LONDON — It is a little after 10am — opening time! — and Gallery 46 of the National Gallery is as silent as a tomb. It is also fairly small and very dark. The blue of the walls makes you feel as if you are gently swimming through some sub-aquatic mystery painted by William Blake.
When viewed side on, the kindly attendant, well ensconced on a padded chair beside the glazed double doors, looks as motionless as a Duane Hanson sculpture, though a little more smartly attired.
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And I am the only visitor.
That remains the case for at least half an hour. Then a boisterous family walks in, complete with a stroller, but they leave fairly quickly, the eye candy being only captivating enough for about 30 seconds of a small, squirmily restless child’s time.
Why so empty? I ask the attendant when peace returns. After all, this is a fascinating show about a 16th-century Renaissance master called Pesellino (c. 1422–1457), a man from Florence who has been all but forgotten.
Rain, he says. I nod, in sad acknowledgment. But what happened to the many I was so patiently queueing beside at the main entrance just five minutes ago? Why not here?
Quite a bit is puzzling about this show. Its size, for example. This rapid survey consists of only eight works, and it is located in one of the museum’s smaller spaces. What is more, the largest piece in the show is not by Pesellino’s hand alone. Why so few though?
There is more than one reason. Death took him far too early — he died of the plague at the age of 35. He had a flourishing workshop in Florence (as did his father and his grandfather before him), and there is much evidence on view that he was a man with a collaborative spirit, rather unlike those jealous, ferociously ambitious, toweringly egotistical wonders called Leonardo and Michelangelo.
And then there is the question of why so many works in this show are rather small.
Several of Pesellino’s relatively few accredited works were individual oblong panels that ran in a line beneath an altarpiece. The altarpiece itself would have been the main visual event, as well as the predella panels beneath its smaller accompaniments, which would seldom have been looked at in any detail. Pesellino, who was very good at streamlining complicated stories, often derived from the Bible, to a sequence of easily comprehensible images, was much in demand for such work because he painted so well on this smaller scale.
One of the finest works in the show is a standalone “Mother and Child” of around 1455, part of it set within a niche that looks like a gorgeously gilded shell. How do you position the figures within the relatively small space available? How do you make the Virgin’s head stand proud, sing out? Pesellino shows us: This wonderful painting was an example for others to replicate. So it is an invitation to copy, a gift to the many painters who wanted and needed to earn a living by making salable (and such images were very salable) devotional images of this kind. That shows a rare communitarian spirit.
Perhaps Pesellino lacked a certain ferocity of ambition. Those who choose not to shout from the rooftops often fail to get heard.
Pesellino: a Renaissance Master Revealed continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London, England) through March 10. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Laura Llewellyn.
Source: Hyperallergic.com