Michele di Matteo

The first document we have relating to the career of “Magister Micael Matei” is his enrolment in the Matricola delle Quattro Arti in Bologna on 30 June 1415. He embarked on his career by painting banners, papal and municipal coats-of-arms, and even the staircase in the dormitory of the convent of San Michele in Bosco.

The first polyptych we can definitely attribute to Michele, depicting the Coronation of the Virgin (Ricasoli Collection, Florence), was painted in 1426 (though the inscription with the date is no longer legible). He already reveals in this early polyptych the extent to which he was rooted in the artistic tradition of Bologna, particularly the style of Giovanni da Modena who had frescoed the same subject in the Bolognini Chapel in San Petronio. Michele also drew his inspiration from Giovanni da Modena for a fresco of St. Anthony of Padua in the Chapel of St. Bridget in San Petronio ¹ , a figure that shares certain stylistic features with a St. Christopher in the same church by Lippo di Dalmasio, an artist with whom Michele is known to have cooperated on a number of banners.

Two spells in distant cities were to have a major impact on the development of Michele di Matteo’s style and career. The first was when he moved to Venice from 1431 to 1436, where he painted a polyptych for the church of Sant’Elena now in the Galleria dell’Accademia (inv. no. 24). It was in the lagoon city that Michele acquired first-hand knowledge of the art of Michele Giambono, Jacobello del Fiore and Gentile da Fabriano, some of whose stylistic features and technical ploys (for instance, the motif of gilded pointillisme, or the basket-bearing angels engrained on the gold ground) he used in the Sant’Elena polyptych.

This change of style can already be detected in the first picture that he painted on his return to Bologna, a Madonna of Humility (Chiaromonte-Bordonaro Collection, Palermo) commissioned by the Vitali family c. 1437, where he enhances the beauty of the Virgin’s mantle with exquisite gold embroidery, dwells on the variety of the plants in the flowery meadow, and changes the way in which he decorates his figures’ haloes by introducing rosette and leaf motifs. This latter innovation is also found with a certain frequency in the art of Jacopo di Paolo, a Bolognese painter who was dead by the early 1430s but whose daughter Lucia was Michele di Matteo’s wife.

His second important spell away from home was in Siena from 1444 to 1447, when he not only painted an altarpiece for the church of Sante Flora e Lucilla in Torrita di Siena and monochrome frescoes in the church of San Girolamo, but also decorated the city’s Baptistery, once again displaying his ability to take close interest in the work of leading local painters, in this instance Giovanni di Paolo and Sassetta.

On returning to Bologna, he was to paint three more polyptychs which can be dated with certainty: one for the Abbey of Nonantola (now in the Museo Benedettino e Diocesano d’Arte Sacra), which can be dated 1460 thanks to the Abbey’s income and expenditure accounts; one for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna, dated 1462 (inv. no. 247, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna); and one for the Ringhieri Chapel in the church of San Martino Maggiore, dated 1469 (inv. nos. 214, 216, 218, 248, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna). Towards the end of his career, Michele appears to have returned to the Bolognese Gothic model, harking back primarily to the style of Jacopo di Paolo’s early work.

1. C. Volpe, La Pittura gotica: Da Lippo di Dalmasio a Giovanni da Modena in La Basilica di San Petronio, I, Cinisello Balsamo 1983, p. 267: here too, the date of 1430 could be seen in a now illegible inscription[↩]