Sassetta was a painter of fragments. Or rather, as we perceive him today, he is a painter of fragments. The dismantling, dismembering and diaspora of his altarpieces, together with their physical abrasions, fadings, candle smoke stainings, restorations, excessive cleanings and varnishings have left us with an array of objects which can bear little relation to what people must have seen during Sassetta’s lifetime. Posterity’s paring of Uccello’s oeuvre seems lenient by comparison.
          Sassetta himself is a man of fragments, none of which add up to a solid portrait. We’re in the position of those hapless archaeologists trying to reconstruct a vase based on slivers of crumbling handles. Sassetta is as lost to us as those anonymous craftsmen who erected cathedral towers. The few biographical facts to be garnered from the archives offer little more than a ghost of a profile: his body is missing, the personality remains a riddle. No temper tantrums with Popes or severed ears can be traced to him. Like reading shards, the profile has to be fleshed out using the surviving paintings. (Though we should keep in mind that in all instances not only is the painting more important than the painter, in a perfect fusion the painting is the painter.)
          It should at the outset be observed that the painter we behold today differs considerably not only from the painter seen by his contemporaries, but also from the painter who was first extricated from historical obscurity a century ago. Fascination with his work has steadily increased in relation to the number of art movements his reputation has been subsequently filtered through. Transmitted via the distorting lens of Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Pop Art and Minimalism (not forgetting comic strips and Technicolor), he now appears, along with Giovanni di Paolo and Paolo Uccello, as one of the most idiosyncratic and yet most profound painters of the Quattrocento period, one of those talents with most to offer present-day viewers and artists. (On the other hand, the cumulative effects of those very same movements which renewed interest in Sassetta have, by contrast, rendered Raphael’s influence all but harmless.)
          Quite literally, we see neither the spectrum nor space (let alone religion) as our predecessors saw them during the Dark Centuries preceding Impressionism. Sassetta has been one of the beneficiaries of the twentieth century’s brightenings and flattenings—and, let’s note, its parallel embracing, absorption and abandonment of the concept of “Primitive.” As a result, he and his Sienese kin now feel closer to us than the Barbizon School.
          “Could it be that at the center of Sassetta’s art there lay no core of sodden sentimentalism but an original and virile mind?” So wrote John Pope-Hennessy somewhat uncertainly in his eximious 1939 disquisition on the artist. But just as there has been a pictorial revolution over the past century, so in the gap between Pope-Hennessy’s query and our own time there has been a quickening aversion towards purely formal dissections of a painter’s worth, a reaction to a clapped-out academic modernism, particularly in its abstract branches.
          Without a hint of embarrassment, previously squirm-inducing designations such as “charm,” “delightful,” “mythopoeic,” “lovely,” “toylike,” even Pope-Hennessy’s “sentimentalism” have begun to vivify—or muddy, depending on one’s stance—the aesthetic waters for the first time since Victorian days, adjectives no longer cast as epithets but as locations of interest. Not that Sassetta lacked classic skills in picture making: serenity, harmony and balance he had in abundance. No mere oddball he. But his career stands as one more riposte to the widespread belief that only formalists have long creative lives. Visionaries too can have longevity. Today, when individualism is a trait prized above all others, there’s another point in Sassetta’s favor: he looks as though he were painting for himself and not only for the clergy or wealthy patrons. He was painting for them, of course, but cleverly disguised this necessity. And it—the work—was all laid down before the aloof cleverness of the Renaissance stiffened bristles throughout Italy, at a time when fervid imaginations still granted improvisation a starring role in design.

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TREVOR WINKFIELD exhibits his paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New
York City. Trevor Winkfield’s Drawings was recently published by Bamberger
Books. The present text on Sassetta is the first part of a book in progress. For more
information go to trevorwinkfield.com.

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