To the National Gallery yesterday to see their Francesco Pesellino exhibition before it closes on Sunday.
It was a small exhibition, so small that the NG didn’t charge for entry – I wish they had as it would have been less crowded – and although FP painted some big altarpieces much of his work was executed with a domestic market in mind; small devotional works for homes and private chapels. There are not many of his pictures around and they are scattered to the four winds in galleries in Italy, St Petersburg, Paris, London (the National Gallery and the Courtauld) and of course the United States. The easiest picture to see, because it was the largest is his Pistoia Santa Trinità altarpiece. I even managed to photograph it.
The back story is worth reading.
“This large altarpiece – one of the few in the National Gallery which is almost complete – has had an eventful life. It was commissioned in 1455 from the Florentine painter Francesco Pesellino, and is his only surviving documented work. He died in 1457 and it was finished by Fra Filippo Lippi and his workshop. We know a lot about how and why it was made from the records of the confraternity who commissioned it.
From 1465 it sat on the high altar of the church of the Holy Trinity at Pistoia, but in 1793 the confraternity was suppressed and the altarpiece was taken apart, with the main panel sawn into pieces, and dispersed. Most of it was gradually acquired by the National Gallery and the altarpiece reassembled.
This is the earliest pala (an altarpiece with a single main panel) in the National Gallery.” (National Gallery)
If you look carefully you will notice the bottom right corner looks different. It was a missing piece of the jigsaw that the NG reconstructed.
You will have three questions. Where’s Pistoia? It’s about sixty miles North West of Florence. Why did Pesellino die so young? He was thirty-five and he died of plague in Florence. That’s why he is relatively unknown and cannot command a fund raising block buster exhibition. They are sure-fire winners if they are Bacon, Freud, perhaps Auerbach, and anything fashion related at the V&A. And where did we go for lunch? The Portrait Restaurant at the gallery next door – The National Portrait Gallery. The NPG has re-opened after a £41 million refurb that moved the entrance from the east side to the north side – not a good allocation of scarce funds.
The joy of Pesellino’s pictures and his contemporaries’ is the depiction of life in Florence in the mid 15th century; life in the highest echelons of society. Architecture, landscapes, richly decorated garments, horses, exotic animals and a realistic cast of aristocrats and their servants jostle for our attention almost six hundred years later.