:The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello's Arthurian Frescoes

Abstract

This book is the first attempt fully to gauge Pisanello's significance as an artist, and it is remarkably successful in doing this. It brings one closer than any earlier publication to the climate of fifteenth-century court art and to the creative intentions of a great court artist. --Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Fine ArtsThis is certainly one of the most impressive contributions I have seen to the interpretation of courtly cultures in the Renaissance, and it is beyond a doubt one of the most important works on Mantua done in this century. What is more, it is interesting and original in so many ways, and manages at the same time to be so erudite and so lively, that it immediately establishes the author as one of a tiny group of scholars who really do make history and art history work together. Time and again, I found myself nodding in agreement, breaking into a smile at some striking or witty observation, or wishing I had said this or that.--Werner Gundersheimer, Director, The Folger Shakespeare LibraryThe unfinished frescoes by Antonio Pisanello in the Ducal Palace in Mantua have intrigued and puzzled art historians since their rediscovery in the 1960s. In the most extensive discussion in English of these important paintings, Joanna Woods-Marsden identifies the frescoes as a coherent cycle depicting an episode from the prose Lancelot, a thirteenthy2Dcentury French romance. Dating the cycle c. 1447-48, she argues that it was commissioned by Lodovico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, and suggests that the work, located in an important reception-hall in the mid-fifteenth-century palace, documents its patron's political and social self-image and ambitions.Not only does the book consider Pisanello's pictorial style in the context of the values, pretensions, and illusions of the Gonzaga court, but it also constitutes a study of his artistic career, of the links between the cycle's pictorial design and the Lancelot's narrative structure, and of Pisanello's physical execution of the frescoes and sinopie.