Giovanni di paolo (1398-1482) is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and imaginative painters of the Early Renaissance in Siena Italy. Firmly anchored in the tradition of late Gothic painting in Siena, he created an individual and sophisticated interpretation of the aesthetic principles of the International Gothic style.

His courtly idiom was founded on a personal approach to Northern Italian artistic formulas, as invented and developed by the protagonists at the Visconti court and particularly by Gentile da Fabriano; and the latter became Giovanni di Paolo’s major source of inspiration and of pivotal importance for his development.

Yet though he embraced the art of Gentile his character remained essentially Sienese, partly because he deliberately sought to adapt ideas and motifs from compositions by earlier local (and non-local) painters, shrewdly masking them and merging them into highly innovative images of distinct personal quality. One of the hitherto unresolved questions in the scholarly assessment of Giovanni di Paolo involved his training and early evolution in a major workshop.

The present study focuses on his apprenticeship (c.1410-1417) and – in light of a newly rediscovered early Virgin of Humility – his subsequent development as he broke away from his first teachers (1417-1426). The second part of the volume offers a survey of Giovanni di Paolo’s biography and career, with a discussion of some of his dated works.