Pisanello Redux. (Review Essay).

Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, with contributions by Susanna Avery-Quash. Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court. London: National Gallery Company, 2001. xi + 264 pp. 286 illus., many in color. $50 (cl). ISBN: 1-85709-932-X (cl), 1-85709-946-X (pbk).

Let me first create a context for this exhibition. One of the drawings in it features a helmet crest in the form of the Siege Perilous of Round Table fame, designed by Pisanello (c. 1394-c. 1455) for King Alfonso of Naples (Louvre, inv. 2295r.). No prince provides a better instance of the early Renaissance court fusion of Medieval and classical cultures than the ruler of Aragon who conquered the kingdom of Naples in 1442. His court was famous for the highly competitive and public feuds among the many Italian humanists in residence. The king himself was molto studioso of classical Antiquity, whether in the form of the passages he ostensibly read every day from Livy and Caesar's Commentaries, or the Imperial coins that, according to Panormita, he preserved in an ivory casket as if they were relics.

Yet Alfonso's reverence for Lancelot's son, Galahad, the knight of the Round Table who was known for his purity, prowess, beauty; and chastity, seems to have equalled that for Caesar. As depicted in verse, the celebration in 1443 of the Spanish conqueror's entry into Naples as victor a modo degli anti chi was graced by the presence of Julius Caesar, who legitimated Alfonso's usurpation of Italian soil by recognizing this Re di Pace as a second Caesar. On the triumphal arch erected between two towers of the Castelnuovo, however, this second Caesar was represented visually as a second Galahad. He is depicted as seated in the Siege Perilous, the chair filled with leaping flames that could only be safely occupied by the knight who accomplished the Quest for the Holy Grail: Galahad. Like the Arthurian hero, Alfonso is constructed as displacing the flames to the floor in front of his feet.

Such were the sentiments of mid-century princes whose imaginations were still fired as much by the Lancelots and Galahads of medieval romance as by the Caesars and Hannibals of Antiquity. At this transitional moment in the history of court taste, when the pictorial language and traditional ethos of chivalric romance merged with the prestigious vocabulary of Roman power and classical values, the rulers of Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, Rimini and Naples turned to Pisanello for the visual expression of their fantasy identification with such glory.

The artist was the Raphael of his day whose skills as a courtier he surely equalled. Like his successor at court, Pisanello seems to have provided precisely what the princes -- some of whom were considered intendentissimi, very knowledgeable in the visual arts -- sought: painting and sculpture that adumbrated a style and iconography of power with elegance and panache. He produced works that fused the signori's continued enjoyment of chivalric subjects with their new-found taste for the antique past that was being unearthed from Roman soil and monastic libraries. Trained in the Gothic vocabulary of Gentile da Fabriano and Michelino da Besozzo, Pisanello's study of classical motifs in Rome integrated him more fully into the new humanist interests of Italian princes than was usual for an artist.

Over thirty years ago in a classic study, Michael Baxandall pointed out that Pisanello enjoyed greater literary fame than any other artist in the first half of the fifteenth century. (1) Court humanists dedicated Latin ekphrases and Italian verse to Pisanello's art, starting with Guarino da Verona in 1427, followed by Ulisse degli Aleotti, Angelo Galli, Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, Basinio da Parma, Leonardo Dati and Porcellio. In 1456 Pisanello was accorded one of the earliest biographies of an Italian craftsman in Bartolomeo Fazio's De viris illustribus, included among the biographies of Illustrious Men of an infinitely higher social status, the princes and condottieri whom he served.

Following good classical precedent, these literary exercises focused on the artist's unsurpassed skill in giving eternal life to his patrons. A second theme was his skill in portraying animals, especially the horses that played a central role in the signori's lives. It was the task of the court humanist to articulate his prince's esthetic tastes and ideological values, and the ink devoted to Pisanello's art confirms that it corresponded to an ideal cultivated in court circles. Indeed, one is struck at how successful he was in embodying seignorial collective ideology and culture. With the exception of Federico da Montefeltro, every major ruler who commissioned art between 1420 and 1450, including the government of Venice and popes Martin V, Eugenius IV and Nicholas V, sought a work by Pisanello. His standing at court is confirmed by the denomination of the Sala del Pisanello, the frescoed hall in the Mantuan palace that -- uniquely in the history of Renaissance rooms -- was named for its artist rather than, as was usual, for the subjects painted on its walls or the room's chief inhabitant.

Pisanello's stock-in-trade of painted dreams, replete with warriors victorious in battle, impenetrable rocche overlooking conquered terre, games and picnics all'aperto, horses, hunts and game, undertaken by glamorous ladies and courageous lords, connote the signori's political aspirations. Adumbrating the control of land that represented the power and dynastic survival for which the rulers yearned, Pisanello's work must have helped to assuage seignorial doubts as to the realization of their central political objectives of military prowess, territorial gain, and dynastic legitimacy.

The fact that Pisanello was probably the first Italian craftsman to undertake the self-conscious step toward the isolated self in an independent self-portrait attests to his exceptional stature (Hill, no. 87). (2) Sigificandy, autonomous self-imaging would later be undertaken primarily by upwardlymobile court artists. The highly competitive court culture must have encouraged these astute observers to develop social aspirations beyond their "perceived" place in society, as they jostled for social recognition at the periphery of power. Unlike the signori, who modeled their medallic selves on Imperial exemplars, Pisanello emulated the modern Caesars who employed him. On the obverse, (which was probably designed by Pisanello c. 1450 and cast posthumously), he draped the self in a mantle made from the same sumptuous brocade as those worn by his patrons, and a jauntily crumpled hat similar to those belonging to Filippo Maria Visconti and Niccolo Piccinino. (3) This first independent artisanal self-likeness testifie s to Renaissance artists' struggle for social acceptance, representing a very early gesture in the collective effort over the following century and a half to win higher standing for both maker and artifact. It also discloses Pisanello's strong sense of personal identity and his promotion of the myth of his own artistic singolarita.

*****

Given the small scale of the medals and drawings that survive, Pisanello's art is not easily accessible to the museum-going public. Despite this major drawback, important exhibitions of his work have recently been organized by the Louvre and the National Gallery, London. Indeed, judging by recent publications, Pisanello's art is definitely "in." The Paris exhibition of 1996, organized by Dominique Cordellier to celebrate the sexcentenary of the terminus ante quem of 1395 -- since revised to 1394 -- of the artist's date of birth, was huge and included an equally comprehensive catalogue, followed by the two-volume Acts of the accompanying Symposium. (4) Around the same time, Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt issued a book on the artist and Lionello Puppi edited another catalogue. (5)

In 1995 Cordellier also did scholars an immense service by republishing and commenting on all the known documents in a special issue of Verona Illustrata, which has since replaced Venturi's 1896 volume as the standard reference tool. (6) The most important document to come to light recently, a transaction between Pisanello and his mother in June 1434, reveals that the artist had a second, perhaps more lucrative, profession. (7) The prudentissimus et morigeratus vir et in arte pictoria pre ceteris prestantissimus Anthonius Pisanus practiced the family occupation of draper, travelling pro diversis negociis of Veronese wool cloth to Venice, the Marches, and Puglia. In the 1420s and 30s he would embark on very long journeys that extended from Verona in the North to the extreme South of the peninsula. The ramifications of these trips down the Adriatic coast, the centers through which he must have passed, the individuals he could have encountered, and the monuments he might have seen, have yet to be researched.

Not to be outdone by the Louvre, the rival institution across the English Channel recently organized its own, more modest, Pisanello exhibition, publishing in conjunction not a catalogue but a book, Pisaneio: Painter to the Renaissance Court, written by Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon. The exhibition in London was much more focused than that in Paris, with rooms and chapters devoted, respectively, to portraits of the artist's patrons, works that articulated chivalric traditions, others influenced by the classical past, consideration of the two paintings belonging to the National Gallery; and an attempt to reconstruct some of the personalities who worked in Pisanello's shop.

The exhibition provided the opportunity of considering in depth the National Gallery's two private, devotional panels. A tiny portable altarpiece depicts the Virgin and Child appearing in a sunburst in heaven to Saints Anthony Abbott and George. The opportunity of displaying the panel without its ugly nineteenth-century frame was, inexplicably, not seized. However important this frame may be for the history of nineteenth-century taste, it has nothing to do with Pisanello or the Quattrocento. In the organizers' defense it could be said that the panel itself is almost as Ottocento as its frame, since Molteni, the restorer who overlaid St. George's armor and the Virgin's sunburst with heavy layers of silver and gold paint (rather than gold leaf) was also responsible for it. The heavy-handed restoration obliterated the context for the unusual iconography of the half-length Virgin and child in heaven. Did the Madonna, as Otto Pacht proposed forty years ago, originally rest on a crescent moon (symbol of virginity a nd the Immaculate Conception) framed by a radiate sun, and should she hence be linked to the vision of the Virgin and Child in the sun that the Tibertine Sibyl revealed to the Emperor Augustus on the site of Santa Maria in Aracoeli? Neither this theme nor the Marian symbolism of SQL is developed by the authors, giving the impression that the exhibition took place before research into this particular subject had been completed.

Although Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan is proposed as the painting's commissioner, the consistency of taste from court to court makes such a determination difficult to argue. As the authors point out, a radiate sun was a Gonzaga as well as a Visconti heraldic emblem (one much employed by Lodovico Gonzaga, who was born on a Sunday). North Italian dynasties, the Gonzaga and Este as well as the Visconti, revered St. George. The cult of the hermit St. Anthony was as widespread in Ferrara as in Milan. Seignorial predilection for the warrior George (whose halo is here displaced by a very secular, if glamorous, straw hat) unquestionably depended on his success in defeating the dragons of life, but that for the early Christian hermit is less dear -- although Pisanello's transmogrification of the Saint's pig into a boar would certainly have appealed to all his patrons. As curators, Syson and Gordon focus on the object and its facture rather than its reception, and the possible connotations of the hypothetical Imperi al subject for the patron, whoever he was, is unexplored -- my use of the gender-specific "he" is deliberate; at this date few, if any, consorts commissioned art. One can visualize this generic ruler kneeling at his prie-dieu, imaginatively accompanied by his favorite saints, as he believed himself to be experiencing a vision of the Virgin identical to that granted Augustus by the Sibyl. Certainly, the words she addressed to the Emperor, "this child is a greater lord than thou art," were just as relevant to the Quattrocento prince's salvation. Augustus, a hero who had triumphed on Italian soil, had an overwhelming emotional reality for these princes whose yearning for territorial expansion made them peculiarly susceptible to any myth of Imperial greatness. It is not difficult to empathize with the lord's possible identification with the Caesar who had not only ruled the world's largest empire, but was also one of the few pagans to have been vouchsafed a vision of the Christian truth.

The significance of the painting's signature for the chronology of this panel (here dated c. 1435-41) was not addressed by the curators of either the Paris or London shows. The letters that read pisanus pi[nxit] imitate the leaves of a plant, a unique script in the oeuvre of this signature-obsessed artist, who regularly signed his portrait medals OPVS PISANI PICTORIS in Roman majuscules. Were it not for the classicizing signature on the 1426 Brenzoni monument frescoes, one could suggest that the London painting pre-dated Pisanello's experience of Rome in the early 1430s, where he must have studied Roman epigraphy to develop the "Roman" identity he appropriated for his medals. If this eccentric, leafy jeu d'esprit, unique in Pisanello's work, is really authentic, as the National Gallery believes, rather than an invention of the restorer, should it then be seen as signifying either a very early or very late work? The painting is probably too heavily restored to permit a satisfactory answer. (8)

Restoration -- but of a higher quality -- also overlies much of the other National Gallery painting: St. Eustace's vision while hunting of the crucified Christ between a stag's antlers. Most of the animals dotted around the tapestry-like landscape, along with the Saint's gold horn and doublet, were repainted -- but not, it seems, the huntsman's peculiar, uniquely-shaped, blue turban. Since the image has been extensively cut down at the top, presumably excluding tree-tops and sky, the viewer is now as surrounded as St. Eustace by a dark, dense forest that is inhabited by every possible species of bird and beast. What an entrancing image this secularized devotional panel, showing the Trajanic soldier Placidus before his conversion, must have been for its (again unknown) commissioner! All the signori were passionately fond of the hunt, as Syson and Gordon do an excellent job of outlining in chapter 2, with Alfonso declaring himself INVENATOR INTREPIDVS on a medal. Indeed many princes seem to have indulged exclus ively in this privileged, aristocratic activity for weeks and months at a time, to judge from their biographies. The hunt, justified in treatises as the best preparation for war, was certainly central to their lives in a way that governance was not. It is perhaps not coincidence that this particular image should have entered the national collection of a country, whose aristocracy was, until recently, as wedded to the chase as any Renaissance lord.

The drawings chosen for display with this panel brought to the fore how few of the many sheets associated with the artist and his workshop can be directly connected to his surviving oeuvre. Of the twenty-five drawings hanging alongside the Sr. Eusrace panel, only the studies for the hands of the crucifixed Christ and the quick sketch of a horse and rider on the recto and verso of the same sheet seem to be unequivocally preparatory to this particular painting (Louvre, inv. 2368). Other possible candidates are a hound in black chalk (Louvre, inv. 2429v.), two sketches of a horse's hindquarters that show it kicking (Louvre, inv. 2366 & 2365r.) and studies of a dead deer's head (Louvre, inv. 2490). The other sheets exhibited in this room consisted of generic model-book formulas (images that could be inserted into a composition whenever required), usually depictions of the animals and birds for which Pisanello was so celebrated. A pretty, if standard, instance of a pattern that would have been appropriate in many contexts is the running hare in black chalk and watercolor, identical to that being chased in the foreground of the panel (Louvre, inv. 2445). An exquisite sheer that demonstrates why Pisanello is considered the greatest draughtsman of the first half of the century is the beautiful horse's head with briddle, again identical in configuration to the Saint's horse (Louvre, inv. 2359), one of the few cases where the follower who reinforced the fading chalk lines with pen and ink did nor undermine the image's esthetic interest in the process.

It is generally believed that drawings were not considered works of art in their own right until the sixteenth century. Syson and Gordon fail to give this context when they describe a sheet usually dated c. 1433 depicting three courtiers modeling the latest in male haute couture, that is inscribed PISANVS F[ecit] in Roman capitals, as a "finished work in its own right" (British Museum, inv. 1846-5-9-143). Not only is this Pisanello's only signed drawing but a signed single sheet is also an anomaly at this date. In Northern Italy it was not until 1491 that the equally self-aware and status conscious Mantegna signed and dated in Roman capitals and numerals an independent drawing of Judith and her maid with Holofernes' head. If the signature actually dates to the 1430s rather than having been added at a later moment, Pisanello's drawing would thus anticipate the concept of the "presentation" drawing by some sixty years. The further suggestion that the drawing may have been created for sale seems much less likely . Just as the humanist would present or dedicate his translation to the prince, so the artist could conceivably have presented a drawing to the lord as a gift (as was common in the next century) -- no doubt always in the hope of having the gift reciprocated with hard cash -- but the concept of selling a drawing in a court context is surely impossible in the Quattrocento. (9) Ironically, this one "signed" drawing would seem to be a copy after a Pisanello prototype, given the weak articulation of the arms of the central and left models.

Like many expert wordsmiths, Guarino da Verona had little respect for visual representations that were unaccompanied by words, sine litteris (imaginatively translated by Baxandall as "unlabeled"); he must have been delighted with Matteo de' Pasti's superb medal that connected his name for all time to his highly idiosyncratic features. Had he been more interested in the visual arts, one might be tempted to credit him with the foresight that portrait identifications would become one of the curses of Renaissance art history. Much effort has been expended in arguing that a given, well-known face must represent an equally famous name, for whom no documented likeness survives. The identity of the adolescent girl in Pisanello's portrait in the Louvre has undergone innumerable such metamorphoses. Currently scholars support two main competing identities. In 1442 Degenhart dubbed the young lady Margherita Gonzaga, who became Leonello d'Este's first wife in 1435, on the basis of both the Gonzaga colors of her gown and t he emblem of Estense urn with branches and two anchors that is embroidered on her sleeve and decorated with pearls. Much earlier, in 1905, Hill recognized the prominent twig of foliage tucked into the teenager's dress as a sprig of juniper, and her identity as Ginevra [Guinivere, Lancelot's beloved] d'Este, Leonello's sister who married Sigismondo Malatesta in 1434, was accepted by many scholars. The "Gonzaga" colors of her gown, the green, red, and white of the Theological Virtues, were acknowledged as having also been used by the Estense -- not to mention Piero de' Medici and Domenico Malatesta Novello. In the Paris catalogue (and a small booklet in the Louvre's excellent "solo" series), Cordellier endowed the lady with a new identity; that of another of Leonello's sisters, Lucia d'Este who married Carlo Gonzaga in 1437, on the grounds of her ostensible likeness to a portrait in a manuscript genealogy. In their book Syson and Gordon revert to the lady's earlier identity as Margherita Gonzaga. The sprig of j uniper is downplayed as a generic symbol of virtue said to have been particularly favored by her husband Leonello, and the Latin designation of the pearl as margarita is emphasized.

Since pearls, besides being the most expensive gems available, signified chastity for the culture, they were the gems most commonly employed to decorate the clothes and head-dresses of adolescent brides in their portraits, not all of whom can have been called Margherita. In addition, daisies were not included among the flowers behind the girl's head. Juniper seems to have been equated above all with Chastity (Pliny, Virgil), a virtue that was not usually claimed by the male ruler. The unfortunate dismissal of juniper as a signifier of identity could have unexpected consequences if followed elsewhere: Ginevra de' Benci's identity in Leonardo da Vinci's portrait in Washington, for instance, depends solely on the juniper bush (which curiously, Leonardo, unlike Pisanello, represented without berries) that enframes her head.

As Leonello used the urn device on two medal reverses after 1441, it is usually characterized as personal to him. The argument that, as Leonello's personal emblem, the urn could only have been adopted by his wife, and never his sister, is impossible to verify, since very few women display heraldic emblems in surviving likenesses. The only two that immediately come to mind were both court ladies: Baldovinetti's portrait of an unknown lady in yellow in London, which probably originated at the court of Urbino, and the likeness in Washington of the Milanese princess Bianca Maria Sforza, who married the Emperor Maximilian at the end of the century, in which she displays Sforza emblems rather than those of her promesso sposo. Should this one instance be found to be typical, it might be argued that the future or recent bride normally displayed the insignia of her own dynasty -- which would in turn eliminate Margherita Gonzaga as Pisanello's sitter. As it happens, the urn device, albeit used extensively by Leonello ( who had it embroidered on his clothes), appears to have been an Estense family emblem, given the use made of it later by his brother and successor, Borso d'Este, in the borders of the monumental illuminated Bible that bears his name. Indeed, as Pisanello's portrait must date close in time to the sitter's marriage (1434 or 1435), the work in any case predates Leonello's use of the device on two medals.

Which young lady did Pisanello depict? As long as the portrait is accepted as dating from the 1430s and as representing a future or recent bride from either the Este or Gonzaga dynasties, does her identity greatly matter? The fact that this image is in all likelihood the earliest surviving autonomous portrait of a woman in Italian art, that it reveals a great deal about the desired demeanor and appearance of the Italian princess and her gendered role within the culture, that the portrait's forms and conventions differ greatly from those of mid-century Florentine female likenesses, would seem to be of far greater significance than the question of which specific princess is represented. (10)

Pisanello's independent portraits were among the earliest to be produced in Italy. He also virtually invented the bronze portrait medal. Medals were designed to be shared with the sitter's peers in the most intimate of circumstances, by being passed from hand to hand. The novel technique of bronze casting made these cose nuove unique as a form of communication that, in an age before printing, could be replicated and as widely distributed as the sitter wished. The profile format of the male likenesses, deriving from Imperial coins, embodied connotations of rulership and empire for the culture; by assimilating the rulers to their classical exemplars, the medals affirmed their authority to rule. The enthusiasm and alacrity with which Pisanello's patrons commissioned this all'antica artform in an all'antica medium reveals their enchantment with this badge of modernity. All of Pisanello's justifiably famous portrait medals of rulers and their humanists were exhibited in London, with great care being taken to borro w the best available casts.

It was for their verisimilitude that the humanists, following Pliny, praised Pisanello's portraits. In Quattrocento life, however, likenesses created for seignorial sitters were acceptable only when presented under an idealized guise. The signori needed visual representations that tactfully embellished the (occasionally unpalatable) truth. Lodovico Gonzaga, for instance, noting that Mantegna "non fa cosi bene" in portraiture because his likenesses lacked grazia, refrained from commissioning an independent likeness from that uncompromising artist. Pace the humanists, Pisanello's contemporary fame lay less in the naturalism of his portraits -- more real than the sitters themselves, as the tag went -- than in his ability to produce poetic and elegant likenesses that were sufficiently recognizable to be convincing. Since the despotic state as body politic was largely subsumed into the identity of its ruler, his image needed to be imbued with grace -- the visual rhetoric of persuasion, as it were -- as the pictori al alter ego had to testify to the state's power as well as the sitter's status. Thus Pisanello, whose likenesses artfully refashioned what they ostensibly described, was the earliest Renaissance artist to formulate the visual construction of seignorial identity.

Syson and Gordon are particularly good on the subject of Leonello d'Este's portraits, suggesting that he may have modeled himself on a hitherto unrecognized classical exemplar. Leonello's bouffant hairstyle has already been equated to a lion's mane, which would signify both a play on his name (little lion) and appropriation of the power of the king of beasts. It is suggested that his profile of continuous forehead and nose (a profile that is however also displayed by Niccolo III d'Este, Cecilia Gonzaga, and Domenico Malatesta Novello) deliberately emulates that on the obverse of a Macedonian coin, minted by Alexander the Great, on which Hercules is depicted wearing the head of his lionskin as helmet, as drawn by the Pisanello shop (Louvre, inv. 2315r.). It is claimed -- but without reference to a primary source -- that at the court of Ferrara this image of a lion-helmeted Hercules was considered a portrait of Alexander. Given the Hellenistic Emperor's high regard for the work of Apelles and Lysippus, who alon e were permitted to paint and sculpt the Imperial features, the assimilation of Leonello to Alexander is an extremely attractive hypothesis. Apart from its connotations for Leonello's self-image, this theory would have allowed Pisanello to enjoy the self-conscious stature of both a new Lysippus (objects cast in bronze) and a new Apelles (his consistent signature "Pisano the painter"), and have justified the humanists' constant reference to these and other Greek artists in so many of the poems they dedicated to the artist. It also permitted the equation of Guarino da Verona to Aristotle, a reference that the humanist could not possibly have overlooked. One hopes that a corroborative source will confirm the Estense court's misreading of the Hellenistic image of Hercules, and that Alexander the Great can be seen as another princely model alongside Divvs Julius Caesar. The latter was, by virtue of his mastery of letters as well as arms, the seignorial exemplar par excellence, since, as Flavio Biondo put it, "only those adorned with letters deserve to be called true princes."

The authors exploit Francesco Rossi's suggestive essay in the Acts of the Paris Symposium, which differentiated between the different kinds of armor -- for battle or joust -- worn by the equestrian knights on Pisanello's medals. Thus, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Sigismondo Malatesta and Domenico Malatesta Novello, professional condottieri all, are said to be equipped for battle on their reverses, with Sigismondo similarly attired on his obverse (Hill, nos. 20, 34, 35). The reverse of Filippo Maria Visconti's medal (Hill, no. 21), on the other hand, shows him with the lesser protection provided by tournament armor, while that of another medal for Sigismondo Malatesta (Hill, no. 33) depicts the condottiere standing full-length in field armor -- but flanked by a tournament helmet bearing the Malatesta elephant crest. Lodovico Gonzaga also seems to have covered his bases: on the obverse of his medal he supposedly displays himself in battle armor, whereas on the reverse he is said to be dressed for the joust (Hill, no. 36). The distinctive resonances of Quattrocento armor for the battle and the joust now need to be explored. What kind of princely image may each have conveyed? (11)

Pisanello's own work in the exhibition was given a broader context by the loan of important, contemporary artifacts, such as the manuscript of Plutarch's Vitae virorum illustrium, open to the folio with a miniature of Julius Caesar crowned with a wreath of gold laurel, Imperial eagle decorating his armor-encased shoulder. Commissioned by Malatesta Novello, the manuscript still resides in Cesena in the most beautiful small library constructed in the Renaissance, and the codex is still equipped with the long metal chain with which it was affixed permanently to a desk. A sarcophagus fragment from Grottaferrata showing part of the Indian Triumph of Bacchus was exhibited beside a workshop sheet with studies of the same figures, including a rearing horseman in a pose similar to that of Psyche in the socalled Bed of Polyclitus --toes and facial profile facing 180 degrees in opposite directions (Ambrosiana, inv. F214 inf.14r.).

Jacopo Bellini's book of drawings in the British Museum, open to folio 71 showing one of his compositions for the Vision of St. Eustace, revealed some of the differences between the two artists' esthetic sensibilities. Bellini's construction of the event ranges into depth rather than across the surface, so that the Saint is presented as suddenly catching sight of Christ over his shoulder. Pisanello, on the other hand, conceived of the event as a face-to-face encounter, in which the Saint and Christ share a prolonged gaze. The Kunsthistorisches in Vienna lent a magnificent set of hunting knives made in Italy for Emperor Frederick III; a transcription of the inscriptions on the handles however would have helped the viewer. They were exhibited in the room devoted to chivalry and war in which armor parts and weapons (carefully selected to coincide exactly with Pisanello's lifetime) were very dramatically displayed against a full-scale reproduction of the sinopia of the tournament scene in Mantua. The artifacts of armor included sabatons or foot defences, poleyn or knee defences, and spurs with elegant, four-inch necks holding the rowls. A very rare tournament helmet by Tommaso Missaglia of Milan dating before 1450 came from the Castle at Sludern. An equally rare, very early franco-burgundian tapestry of Hercules (if the Inscriptions are contemporary), hanging on the wall opposite the tournament wallpaper, made this the most effective room in the exhibition, by overcoming the disadvantage of the small scale of Pisanello's surviving work.

While the artist's largest surviving work, the unfinished Arthurian frescoes in Mantua, was (obviously) not exhibited in London, it has received much scholarly attention since its discovery in 1969 and is discussed at some length by Syson and Gordon. The date originally proposed by Giovanni Paccagnini, followed by Bernhard Degenhart and myself, was the late 1440s. (12) A late date seemed dictated by the graphic style of the extensive and wonderful sinopie (wall drawings on the arriccio [penultimate layer of plaster]) and underdrawings on the intonaco (top layer of plaster) that are only visible because the work was left unfinished. Italian scholars, however, have consistently pushed the frescoes back in time to the 1430s and 1420s, culminating in Miklos Boskovits' suggestion in the Acts of the Paris Symposium that the cycle be dated earlier than Pisanello's generally accepted earliest surviving work: the frescoes surrounding the Brenzoni tomb monument in San Fermo, Verona, dated 1426.

Syson and Gordon propose a date of 1439-42. Along with most recent scholars, they are overly influenced by an edict issued in 1442 by Venice banning Pisanello from Mantua and his home town of Verona. The Council of Ten's conflicts with its Veronese subject originated in the war between Venice and Milan. Long colonized as part of the Venetian empire, Verona was briefly overrun in 1439 by Milanese forces, under the command of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua. Venice was incensed at the "disloyalty" of those Veronese subjects who were seen as aiding the "enemy" and, along with other Veronese subversives, characterized Pisanello, who entered Verona beside the Milanese commander Gonzaga, as Pisan pentor rebello. Curiously, Syson and Gordon find the motivation for the political actions of this artist, who lived his entire life as a colonized Other under the Venetian oppressor, "unclear" (34-35). Pisanello's sentence in absentia in 1442 to be confined to Venice was waived almost immediately on Leonello d'Este's inter vention, although he was still forbidden to enter Veronese or Mantuan territory. The terminus ante quem of 1442 that is espoused by so many scholars for the Arthurian cycle is thus based on the notion that, half a dozen years later, the Venetian authorities had little better to do than monitor the movements of a craftsman into and out of a state that was outside their jurisdiction -- surely an implausible proposition.

In cases of apparent conflict between archival/historical and stylistic evidence, the art historian's perception of a work's forms should surely take precedence. In the absence of other evidence, the Arthurian frescoes appear to be a more mature work than the mural of St. George and the Princess in Sant'Anastasia, Verona (usually dated to the second half of the 1430s), from which it therefore needs to be distanced in time. The Mantuan murals could conceivably have been commissioned by Gianfrancesco Gonzaga shortly before his death in 1444, which might in addition explain its incomplete state. What seems impossible, however, is a date close in time to the San Fermo frescoes of 1426.

To establish the date is to identify the specific Gonzaga patron. A date before 1444 confers that honor on Gianfrancesco, best known for bringing Vittorino da Feltre to Mantua to educate his children. Although Gianfrancesco is documented in the 1440s as seeking classical codices for his library, there would have been nothing unusual in his commission of an Arthurian story -- identified by inscriptions in French as the visit of the Arthurian knight Bohort to King Brangoire's castle, during which a tournament and a love affair took place -- for the walls of his Sala. Nor would it would have been unexpected for his son, Lodovico, to have ordered the cycle soon after his father's death, contemporary with the three medals he commissioned from Pisanello. Nonetheless, since Lodovico is renowned primarily for his patronage of Mantegna and Alberti's all'antica painting and architecture in the 1460s and 70s, he is seen by scholars as the stereotype of the "humanist patron" who, given a classical education by Vittorino, would never have commissioned a chivalric subject -- notwithstanding his documented perusal of an Arthurian romance in 1468 at the age of 54.

Whichever Marchese commissioned the work, a more sophisticated understanding of court ideology and taste at mid-Quattrocento is needed than one that precludes the possibility that Lodovico's tastes might have changed, and his artistic policy shifted, during the fifteen years that intervened between his patronage of Pisanello and Mantegna. As attested by library inventories, French literary culture was too deeply rooted in the region, and chivalric values played too large a role in the signori's emotional nourishment, to be abruptly displaced. As King Alfonso's triumphal entry into Naples emphasizes, the two cultures should not be perceived as standing in chronological antithesis, nor was there a point of disjunction between them. Rather, elements from each were increasingly juxtaposed until eventually one strand emerged as dominant. On the one hand, the signori sought subjects that would be effective in justifying and legitimating the established order; on the other, their pervasive nostalgia for mythic ancie nt heroes, whether of the relatively recent medieval past or of the long ago classical past, was undifferentiated. As exemplars, the heroes were equally potent.

There are many reasons to be grateful to Syson and Gordon for organizing this stimulating exhibition and writing the accompanying book whose rich footnotes are a veritable mine of up-to-date references. Regrettably, however, this important contribution to the literature on Pisanello lacks the usual scholarly apparatus: an adequate Index that includes the many works of art and -- that indispensable scholarly tool -- a bibliography. When museums publish scholarly texts, they must follow the standards established by University Presses, if they are not to shortchange their authors.

(1.) Baxandall, 91 ff.

(2.) Hill is the standard reference for medals.

(3.) For the reverse, see Woods-Marsden, 1998, 266, 281.

(4.) Pisanello: le peintre aux sept vertus; Cordellier and Py, eds.

(5.) Degenhart and Schmitt; Puppi, et al.

(6.) Cordellier, 1995. For a subsequently discovered letter from Pisanello to Francesco Sforza in 1440, see Peretri.

(7.) Cordellier, 1995, doc. 18 his.

(8.) I wish to thank Jill Dunkerton of the National Gallery, London for discussing these paintings with me.

(9.) I wish to thank George Goldner for discussing this issue with me.

(10.) Woods-Marsden, 2001, esp. 74-75.

(11.) For more on Pisanello's medals, see Woods-Marsden, 2002.

(12.) Paccaguini; Degenhart; Woods-Marsden, 1988.

Bibliography

Baxandall, Michael. 1971. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450. Oxford.

Hill, George Francis. 1930. A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini. 2 vols. London.

Cordellier, Dominique. 1995. "Documenti e fonti su Pisanello (1395-1581 c.)." In Verona Illustrata, Vol. 8.

----- and Bernardette Py, eds. 1998. Pisanello: Actes du colloque organise au Musee du Louvre, les 26, 27 et 28 juin 1996. 2 vols. Paris.

Degenhart, Bernhard. 1973. "Pisanello in Mantua." Pantheon 31:364-411.

----- and Annegrit Schmitt, with essays by H.-J. Eberhardt and Brigit Blass-Simmen. 1995. Pisanello und Bono da Ferrara. Munich.

Paccaguini, Giovanni. 1972. Pisanello e il ciclo cavalleresco di Mantova. Milan.

Peretti, Gianni. 1998. "Pisanello a Marmirolo: un document inedit." In Cordellier and Py, eds., 1: 29-41.

Pisanello: le peintre aux sept vertus. 1996. Paris.

Puppi, Lionello, et al. 1996. Pisanello: una poetica dell'inatteso. Milan.

Woods-Marsden, Joanna. 1988. The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello's Arthurian Frescoes. New Haven.

-----. 1998. "Pisanello et le Moi: la naissance de l'autoportrait autonome." In Cordellier and Py, 1: 263-95.

-----. 2001. "Portrait of the Lady, 1430-1520." In Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra da Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, 63-87. Washington, D.C.

-----. 2002. Review of Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon. Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court. In The Medal, Vol. 40.