A single, dark room in the National Gallery shimmers with colour and pattern and detail. It feels intimate and otherworldly after the cavernous spaces and damask walls of the main displays; even busy with people there's a hushed, chapel-like atmosphere. Pesellino is not a 'big name' but you walk out thinking he ought to be. There is something so joyously exuberant about his art, so crazily outlandish. Why add pink marshmallow clouds to his King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land ? Why surround his Pistoia Crucifixion with surreally-weird disembodied putti? Why have a bear cub snuffling in the foreground of David's grand victory parade? Just for the hell of it, for the brash Icarus-like, 'look at me fly' nerve of it. Even without knowing the tragedy of his early death from the plague, you have to love the guy.
Pesellino was at the centre of artistic life in Florence, at a time when Florence was pretty much at the centre of artistic life; he worked with big names like Filippo Lippi, he worked for big names like the Medici, who commissioned the David panels here. He was also a canny operator: illuminated manuscripts, devotional diptychs, furniture. You get the idea that if the price was right, and the patron was right, then Pesellino, like most of the artists of the day, would turn his hand anything. He lived right in the middle of that exciting, anything-is-possible time in the midst of the fifteenth century when new - Masaccio's perspectival experiments - and the old - pattern and gold and natural detail - coexisted in a gloriously chivalrous battle. You can see Uccello's San Romano in Pesellino's foreshortened knights and stylised horses; you can see Botticelli's elegant angels their draperies blowing in the breeze; you can see Gentile da Fabriano's gilded luxury. But if that all makes, Pesellino sound like an artistic magpie, nicking the others' best ideas, you'd be wrong. There is also something uniquely, idiosyncratically him.
The little exhibition also showcases the National Gallery. They do this kind of thing so impeccably well that you forget the time and effort (and money obviously) which goes into even a one-room exhibition like this. We owe them for originally gathering together the hacked up pieces of the Pistoia altarpiece, now united. We owe their conservation team their labour in restoring the battered furniture panels of the cassone, with their visible key marks. We owe the curators for having the foresight to see that this was a show worth having and reaching out to get loans like the King Melchior. And most of all, we owe them for not charging an entrance fee. It would be very easy for the gallery to rest on its laurels, put on the big shows and watch the visitors come through the doors, but, as anyone who visits regularly knows, they are constantly tweaking, moving, changing; and always producing these mini-displays. You can also see Jean-Étienne Liotard's pastels at the moment.
So, go! Make use of the magnifying glasses provided, the excellent key which clarifies the complex multiple scene-narrative of the David panels, and the conservation video which shows just how mind-blowingly skillful Pesellino was in his pre-application of tiny gold leaf details. But most of all just go and enjoy some of the best art you'll see this year. By a guy who never even makes it into the history books.
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