GIOVANNI di PAOLO di GRAZIA. – Painter, born in Siena ca. 1399, died between February and March 1482. His life, although very extensively documented, was lacking in external events of note. Unless one assumes that his first master was the obscure painter Nanni di Giovanni di ser Cecco, who in 1428 made the mother of G. di P. his universal heir (she had been widowed for many years), G. di P. must have been trained in the circle of Taddeo di Bartolo, whose style is clearly reflected in the painter’s first dated work, the Madonna of 1426 in the district of Castelnuovo Berardenga. Numerous documentary records, in addition to a copious series of signed and dated works and many others of certain attribution, inform us of the activity of G. di P., who probably never left Siena, where he first lived in the Terzo di S. Martino, and later in a house on Poggio Malavolti (hence the painter is often called or signed himself “del Poggio”).
To the initial influence of Taddeo di Bartolo was added, in the decade after 1426, a gradual assimilation of the refined styles of Gentile da Fabriano’s painting, and later some rare and specious contact with the Florentine milieu. But it was above all from the local Gothic tradition that G. di P. developed his highly personal and unmistakable linearism, impetuous and vibrant, sometimes singularly taut and concise, more often bristling with hesitations and overflowing with tortuous whorls: a linearism that, with its nervously incisive quality, boldly deforms reality, projecting it onto the plane of a fantastic abstraction saturated with ardent lyricism. Around 1440 the painter’s style becomes more grandiose and finds accents of tragic monumentality: and in the decade between 1449 (the date of the large altarpiece “dei Pizzicaioli,” with the Presentation of Mary at the center and around it small scenes from the life of St. Catherine of Siena, now dispersed in various museums) and 1459 (the date of the Polyptych of St. Nicholas, now in the Pinacoteca of Siena) fall the admirable panels with the Stories of the Baptist, divided between the Art Institute of Chicago, the Lehmann Collection of New York, the Landesmuseum of Münster, and the Carvalho Collection of Tours, judged the painter’s masterpiece for the suggestion emanating from the landscapes magically transfigured into a fairy-tale atmosphere. Of 1463 is the altarpiece of the cathedral of Pienza, after which begins the painter’s last period of activity, generally considered less attractive than the previous ones, if not one of outright 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 in churches, museums, and private collections in Siena, in Italy, and abroad. – See pl. XLV.