GIOVANNI di PAOLO di GRAZIA. — Painter, b. in Siena ca. 1399, d. between February and March 1482. His life, although very extensively documented, was poor in external events of note. Unless one accepts that his first master was the obscure painter Nanni di Giovanni di ser Cecco, who in 1428 instituted the mother of G. di P., a widow for several years, as his universal heir, G. di P. must have trained within the orbit of Taddeo di Bartolo, whose manner is clearly reflected in the painter’s first dated work, the Madonna of 1426 in the parish church of Castelnuovo Berardenga. Numerous documentary records, in addition to a copious series of signed and dated works and very many of certain attribution, provide information about the activity of G. di P., who probably never left Siena, where he first lived in the Terzo di S. Martino and then in a house on the Poggio Malavolti (whence the painter is often called, or signed himself, « del Poggio »).
To the initial influence of Taddeo di Bartolo was added, in the decade following 1426, a gradual assimilation of the refined modes of the painting of Gentile da Fabriano and, later, some rare and distinctive contacts with the Florentine world. But it was above all from the local Gothic tradition that G. di P. developed his highly personal and unmistakable linearism, impetuous and quivering, at times exceptionally tense and concise, more often bristling with angular emphases and luxuriant with tortuous convolutions: a linearism that, with its nervous incisiveness, boldly deforms reality, projecting it onto the plane of a fantastic abstraction saturated with ardent lyricism. Around 1440 the painter’s style became more grandiose and found accents of tragic monumentality; and in the decade between 1449 (the date of the great altarpiece « dei Pizzicalioli », with the Presentation of Mary at the center and, around it, Storiette della vita di s. Caterina da Siena, now dispersed among various Museums) and 1459 (the date of the Politico di s. Nicola, now in the Pinacoteca of Siena) belong the admirable panels with the Storie del Battista, divided among the Art Institute of Chicago, the Lehmann collection in New York, the Landesmuseum of Münster, and the Carvalho collection in Tours, judged the painter’s masterpiece for the evocative power emanating from the landscapes magically transfigured in a fairy-tale atmosphere. The altarpiece of the cathedral of Pienza dates from 1463; after it began the final period of the painter’s activity, generally considered less attractive than the preceding ones, if not an actual decline. The Pinacoteca of Siena preserves a very large collection of works by G. di P., who was also an excellent miniaturist; other paintings certainly by him are found in churches, museums, and private collections in Siena, throughout Italy, and abroad. — Vedi tav. XLV.