For 160 years, London’s National Gallery has been hunting down fragments of a rare altarpiece. The monumental panel, called The Pistoia Santa Trinity Altarpiece, was commissioned in 1455 and is the only surviving documented work by the greatest Renaissance artist you’ve probably never heard of: Francesco Pesellino.
Wildly popular in his time, Pesellino painted for the papal court in Rome and the Medici dynasty in Florence. In the summer of 1457, when the plague swept through Tuscany, he died at 35 and never saw the Pistoia Trinity unveiled. In the 18th century, the work was cut up and sold off. Pesellino’s name passed into obscurity, and virtually his entire body of work was ascribed to other artists.
But no more. Two days ago, “Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed” opened at London’s National Gallery. The first-ever exhibition on the artist, it was organized by Laura Llewellyn, the gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500. The altarpiece is a focal point.
Its central section, which depicts the Holy Trinity, arrived at the gallery first, in 1863. Some 50 years later it was joined by two angels that slotted like jigsaw-puzzle pieces into the upper-right and upper-left corners. The left-hand side, which shows the saints Mamas and James, was loaned from the Royal Collection; then, in 1929, the right-hand side, featuring the saints Zeno and Jerome, was acquired through the debonair art dealer Lord Duveen.
Once the panel was re-assembled, it became clear its image was a watershed in terms of anatomy, foreshortening, perspective, and light. The way Pesellino set weighty, sculptural figures against a single panoramic landscape was practically unprecedented, and scholars now think he set the stage for Verrocchio, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci. The work is also a blueprint for Pesellino’s “hand” and has helped scholars re-attribute around 30 paintings to the elusive artist.
Llewellyn spent lockdown overseeing the restoration of the museum’s other Pesellino holding—a breathtaking pair of Medici marriage-chest panels recounting the biblical story of David, king of Israel. “Having removed the discolored varnish, we revealed their former splendor,” Llewellyn explains. “I had the idea to use them to draw attention to this painter that was hugely celebrated in his own lifetime but now virtually unknown.”
By re-uniting the National Gallery’s Pesellinos with six other works by the artist, this small show highlights the sheer breadth of Pesellino’s talent. These works include a devotional Madonna and Child lent by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, in Lyon, a jewel-like diptych of the Annunciation loaned by the Courtauld, and a delicate gouache of Saint Augustine from the Louvre. Llewellyn admits, however, that a few keystones are missing. The Met, in New York, couldn’t lend its gold-ground panel as it only just went back on display. A collection of the artist’s extraordinary illuminated manuscripts at the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, weren’t requested. And one section of the huge altarpiece is still unaccounted for.
“It shows the legs belonging to Zeno and Jerome,” says Llewellyn. “I assume one of two things. It was either damaged by damp and removed, or, given Jerome’s typical iconography, there was a lion at his feet. Pesellino painted fantastic lions, and this would have been very sellable as a separate artwork. Maybe one day it will reveal itself.”
“Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed” is on at the National Gallery, in London, through March 10, 2024
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Harry Seymour is a London-based art historian and writer
