PISANELLO, Antonio Pisano, called Il. - Painter, draughtsman, medallist, b. at Pisa before 1395, d. probably at Naples in 1450.
Having moved with his mother to Verona he was called il P., and Stefano da Zevio was in all likelihood his first master. At Venice (around 1415), P. painted, in the Doge's Palace, a lost fresco, alongside Gentile da Fabriano, who may be considered his second master. In 1420 he is at Mantua; in 1424, once again at Verona; in 1432 at Rome, where he continued the frescoes left unfinished by Gentile in St. John Lateran.
Among P.'s early works belongs the so-called Madonna della quaglia (Verona, Museo civico), in which the influence of Stefano da Zevio is dominant, but which likewise reveals a first contact with Gentile's ornamental and chromatic taste. Typical of P. is the feeling that distinguishes the drawing of the quail and of the two birds at the sides of the throne and of the two suspended angels, with a rhythm of Gothic linearism such as is found again in the famous Annunciation, in fresco, at the sides of the Brenzoni monument, in S. Fermo at Verona (around 1424). Other works in which Gentile's impression tends to replace that of Stefano are: the fresco with the Story of St. Eligius, in S. Caterina at Treviso, four small panels with the Stories of St. Benedict, respectively in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum at Milan and in the Uffizi at Florence. The St. Jerome of the same period (London, National Gallery) is claimed, for the characteristics that recall Lombard painting and Gentile, as the work of the young P. by Adolfo Venturi, who considered the signature apocryphal: Bonus ferrariensis pisani discipulus.
P.'s "animalistic poetics" is asserted again in the Vision of St. Eustace (London, National Gallery), in an incisive, draughtsmanly and medallic vision which, together with his profound portrait-like intuition of characters and customs, returns in all the artist's works: from the paintings to the drawings (among which the group in the Louvre, coming from the Vallardi collection, predominates in number and quality), down to the medals. Among the latter should be remembered: that of Cecilia Gonzaga (1447), of John VIII Palaeologus; the other for the marriage of Lionello d'Este; of Filippo Maria Visconti and of Alfonso of Aragon, etc. Among the paintings that share with the medals a nobly stylized vision of form, are remembered: the Portrait of Lionello d'Este (Bergamo, Galleria Carrara), that of an Este Princess (Paris, Louvre) and the fresco St. George and the Princess (around 1436), in the church of S. Anastasia, at Verona: where the world evoked by the artist, although intuited from the "real," at once becomes a legendary, romantic world, as in Gentile da Fabriano. Moreover in all these works he shows that he knows how to reconcile two formally opposed worlds: the "international" Gothic and the aspirations of the Renaissance. To be remembered also is a painting of the mature period: the Virgin and Child in Glory, between Sts. Anthony Abbot and George (London, National Gallery), signed Antonius Pisanus, where the colour is sustained on a higher tone, of a clarity that suggests relations with Jacopo Bellini. - See pl. CVIII.
Bibliography10 works
Luigi Grassi