Biography

Italian painter. He was named after a set of three spalliera panels (National Gallery, London) devoted to Boccaccio's story of Patient Griselda (Decameron, X.10). They had been assigned to Pinturicchio, and the Master's style is rightly linked to Umbria, although he was active chiefly in Siena. The tall, spindly figures on the panels show vibrant movement and are dressed in elegant costumes, despite their crude, sticklike, sketchy execution. The artist's personality was established by the discovery of the same hand at work in small background scenes in a set of panels of single figures standing on pedestals with landscape backgrounds. Eight panels of the set by various artists have been identified. Four of the panels are by Sienese painters: Matteo di Giovanni's Judith (University Art Museum, Bloomington); Neroccio de' Landi's Claudia Quinta (National Gallery of Art, Washington); Francesco di Giorgio's Scipio Africanus (Bargello, Florence); and Pietro Orioli's Sulpicia (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). The other four were first attributed to Signorelli but now are given by consensus to an artist dependent on him, plausibly considered to be the Griselda Master himself: Artemisia (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan); Eunostos (National Gallery of Art, Washington); Alexander (Barber Institute, University of Birmingham); and Tiberius Gracchus the Elder (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). Though more suave and sculptural, the main figures share the smaller ones' finicky, dancer-like refinement.

The shared theme of persons behaving virtuously to the opposite sex is that of the Griselda panels too, and the figures were probably made for a grand house, perhaps for a marriage; the Piccolomini and Spanocchi families of Siena have been suggested. The frequent comparison with Andrea del Castagno's series of Nine Famous Men and Women (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) can be enhanced, in that both sets include one half-length figure, the only Biblical one, in each case an Old Testament heroine (in this case Judith, for Castagno Esther). Hence Judith may, like Esther, have been over a door in the middle of the wall, the central and highest-ranking figure. There would then have had to have been a ninth panel. It is consistent that the seven surviving secular panels comprise two male Romans and two male Greeks (in both cases one military, one civil), two female Romans (one virgin, one wife) and one female Greek (a wife). A candidate for a ninth figure, as a Greek virgin, is Hippo. The usual reconstruction regards the set of eight as complete, because there are four men and four women, and assumes that the Judith has been cut. That the ethnic clusters are significant is also suggested in that the Greek figures are all by the Griselda Master, whereas the other five are each by a different artist, including one by him; the work is often said to have begun with the better-known artists assisted by the Griselda Master for backgrounds, after which the Master took over and completed the set.