Pellegrino di Mariano

Like Sano, Pellegrino satisfied a demand for private devotional panels depicting the Madonna and Child with Saints. The almond eyes of his Madonnas, the exquisitely drawn draperies, the lavishly tooled gold backgrounds and the compositional device of arranging saints in a sort of mandorla around the Madonna show Pellegrino’s closeness to the formulae of Sano di Pietro. However, Pellegrino retains something of the eccentricity of Giovanni di Paolo, visible in the characterization of the saints and details such as the hair of his protagonists.

Pellegrino, like Giovanni di Paolo, Sassetta (ca. 1392–1450) and Sano di Pietro paints in a way which seems astonishingly archaic in view of what was happening at the same time in Florence. They all maintain the solemn dignity and refinement of their artistic ancestor Duccio (active 1278–1318). Equally they share, though expressed in more up-to-date terms, Duccio’s love of narrative detail; this can at times seem naïve and at others ‘modern’ and almost hallucinatory. They also clung to the use of gold as a background long after it had been abandoned elsewhere.