Luminous Messenger

By * Robert Hughes

One tends to imagine the history of Italian art as a formidable seamless block of marble, smoothed and polished by generations of research. In fact, its surface is pocked with holes left by artists whose names, but very little of whose work, survive. Next to nothing is known about their lives and personalities. One of these was Michel ino da Besozzo, who came from Pavia and became the leading artist in early 15th century Milan. Nearly all Michelino's work is lost, but most of what remains was recently bought by New York's Pierpont Morgan Library. It consists of a tiny (6 3/4 in. by 4 3/4 in.) prayerbook, containing 22 miniatures on vellum that Mi-chelino painted sometime around 1420. John Plummer, the Morgan's curator of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, compares his new treasure with such supreme achievements of manuscript painting as the Tres Riches Heures of the Due de Berry. Michelino's con-'emporaries in Milan could well have agreed: one of them called him "the most excellent of all the painters in the world," which, even allowing for the ritual hyberbole of renaissance prose, is still a startling tribute.

Divine Gesture. The Morgan's prayer-book is a luminous messenger from the culture of the late medieval Italian courts --a world now as dead as the turned face of the moon and less visible. Manuscript illumination was the most private of all arts, tiny in scale, introverted and forbiddingly difficult to do, a matter of brush strokes one-fiftieth of an inch long and burnished dots of gold no bigger than a flake of cigarette ash. Unlike the grand-scale media of stained glass and fresco --which Michelino also worked in, though little he made has survived--an illuminated manuscript was frequently aimed at an audience of one: the patron who ordered it. Consequently, their owners must have experienced them not only as marvelous and jewel-like artifacts but also as a proof of class power: books which only privileged friends could read or see.

Undemocratic though this may be, it had one good effect: because they were protected from the light in a closed book, miniatures did not fade as did exposed paintings. The Michelino prayerbook's vermilions, blues and earthy pinks are as resonant as they must have been when, 550 years ago, they were stippled in.

Line, not mass, is the essence of Michelino's style. A melodious tracery of arabesques invests every shape he depicted, tying them together. Pattern delighted him. The way he selected a flower as a motif and set his figures against a whole screen of them, the petals interlocking with reverse shapes of gold leaf, was a master stroke of decorative invention that seems both to look back to Moorish tile work and predict art nouveau.

Michelino's style was not grand. When he painted the Holy Trinity as a single figure of God, seated in a mandorla of angels' wings, the authority of divine gesture was almost lost in the flow of gold drapery. But this incessant undulation of line gives the forms of Mary and Elizabeth a rhythm that rarely appears in such epigrammatic form until Botticelli. Michelino's figures, whether of Christ rising from the tomb or his Disciples laying him in it, are refined to a trance-like stillness; their flesh and robes seem translucent, as if emitting light in a space without shadows.

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