Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Giovanni di Paolo was one of the leading figures of the Quattrocento Sienese school of painting. According to the administrative documents of the time and the numerous paintings he made, mainly altarpieces and predellas, Giovanni di Paolo was a prolific artist. The increase demand for various types of religious art, including frescoes and liturgical objects, was triggered by economic growth and individual, civic or guild pride. Commissions were pouring and clients were eager to show off their status, prosperity, but also their veneration of the sacred. Though, we can assume that clients’ tastes impacted the artistic works they commissioned, not all the artistic creation was subject to the mores and aesthetic conventions of the time. Giovanni di Paolo created his own rather unconventional arrangements. His representations of Paradise (the first held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, probably part of a predella of a lost composition, and the second, a contiguous representation of the Last Judgement held in Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena) confound the viewer with a sense of modernity that none of his contemporaries would have reckoned (an ‘avant la letter’ or simply ‘modernist’ representation of the heavenly paradise). Despite their sketchy appearance, the characters depicted have a gestural individuality which surpass other eschatological representations of the Early Renaissance. The purpose of my paper is to discuss the gestural expressiveness of Giovanni di Paolo’s characters and the modernity of his compositional style in contrast to similar works of Fra Angelico and Gentile da Fabriano.