Two Marchigian Vagabonds

Throughout the fifteenth century aspiring painters ventured from the confines of Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches to Florence as a means of transforming their art, much as, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, artists traveled to Rome and, in the early twentieth century, to Paris. Some remained, but most returned to their native cities, where they exploited their mastery of the new idioms. (So far as we know, Piero never received an independent commission in Florence, although Vasari reports that he later worked with Domenico Veneziano in Loreto, suggesting that the two artists remained in touch with each other.)19 Probably in 1443 two other artists who will be of importance to the story we have to tell, Giovanni Boccati and Giovanni Angelo d'Antonio—both from the Marchigian town of Camerino, south of Urbino and east of Perugia and Assisi—made their way to the Tuscan city.20 In Camerino Giovanni Angelo had married into a mercantile family that had links with the ruling Da Varano and business ties to the Medici.21 Giovanni Angelo was a clever man who could, and did, do duty as a courtier (we know from one of his letters that he played the lute, which seems to have been a requisite for the role he filled). By 1444 he was a guest in the Medici palace, where he was on familiar terms with Giovanni de'Medici; in 1451 he actually attempted (unsuccessfully) to negotiate a marriage between Giovanni and a cousin of the Da Varano. That was seven years after he had been summoned home, in March 1444, to put his affairs in order; Elisabetta da Varano had even expressed her desire that he accompany the eleven-year-old Rodolfo da Varano to Ferrara on the occasion of the marriage of the marquis Lionello d'Este to Maria d'Aragona. He had traveled to Florence with his compatriot Giovanni Boccati, who—we now know from a newly discovered document—joined the workshop of Filippo Lippi. In January 1443 Boccati received a payment for work on Lippi's altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin (fig. 2) intended for the church of Sant'Ambrogio.22 This is the same altarpiece for which Fra Carnevale was to receive payments two and a half years later, and it is interesting to speculate on whether Boccati may have had a hand in directing the Urbino artist to Lippi's shop. Did they know each other at an early date?

By March 1445 Boccati, now on his own, had moved from Florence to Perugia, where in October he became a citizen and undertook to paint a major altarpiece (see fig. 17 and cat. 30). Boccati's intention was to set up a permanent workshop in the city ("ad exercendem artem pictorum et in eadem civitate habitare et stare continuo intendit et dictam eius artem exercere," his petition reads), and it was in view of his expertise ("in arte pictoria expertissimus") that citizenship was granted—an indication of the value of having spent time with a widely respected Florentine master.23 (The prestige of Florentine artists can be judged by the fact that when, in 1454, the local Perugian painter Benedetto Bonfigli was hired to fresco the chapel in the Palazzo dei Priori, it was stipulated that either Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, or Fra Angelico should do the all-important valuation.) In the event, Boccati left after finishing his altarpiece in 1447: He seems to have accompanied a young Perugian law student to Padua, where it is just conceivable that he was joined by Giovanni Angelo as well as by another compatriot, Girolamo di Giovanni, who is documented there in 1450. Both Giovanni Angelo and Giovanni Boccati were back in Camerino by 1451, for we find them in attendance at the wedding of the young ruler Giulio Cesare da Varano to Giovanna Malatesta.24 (It is one of the characteristics of the courts of Renaissance Italy that the ruling families intermarried as part of their politics of expansion and security: Giovanna was the daughter of Sigismondo Malatesta, the lord of Rimini; Giulio Cesare's cousin Rodolfo had married the half sister of Lionello d'Este in 1448; and in 1459 Federigo da Montefeltro married Battista Sforza [1446–1472], the daughter of Costanza da Varano—Rodolfo da Varano's sister—and Alessandro Sforza, brother of the duke of Milan and the ruler of Pesaro.) For painters from small towns an itinerant career was a necessity, even when they were closely associated with cultivated ruling families, as in the case of the Da Varano (Elisabetta da Varano—a Malatesta on her father's side and a Montefeltro on her mother's—had a humanist education and wrote Petrarchan verse). Yet, this should not blind us to the fact that when Giovanni Angelo and Boccati set their horizons on Florence and then Padua, a humanist center where Nicolò Pizzolo and the young Mantegna were establishing their fame, they were motivated by cultural ambitions shared by their prospective patrons and rulers.

It is easy to pass a premature, dismissive judgment on the art of Boccati (see cat. nos. 30, 31, 32, and 33), with its insubstantial figures, high-pitched emotional fervor, and casual attitude toward the science of perspective. Provincial as his art may seem when set against the grave, elevated imagination of Piero, it was nonetheless remarkably attentive to the most innovative ideas in Italian painting. The Madonna and Child with Music-making Angels (cat. 32) presents a virtual curriculum vitae of the artist's cultural education. The dais of the throne is inspired by Roman pavements, the tabernacle by Florentine and Paduan models (with a classicizing relief intended to appeal to antiquarian tastes), and the steeply foreshortened rose arbor quoted from one of Mantegna's most admired frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua. The colors and lighting show Boccati to have been no less attentive to the work of Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli.25 Not surprisingly, then, it was to Boccati that Federigo da Montefeltro turned sometime prior to 1467 for the task of frescoing a room in the new wing of his palace (see fig. 9, 10). Was it on the recommendation of Fra Carnevale, who by then may have been serving as a consultant to Federigo on artistic and architectural matters? There is a temptation to divide Federigo's patronage into successive phases and to associate Fra Carnevale and Boccati with an early, pre-Piero stage (Piero is first documented in Urbino in 1469, although he may have worked there earlier), but this is too simple a schema. To our eyes Boccati's witty and decoratively brilliant frescoes are more Gothic than Renaissance in character. Certainly they lack that grounding in arithmetic and geometry that Federigo prized above all else.26 However, we should not forget that at the same time he was active as Piero's patron and having the walls of his private study covered with astonishing perspective views carried out in wood inlay, Federigo was ordering tapestries from Tournai (1476) that transformed the story of the Trojan War into a Burgundian chivalric romance. Piero's art, in other words, gives only a very partial view of Renaissance taste in Urbino; in evaluating the art of Boccati, Giovanni Angelo—and Fra Carnevale—we must remove the blinders of modern taste: Tunnel vision has no place here.