Fig. 59. Sassetta. The Birth of the Virgin.—Asciano.
Fig. 60. Sassetta. Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty.—Chantilly, France.
Fig. 61. Sassetta. Temptation of St. Anthony.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.
Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now scattered ancona for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San Sepolcro. The central panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.” The panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at Chantilly which represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with Poverty, Figure [60]. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chastity and Obedience, sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his petulant superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless heights of a pure æstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable little book A Painter of the Franciscan Legend well describes the technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in “outlines which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are representative or calligraphic, give off values of movement, and values of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what visual art can do to evoke spirit.”
Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure [61], in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than seeing the tiny bats’ wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one almost feels the old earth swinging unconcernedly beneath this dilemma. A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the hobgoblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages.
Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro (1406–1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403–1482) kept something of his influence alive for still thirty years.
Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously, there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian without the finesse of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(Pictor famosus et homo lotus deditus Deo)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to appreciate a traditionalist.
