Anachronistic or Visionary? Evaluating Giovanni di Paolo’s use of Silver Leaf on a 15th-century Sienese Predella
Molly Hughes-Hallett
Giovanni di Paolo’s unusual use of silver is a material choice unexplored in terms of defining his aesthetic, as well as contextualizing him within the artistic Zeitgeist of his generation. A technical study of Giovanni di Paolo’s Saint John the Evangelist, The Assumption of the Virgin, and Saint Ansanus, part of the Kress Collection at the El Paso Art Museum, revealed that this predella fragment once had a silvered frame and silver leaf ground, prompting a reevaluation of how the work should be displayed, and how its current condition with degraded and tarnished silver affects our reading of the work. Most of Giovanni di Paolo’s works are now in a fragmentary state. This creates challenges when contextualizing how the predella fit into its original altar format, and whether it is feasible that the artist mixed metal leaves without a clear example as a comparison. A reconstruction hypothesis is reevaluated, stressing the importance of understanding the materiality of an object when reconstructing larger pictorial schematics.