Pisanello and the Grounds of Invention

Campbell, C. Jean

The work of the fifteenth-century Italian painter Pisanello has long proven resistant the interpretative procedures of art history, in ways that point to the limits of those procedures as they evolved in the period after the Second World War. Taking Pisanello’s art as an example of a larger theoretical issue, the book proposes a model of interpretation that addresses the realm of imitative practice. Using Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro del’ Arte as a primer,the author argues for an approach that confronts the evidence of the artist’s self-tempering work, and then tests that model through an examination of Pisanello’s drawings and medals. She exposes the drawings as primary evidence of the ontological groundwork within which the painter finds his own habits of invention, and also demonstrates the value of looking for the groundwork in a selection of Pisanello’s official works, including the surviving wall paintings in Veronese churches. In the end, the author contends that the self-reflexive recognition of creative agency is a prerequisite for the apprehension of Pisanello’s art, especially the agonistic scenario staged in his panel of The Virgin and Child with Saints George and Anthony and its enigmatic signature.