Giovanni di Paolo_ The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 46 ..

66. Giovanni di Paolo. Pieta. Private collection
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heads, which were comparatively weakly treated in the
earlier triptych, now protrude above the throne. It is clear
that the second altarpiece was in fact worked out afresh,
and it reflects the action of the same self-critical interpretative
mind that directed the adaptation of the figure content
of his smaller paintings.
So much for what we know. What of the unknown? It
remains puzzling that in the middle of the fifteenth century
a market, quite a large market, existed for what, by the
standards of the time, must have seemed eccentric,
heterodox paintings. Of the complacency and the sometimes
exasperating tenderness of Sano di Pietro there is no
trace, yet these works stood in the same churches as Sano di
Pietro's, were addressed to the same public, and were made
for the same use. Did they result from heightened personal
conviction, or are they due to some current of doctrinal
thinking of which we know nothing at all? In Giovanni di
Paolo's late works the imagery is the imagery of fear not
consolation. When the New York Paradise was reproduced,
about I465, in a great oblong panel of The Last Judgment
in Siena, even Paradise seems, as a prospect, not to be much
fun (fig. 67). How did it happen that in the contented
climate of Siena there was this thirst for moral chastisement?
Or are the qualities that we interpret as despair due
rather to failing eyesight or to some arthritic disability that
caused the artist after 1453 to abandon the practice of illumination?
There are, of course, no answers to questions
of this kind. What is significant is that they are questions
prompted by no other quattrocento painter, and my sense,
in looking at Giovanni di Paolo and his work once more,
is that he was humanly and historically a richer and even
more rewarding artist than I had originally supposed.
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