SASSETTA, Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo, called Il. - Sienese painter b. in 1392, d. April 1, 1450.
His first documented work, executed between July 1, 1423 and December 1426, consisted of a large triptych bearing at the center the Triumph of the Most Holy Sacrament surmounted by the Coronation of the Virgin and on the side panels St. Anthony Abbot and St. Thomas Aquinas surmounted by the Annunciation; the whole connected by pilasters with the Four Patron Saints of Siena and the Four Doctors of the Church, by cusps, and furnished with a predella with the Last Supper and Little Scenes of St. Anthony and St. Thomas. The complex was dismembered and dispersed in 1816, and only a few secondary parts of it survive in Siena, Budapest, the Vatican and Barnard Castle. Between 1430 and 1432 the S. painted for the cathedral of Siena the Madonna delle Nevi, which later moved to Chiudino and then (1936) to the Contini Bonacossi collection in Florence; of 1433 is the Crucifix for the church of S. Martino in Siena, destroyed in 1826 and of which the terminal crosses and the little scene at the base survive in the Chigi Saracini collection in Siena. To this period, or a little later, belong the Polyptych for the church of S. Domenico in Cortona and various Madonnas (Museum of Grosseto, Pinacoteca of Siena, etc.). The masterpiece of the S.'s last period is the great polyptych executed for the Franciscans of Borgo S. Sepolcro (1444); dismembered in 1752, dispersed in 1810, it could be ideally reconstructed with absolute certainty only after the very recent (1951) discovery in a French private collection of three compartments: a Madonna with Music-making Angels, a St. Anthony of Padua and a St. John the Evangelist, flanked by the figures of the Baptist and the Bl. Ranieri Rasini in the Berenson collection, to which also belongs the central panel of the reverse, with St. Francis in Ecstasy, originally flanked by eight Little Scenes of St. Francis (one now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly and the others in the National Gallery in London). The Coronation of Mary above the Porta Romana in Siena, a work completed at the S.'s death by Sano di Pietro, was destroyed in 1944, but the autograph part of it was saved, that is, a Glory of Music-making Angels in the sub-arch. Various works, among them the very famous Nativity of Mary in the Collegiata of Asciano and a triptych (1436) in the basilica of the Osservanza in Siena, which were once considered among the most significant of the S., have recently been attributed to an unknown personality, akin to the S., called the "Master of the Osservanza."
The S. is the greatest Sienese painter of the 15th century. Although trained in Siena, probably in the circle of the late-Gothic painters (Gualtieri di Giovanni da Pisa, Nicola da Naldo, Benedetto di Bindo, etc.), he must have had an early and not superficial knowledge of the manners not only of Gentile da Fabriano and of Masolino, but of Masaccio himself, of Brunelleschi and of Donatello. This is shown by the constant search for a three-dimensional plasticity and a concrete spatiality that can be discerned from his very first works. Nevertheless the S. cannot be called a wholly Renaissance artist, because the ingenuous love for the finely elaborated detail and the almost mystical inclination to dream, the exquisitely decorative taste and the abstracting tendencies all proper to the Sienese spirit prevented him from realizing that unity and organicity of vision at which the Florentine innovators aimed. A most consummate technician and a colorist of exceptional refinement, the S. also displayed highly original qualities as a narrator. - See pl. CXXIX.
Bibliography5 works
Enzo Carli