King Melchior in woven gold, high on his throne in an elaborately rigged vessel cutting through foamy spray, sails into London for the National Gallery’s loveliest Christmas exhibition in years.
With its retinue of exotic travellers in crimson turbans, rough shipmen, a flotilla of little boats echoing the grand regal one and a simplified landscape of Tuscan hills and tiny castles, Francesco Pesellino’s quirky waterborne journey of the magi, “King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land” (c1445-50), encapsulates this little-known artist’s happy blend of fantasy, meticulous naturalism and ceremonial splendour. The billowing white sails whip up energy across the whole painting, sea and earth surge and swell beneath a strip of sky at sunrise, the undersides of the clouds tinged pink: a new dawn, a new God and a fresh art emerging in 15th-century Florence.
Pesellino was born there around 1422 and was in his mid-twenties when he painted “Melchior”, but his meteoric career was cut short by his death from the plague at 35. Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, the National Gallery’s small festive exhibition, is the first ever devoted to him, and very welcome. Uncertain attributions, unclear collaborations, imitations of his most successful paintings have long clouded appreciation of his work. Even Vasari documented him wrongly, confusing Pesellino with his grandfather Pesello, who ran a thriving business on the Corso degli Adimari making bunting and coats of arms for parades and tournaments.
The impetus for this show is the engrossingly intricate cassone (a bedroom chest covered in decorative paintings) narrating the life of King David in a lavish procession of people and animals, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 2000 and has just been restored. Four metres long, the panels stretch magnificently across the single-room exhibition, surrounded by works which each demonstrate an aspect of Pesellino’s achievement.
Apprenticed at 11 to his grandfather the banner painter, he learnt early to make eye-catching, lively, clear designs, evident in the Louvre’s youthful panels “The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis” and “The Miracle of the Black Leg” (c1442-45). The first, set in a desert between masses of jutting rocks, echoed in the spiky clouds, is stark; the second, featuring doctor-saints Damian and Cosmas curing a man by amputating a rotten leg and replacing it with the limb of a recently dead Ethiopian person, occurs in a warm interior, dominated by reds and pinks.
Pesellino developed fast. The Paris pictures are built from blocks of dense colour and sharp shadows, but in “A Miracle of Saint Silvester” (c1450-53), the spatial arrangement is far more complex and audacious. Between two loggias, with receding columns and boldly foreshortened floors patterned in rich terracotta, Pesellino creates a stage for a crazy drama of doubt, surprise, faith, as a dozen courtly figures react to Silvester resuscitating a bull, who gratefully genuflects before him.
In all these paintings, pure colour and strong light effects recall manuscript illumination. The opposite of his grandfather, Pesellino excelled at cose picchole, “small things”. Fine book illustrations won him prestige, but this was the moment when representations of Mary were replacing Crucifixions as favoured images for private devotion, and his domestic-scale Madonnas, frequently imitated and replicated, met a growing demand.
In Lyon’s solemnly beautiful “Virgin and Child”, the waif-like, serene mother holds the chubby baby with delicate hands, caressing his cheek with a finger. The sculptural figures, crisply defined — chiselled features, stylised blond curls — are framed within a dazzlingly textured background: niche of variegated marble, conch shell dome, golden mouldings.
The inspiration was Luca della Robbia’s glazed terracotta Madonnas, while the jewelled surfaces suggest influences from goldsmith-sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. Like many quattrocento painters, Pesellino almost certainly passed through Ghiberti’s workshop while it was occupied with the “Gates of Paradise” for Florence’s Baptistry (1425-52).
Everything is precise and precious in the Courtauld’s resplendent “The Annunciation”, a portable diptych. The intimacy captivates: the colonnade and enclosed garden; gentle transitions from shadow to light, outer to inner world; Mary’s elegant interior and the sweep of her gold-fringed robe in expensive lapis lazuli. Vitality comes from the rhythms between her and the angel’s postures, gestures, each kneeling, head bowed, hand on heart.
Pesellino’s rendering of monumentality in miniature found greatest expression in the panels “The Story of David and Goliath” and “The Triumph of David”, a work demanding refinement, intricacy, careful intertwining of bodies, limbs, animals within the spectacular ensemble. Space as well as time are compressed as we follow David along the winding route from herd boy in a tranquil landscape to the army encampment where he faces the giant. Then, still in his short pink tunic, Goliath’s bloody head dangled laconically from his hand, the boy hero perches coolly atop a carriage on the victorious cavalcade.
Pesellino’s delight in amassing dogs, falcons, a cheetah and a bear cub along the route, and in the horses’ ornamental drapery, looks back to his training in heraldic emblems, but the painterly accomplishment is supreme. Alongside sumptuously dressed riders, puffing trumpeters, bound prisoners of war, each saddle, bridle, harness, helmet, horseshoe is intently delineated in tooled metal leaf.
Commissioned for the Medici, this is a fairytale version of the meandering roads through the Tuscan hills to a walled heavenly city, the design as closely knit as a medieval tapestry. Although the narrative is biblical, the resonance of luxury, elegance, worldly power is secular.
But Pesellino’s final work pointed elsewhere. In 1455, he began an altarpiece for a chapel in Pistoia, “The Trinity with Saints Mamas, James, Zeno and Jerome”, where God supports the crucified Christ. The commissioning priest was so excited by the painting’s progress that he was disgraced for squandering funds on visiting Florence too often. He ended up disappointed, for Pesellino died before finishing the altarpiece.
It was completed by Fra Filippo Lippi, subsequently cut into parts for resale, the fragments later reunited but still damaged. We can’t know Pesellino’s full intentions, but the individuality and dynamic poses of the saints are startling. The alluring teenage martyr St Mamas, eyeing the viewer, one hand on his hip, a stockinged leg bent at the knee, derives from Donatello’s provocative David of the late 1440s — a landmark in humanist depiction. “The Trinity” is the National Gallery’s oldest main-panel altarpiece, but Pesellino exhilaratingly leaves us here on the brink of something new.
To March 10, nationalgallery.org.uk
