Antonio di Puccio called Pisanello (c. 1394-1455), Alfonso V of Aragon, King of Naples and Sicily (1396-1458), lead medal, dated 1449, DIVVS ALPHONSVS REX – TRIVMPHATOR ET PACIFICVS, armoured bust right flanked by, on the left, a helmet adorned with an open book beneath the rays of the sun, and on the right, an open crown dividing the date M/CCCC and XLVIIII, rev., LIBERALITAS AVGVSTA, an eagle perched on a branch below which are three birds of prey gazing at a dead fawn whilst a hawk looks away at lower left; below, on a panel, PISANI PICTORIS OPVS, 111mm (Hill 41 (105-110mm); Armand I, 6, 17; Pollard 21 = Kress 19 (111.2mm); Bargello 30-31; Cordellier 300; Syson/Gordon 127, fig. 3.44; Scher 10; Bonazzi 22), pierced, with cratches and other marks, flan slightly warped, a very fine contemporary cast Provenance: John R. Gaines collection.Having sought the patronage of Alfonso as early as 1443, Pisanello was finally granted permission to “move to Naples sometime after August 1448 and soon began “work on the portrait medal of the king ... the largest and most complex medal he had yet designed.” (Keith Christiansen, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, 2011, pp. 306-308, cat. nos. 131, 132). In early 1449 Pisanello was admitted to Alfonso’s royal household with an annual stipend of 400 ducats, but the only output that has survived are four medals, including the Liberalitas Augusta medal of Alfonso (the design here offered) which George Hill referred to as “The finest of them all .... a design of great dignity and richness....” (Pisanello, 1905, p. 196) In 2001, Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon (Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court, p. 229-231), citing drawing studies of details found on Alfonso’s medals that had been downgraded to workshop status by some academics (Louvre invs. 2307 and 2481), as well as what they saw as problematic aspects of the designs themselves, put forward a controversial suggestion that the medals were not wholly autograph, but may have involved workshop assistance. Maria Fossi Todorow’s rejection of the drawing of the obverse design in 1966 (cited by Syson/Gordon p. 231, n. 101) was subsequently withdrawn by her (Pollard, Renaissance Medals, Italy, 2007, p. 34, n. 1) and is catalogued as autograph by the Louvre (as are examples of the medal itself in the MMA, BM, V&A, Milan and Berlin cabinets). Joanna Woods-Marsden stated that she considered it “difficult to accept that [the medal’s reverse] was [not] conceived by Pisanello himself” (The Medal 40, Spring 2002). Indeed, proof of the existence of a Pisanello ‘workshop’ itself is scant. Both Carl Brandon Strehlke (The Burlington Magazine, Jan. 2002, p. 40) and Helen Geddes (Master Drawings, Winter, 2003, p. 388) commented on the lack of evidence for who Pisanello's assistants were, or what they did.Alfonso himself, as he did with his biographers, may have insisted on certain elements that Pisanello would have had to incorporate into the design, but the medal bears Pisanello’s full signature, and “is it conceivable...that Pisanello would turn over a project of this importance to a workshop assistant while he focused his attention on the medal of an advisor [Iñigo d’Avalos] to the court?” (Christiansen, 2011, p. 308).

Estimate: GBP 10000 - 15000