Original scientific paper
An Addition to the Oeuvre of Pietro di Martino da Milano
Igor Fisković
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
This study widens our insight into the art of Peitro di Martino da Milano, who lived and worked in Dubrovnik from 1431 through 1452, and was document as involved in a series of public programs. The author of the text has identified him with the "unknown Gothic master" to whom he had attributed, long ago, some fifteen sculptures in "soft style," and now he has added two additional significant works to that group — pulpits in the refectory of the Franciscan monastery, and in the church of St. Dominic, where the relief sculptures of various saints reveal the same style as the earlier attributions. The first pulpit represents an appearance of a new type in Southern Croatia, an exemplary work of the foreign master recorded in the monastery's records as working on the altar railing and the fountain in the cloister in the 1440ties. Its firm construction harmoniously relates to the relief of a slender St. Francis in the center field of the polygonal parapet revealing a hand of an accomplished artist. The pulpit in the Dominican church has been composed in a different way. It reveals similarities to the former in the modeling of the heads of the four main saints of the mendicant orders shown as smaller relief figures within a poliptych on the facade of its cubic body. The richness of the treatment has been complemented by a luxuriously carved capital of the support repeating together with the rest of figured and decorative elements other solutions by the master found in Dubrovnik. Most of the text has been devoted to comparative analysis to define, in totality, the art of Pietro da Martino in Dubrovnik. His role in conceiving of the complex program of the Rector's Palace has been especially emphasized, which, as well as two public fountains where Pietro's contribution has been documented, came into being during the stay of this highly respected artists in a city of ambitious rulers. In that sense we have attempted to clarify some earlier attributions and show Pietro as an accomplished master of international courtly Gothic open to humanist inspiration, and with signs of a "first Renaissance," not only in spirit but also in morphology. As Ms. Renata Novak-Klemen_i_ recently discovered that Pietro was identical with a "magister Petrus filius Martinij de Sormano de Mediolano lapicide," and successfully identified his so far unknown works in Italy, Pietro's oeuvre deserves a substantial revalorization. This would be justified also by the well-known demand by King Alfonso of Aragon asking Pietro to leave Dubrovnik for Naples, where the artist would acquire a world fame as one of the key masters of the Triumphal Arch of the Castelnuovo, a paradigmatic piece of Early Renaissance art in Italy.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
166733
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2003.
Visits: 1.587 *