New Names for the Old Sacristy of the Siena Hospital: Pseudo‐Scripts, Hidden Signatures, and the Ludic Self

Abstract

While working on the scaffolding of Vecchietta's frescoes in the sacristy at the Santissima Annunziata, Siena (1446–49), thirteen‐year‐old Benvenuto di Giovanni and another garzone, Guasparre d'Agostino, signed together their names in Greek letters hidden among pseudo‐scripts on the hem of the cloak of a seemingly unimportant figure painted about three metres high up on a wall. Previously ignored, this signature is important in that, combined with unpublished documents, it sheds light on Benvenuto di Giovanni's youthful career and, more broadly, the first steps of a garzone on their way to becoming a master. The first known signature in Greek ever to appear in fifteenth‐century Italian painting, but enmeshed among pseudo‐scripts, Guasparre and Benvenuto's marks are not proof of antiquarian culture. Instead, this signature begs for a historicized concept of both linguistic knowledge and artistic authorship. Hidden, it betrays an interest in the signature as a locus of playful negotiation of identity, suspended between concealment and revelation.