TOmmaso by Cristoforo Fini, known as Masolino da Panicaleworks between the end of the XIV and the beginning of the fifteenth century, about one hundred years after Giotto. The place of birth and the first years of life, as well as the job of the father, although Vasari attributes the profession of painter, remain wrapped in mystery.
Vasari writes in The lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architectors of 1568: “Masolino da Panicale di Valdelsa, who was a disciple of Lorenzo di Bartoluccio Ghiberti and in his Bonissima Orefice boyfriend and in the work of the doors the best reinstatement that Lorenzo had, was in making the role of the very right and Valente figures, and in reinstating he had very good way and intelligence”.
Masolino’s ability in the drapery, as well as the skill in “going through the hits”, corresponds to the experience that everyone can draw from the vision of the painter’s works. While There is no historical trace of Panicale Valdelsa. In any case, when the Visconti held the lordship of northern Italy and part of central Italy, Masolino was born, between Umbria and Tuscany.
In 1425 he left for Hungary, following the leader Pippo Spanoprobably not to incur pecuniary sanctions for the failure to deliver a work. He was very popular painter, and had perhaps disregarded an onerous contractual agreement. Therefore, an already nourished colony of Toscani in Land Magiara influenced.
We do not have many sources of this stay, nor does it seem that Masolino has left works on site, at least until proven otherwise. We know that Veszprèm visited, town located north of Lake Balatonand of that journey and that landscape kept memory, so much so that 10 years later, In 1435, he transfigured him into a fresco painting, preserved in BRANDA CASTIGLIONI Palacein Castiglione Olonanear Varese.
“View of Veszprém” by Masolino da Panicale (1435), Civic Museum Palazzo Branda Castiglioni, Castiglione Olona, Varese (photo Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images).
The lyrical personality, an intimate of Masolino da Panicale is fully revealed to Castiglione Olona, a village in Lombardy but all “Tuscan” for artistic decoration, because so he wanted Cardinal Branda Castiglioni. In Castiglione Olona Masolino is finally free from Masaccio’s obsession; And in the Collegiate, as in the Baptistery, it only follows its inspiration, taking back from the Brancacci chapel, for the stories of San Giovanni Battista, the spatial scheme of the scenes that unfold in a continuous landscape, within an illusionistic architectural cage.
And here, perhaps for a newfound sense of freedom and serenity, Masolino makes a little great revolution. He brings to mind the meeting with the new, exotic world of Hungary; The vision of a city, the vast plain, the Balaton lake surrounded by high mountains, impressed in him, so much so as to release, after years, resurfaces, The first pure landscape painting of Italian painting. The Masolino mountains are affected by Gothic sensitivity, and also Giotto, but are mountains of a dream, a vision.
In the frescoes of Palazzo Branda Castiglioni we can admire the first pure nature of modern art, the first pure mountain landscape. And it is not an Italian, Umbrian, Tuscan, Lombard landscape, which could have reasonably been. Masolino, like a traveler of the centuries to come, brings with him the memory of a journey, and leaves testimony to a memorable cycle of frescoes.
A few decades later, In 1495, Albrecht Dürer, the greatest German painter, does something similar: descends to Italy to reach Venice and meet the great Venetian painters, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Lorenzo Lotto. And, on his journey, he touches arc, e He leaves the first realistic landscape of art history, the first photography in painting, “The Castle of Arco”now preserved in the Louvre Museum.
Dürer almost photographically represents what he sees, draws him in watercolor and leaves us memory, as a document of a real journey. You can see the cultivated fields, the olive trees, the castle climbed on the rocks, the path that leads there, the towers, the town at the foot of the mountain.
They are wonderful watercolors, which detailed a journeyas the great French and German writers will do in the 18th century and in the 19th century in their pages. Dürer will paint other mountains and other places, such as Avio, such as the castle and the Pyramids of Segonzano, in Val di Fiemme. The watercolor allowed him to quickly compose, stopping snapshots of what he saw.
Masolino, Italian, transfigures a Hungarian landscape in memory of ten years earlier. Dürer, amazed by the Italian landscape, gives us back an instant. Both give us the first landscapes, mountain, of history.
All articles by Vittorio Sgarbi
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