The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello's Arthurian Frescoes

Book excerpt: The unfinished frescoes by Antonio Pisanello in the Ducal Palace in Mantua have intrigued and puzzled art historians since their rediscovery in the 1960s. In the most extensive discussion in English of these important paintings, Joanna Woods-Marsden identifies the frescoes as a coherent cycle depicting an episode from the "prose Lancelot," a thirteenthy2Dcentury French romance. Dating the cycle c. 1447-48, she argues that it was commissioned by Lodovico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, and suggests that the work, located in an important reception-hall in the mid-fifteenth-century palace, documents its patron's political and social self-image and ambitions. Not only does the book consider Pisanello's pictorial style in the context of the values, pretensions, and illusions of the Gonzaga court, but it also constitutes a study of his artistic career, of the links between the cycle's pictorial design and the Lancelot's narrative structure, and of Pisanello's physical execution of the frescoes and sinopie.