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- Title
WHO WAS THE PRIMARY ILLUMINATOR OF GUIDO DA PISA'S COMMENTARY ON DANTE'S INFERNO IN CHANTILLY?
- Authors
POLZER, JOSEPH
- Abstract
This study concerns the identity of the principal illuminator of Manuscript 597 of Guido da Pisa's Commentary on Dante's Inferno in the Musée Condé in Chantilly, generally referred to as Cha. It was surely produced in Pisa around the mid to later thirties of the trecento. Its illuminations rank among the finest to be found in late medieval Italian manuscripts. The image on folio 31r where Guido offers the manuscript to Lucano Spinola, his noble Genoese patron is exceptionally advanced in its realism. The identity of this illuminator has been the subject of recent discussion. As indicated in Chiara Balbarini's doctoral dissertation L'inferno di Chantilly submitted at the University of Pisa in 2005 and published in 2011 many Pisan scholars identify this illuminator with Francesco Traini who was Pisa's leading painter of the mid-trecento. His principal work is the Saint Dominic Altarpiece in the Pisa Museum, which was completed in 1345. Differently, Millard Meiss, whose article in the Art Bulletin of 1933 first clarified Traini's oeuvre, definitely denied Traini's identification with Cha's primary illuminator in his publications of the 1960's, although later in an article that appeared in 1971 he wasn't quite so sure. Here I deny Traini's authorship of Cha's illuminations on both stylistic and chronological grounds. I realized in the fall of 1967 on the basis of the close stylistic connection of the early Campo Santo murals to a mural in the old baptismal chapel of Arezzo Cathedral that both were by the same master. At the time a young Italian art historian Pier Paolo Donati attributed the Aretine mural to Buffalmaco on documentary grounds. Pooling this information I concluded that Buffalmacco, who resided in Pisa in 1336, was the master of the early Campo Santo murals. Since then Buffalmacco's authorship of the latter has been widely accepted. Significantly, these murals substantially influenced Traini's later Saint Dominic Altarpiece. Buffalmacco's Pisan murals offer the closest stylistic connections to Cha's primary illuminator's oeuvre, in particular as regards the realism of the Presentation scene, and also in the shared diversified zoomorphic shapes of the demons that abound in both their works, including even the demons' weapons. Not a single demon or devil appears in Traini's entire available oeuvre.
- Subjects
MURAL art; MANUSCRIPTS; PAINTING; ALTARPIECES; MEISS, Millard
- Publication
Studi di Storia Dell'Arte, 2017, Issue 28, p45
- ISSN
1123-5683
- Publication type
Article