John of Paolo di Grazia

JOHN OF PAOLO DI GRAZIA. - Painter, b. in Siena ca. 1399, d. between February and March 1482. His life, although quite extensively documented, was poor in external events worthy of note. Unless one admits that his first master was the obscure painter Nanni di Giovanni di ser Cecco, who in 1428 made the mother of G. di P., who had been a widow for several years, his universal heir, G. di P. must have trained in the orbit of Taddeo di Bartolo, whose manner is clearly reflected in the painter's first dated work, the Madonna of 1426 in the collegiate church of Castelnuovo Berardenga. Numerous documentary records, in addition to a copious series of signed and dated works and to very many of secure attribution, inform us of the activity of G. di P., who probably never left Siena, where he lived first 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 there was added, in the decade after 1426, a gradual assimilation of the refined manners of the painting of Gentile da Fabriano and later some rare and specious contact 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 singularly taut and concise, more often bristling with sharp accents and overflowing with tortuous swirls: a linearism that with its nervous incisiveness boldly deforms reality, projecting it onto the plane of a fantastic abstractness saturated with an 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 great altarpiece "dei Pizzicalioli", with the Presentation of Mary at the center and around it small scenes from the life of St. Catherine of Siena, now dispersed among various museums) and 1459 (the date of the Polyptych of St. Nicholas, now in the Pinacoteca of Siena) are placed the admirable panels with the Stories of the Baptist, divided among 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 landscapes magically transfigured in an atmosphere of fairy tale. Of 1463 is the altarpiece of the cathedral of Pienza, after which begins the last period of the painter's activity, generally considered less attractive than the preceding ones, if not of true and proper decadence. The Pinacoteca of Siena preserves a very copious collection of works by G. di P., who was also an excellent miniaturist; other paintings surely his are in churches, museums and private collections of Siena, in Italy and abroad. - See plate XLV.

Enzo Carli