BELBELLO DA PAVIA, Luchino - b. ~1428 Pavia, d. ~1470 ? - WGA

BELBELLO DA PAVIA, Luchino

(b. ~1428 Pavia, d. ~1470 ?)

Italian illuminator. He was one of the principal and most distinctive manuscript illuminators active in Lombardy in the mid-15th century. This distinguished miniaturist remained unknown for a long while and scholars only became aware of him in 1915. Yet he was famed in his time throughout northern Italy. He received his training in Lombardy where he was guided by the masters Giovannino de’ Grassi and Michelino da Besozzo, and just as much by the miniatures of Franco-Flemish manuscripts which were kept at Castello di Pavia. In 1450 he was convicted of sodomy in Mantua, in his absence.

He was engaged by the most important patrons imaginable, because of his outstanding accomplishments - the Este family, the Gonzagas, the Visconti and Cardinal Bessarion. Filippo Maria Visconti, 3rd Duke of Milan, commissioned him to complete a Book of Hours (Ms. Landau Finaly 22, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence) left unfinished by Giovannino de Grassi and Salomone de Grassi. Three miniatures in an Acta sanctorum (Mss. AE. XIV. 19-20, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan), the first volume of which is dated 1431, are close in style, and probably in date, to Belbello’s work in the Visconti Hours. He also contributed to the illumination of the Breviary of Marie of Savoy (Ms. 4, Bibliothèque Municipale, Chambéry). This is likely to have been painted after Marie’s marriage to Filippo Maria in 1428, but before 1434, the year Belbello completed a Bible (Ms. Barb. lat. 613, Biblioteca Apostolica, Vatican) for Niccolò III d’Este, Marquess of Ferrara. In 1460 Barbara von Brandenburg requested his son in Pavia, Francesco Gonzaga, to correspond with Belbello concerning the miniatures for a missal.

The artist may have spent his final years in Venice; at any rate he received several commissions from the Veneto. His dramatic style found no immediate following, nevertheless he influenced later artists, including Teddeo Crivelli and Girolamo da Cremona.

Visconti Hours

Giovannino de’ Grassi began illuminating this two-volume prayer-book for Gian Galeazzo Visconti; but it was a long time after they both were dead that the work was completed by Luchino Belbello da Pavia and his assistants.

On folio 46v, the initial of the text, the capital C, is the nucleus of the folio with rather crowded embellishments. Encircled by the letter we can see the creation of Eve, in front of a golden background. The three figures - God the Father, Eve and Adam - are arranged in a way that follows the line of the C. Stylized golden vine-leaves, springing from a straight vine-stock on the right-hand side of the margin, surround the initial, and the seemingly irregular, curving network of vine-tendrils is also adjusted to the shape of the letter. In the arid, rocky landscape at the bottom of the folio there are some luxuriant, thriving bushes and shrubs, with different animals among them, which point back to the previous days of the Creation, when the Earth was populated by plants and animals. The bottom strip with its flat representations - connected with the principal one, as was usual at that time - expands in Belbello’s miniature, as it did in the works of his contemporaries, into a spacious stage. In the two upper corners of the initial, groups of radially arranged angels support the Viscontis’ unpleasant coat of arms which depicts the serpent devouring a child.

We are presented with a fantastic mixture of fairytale and reality, of decoration and representation. The griffin is depicted in a three-dimensional manner as is the hunting leopard, the favourite “domestic animal” of the Viscontis, an animal the painter may have seen every day in his master’s park. However, at that time it did not depend only on the presence of the model whether the artist succeeded in representing it successfully. This is shown by the fact that, although there were elephants, bears, lions, monkeys and rabbits too in the Viscontis’ menagerie, in Belbello’s miniature they appear schematically, in a childishly simplified form. This may be due to the fact that the painter had not had much practice in depicting them and had not mastered the skill of representing them.

From among the innumerable instances of the intertwining of natural and fantastic forms it is worth while pointing to the oval, colourful flower cups swaying among the golden vine-leaves. These flowers have nothing to do with reality, and, in particular, not among vine-leaves. On the other hand, they have striking similarities to ornaments on the jewellery of the period, not only because they appear in three-dimensional forms, but because of the enamel-like layers of paint which cover them.

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