacoteca of Perugia.
Of the Venetian period only the Kress Madonna remains, coming from Belluno (Washington, Museum); damaged, but of an open rhythm, with the Child in a frontal attitude relative to the movement of the Virgin; the center of a polyptych that recalls the Venetian ones. The Virgin in Adoration of the Museo civico of Pisa, on the other hand, in its revival of a subtle, miniaturistic Gothic; in the same literary suggestion (due to the cultivated environment of a court) of the inscription in Arabic characters at the margins of the fabric on which the Child lies, it suggests a work of the Brescian sojourn. There Gentile was able to become acquainted with Franco-Flemish miniatures, of the brothers of Limbourg, whose memory is evident in the Adoration of the Magi, executed in Florence for Palla Strozzi. Where the capacity of Gentile is admirable to relive, in a serene, narrative pictorial language, and to unify the most diverse and opposite impressions. These are still Lombard, Sienese, French impressions, and of the first contacts with the Florentine environment. Affinities with Masolino and with Ghiberti, references to the antique, and even a naive Masaccism (scenes on the stole of St. Nicholas) are then developed in the "Quaratesi polyptych," formerly in S. Niccolò Oltrarno, and in another polyptych for the same church (Uffizi, storerooms). The "Quaratesi polyptych," dismembered, is composed of the "Madonna with Child and Angels" (London, National Gallery); of the side panels with 4 saints (Florence, Uffizi); of the predella with stories of St. Nicholas (Vatican City, Pinacoteca; Washington, Museum).
In the very beautiful fresco of the cathedral of Orvieto, the references to the delicate sense of Sienese color (reminiscences of Simone Martini) prevail, together with the monumentality due to the experience of Florentine art. A broad, compact effect, through the reduction of ornamental elements, expresses the Madonna in the Chapter of the cathedral of Velletri, the only work certainly of the Roman moment (1426). The impression is that of a painter who interprets the Gothic with classical measure: not unlike an Andrea Pisano or a Jacopo della Quercia. The attribution to Gentile of a Crucifix painted in fresco, in the refectory of the convent of S. Paolo fuori le mura (Lavagnino), appears plausible, equidistant between Masolino and the master of Fabriano. To whom are rightly attributed: the Coronation of the Virgin (Paris, Heugel Collection); the Madonna with Child and Angels, formerly Davis (New York, Metropolitan Museum); the Madonna formerly Goldman (Washington, Museum); the Madonna - fragment in the Berenson Collection (Settignano); the St. Francis formerly Fornari (Milan, Carminati property), and other works.
The pictorial cosmopolitanism of Gentile da Fabriano reveals an individual foundation in transposing the love of the naturalistic fragment onto the plane of poetry, in the enchantment of color and of a fairy-tale narrative.
Bibliography15 works
F. and aspects of the International Gothic in Italian painting (lecture notes), Rome 1949-50.