NELLI, OTTAVIANO (OTTAVIANO di MARTINO di NELLO). - Painter, b. at Gubbio ca. 1375, d. probably before 1450. He was very active, especially in Umbria.
In Gubbio there are preserved, besides his earliest known work, the Madonna del Belvedere (1403) in S. Maria Nova, executed in tempera on wall, the cycle of undated frescoes in S. Agostino and the one recently discovered in S. Francesco with Stories of the Virgin; the frescoes of the chapel in S. Pietro of 1438 are lost instead. Very well known and important for the host of collaborators is the decoration of the chapel of Palazzo Trinci at Foligno (1424). Other pictorial cycles are at Urbino, where N., in the years 1411, 1420, 1428, 1434, went to work on several occasions in S. Maria del Lomo and in the oratories of S. Gaetano and S. Croce. Among the panel paintings mention should be made of the polyptych of Pietralunga (1403) and the Spocalizio di s. Francesco e la Povertà in the Vatican Pinacoteca.
His belonging to the current of international Gothic with reference to Sienese painting and to French and Lombard illumination explains the affinities with the Salimbeni brothers and with Gentile da Fabriano, on whom, according to an erroneous statement of Cavalcaselle, he would have exerted influence. The confluence of the various influences does not alter the personality of N. which, however not very lofty, allowed the painter to maintain his own characteristics even within the common language of the time. He nevertheless failed to maintain a qualitatively constant level; from the refined and aggravated Madonna del Belvedere (considered his masterpiece), with its harmoniously blended colors, to which the frescoes of S. Agostino at Gubbio can be compared for the perfection of execution, the refinement of the palette, the expressive force, one passes to the frescoes of Foligno, of a richer but less refined chromaticism, where even the research into light is accentuated with effects of greater vivacity and immediacy that nevertheless harm the elegance of the whole; the same can be said for the Stories of the Virgin at Gubbio, which nevertheless retain a certain grace. This carelessness is accentuated in the last works, perhaps because of an ever wider intervention of collaborators.