Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 98. (Budapest, 2003)

SALLAY, DÓRA: A Proposal for a Baptism of Christ-Lunette by Guidoccio Cozzarelli

time, the influence of Pollaiuolo's works of the 1460s and 1470s is perceivable in the vast and panoramic landscape - very different from the later Sinalunga version - and in the large figures' relations to it.

35 They are placed very close to the pictorial plane, and the long plain behind them, punctuated by the zigzag pattern of rivers and roads, is shown from a bird's-eye view. The use of the most recent Florentine models would certainly be a proof of a much wider artistic horizon than Guidoccio Cozzarelli is generally credited with. Yet, in view of his general output one is tempted to assume that it was probably not him whose visual language was so updated at the time, but his master Matteo di Giovanni, in whose works a close attention to the latest achievements of Florentine art, and especially that of Pollaiuolo, has been noted by several scholars.

36 It must have been also Matteo di Giovanni who mediated for Cozzarelli the art of Piero della Francesca, whose landscapes, too, sometimes show similar solutions as seen in the Moscow fragment, and whose Baptism of Christ (National Gallery, London) Cozzarelli's Sinalunga panel seems to reflect in some compositional solutions such as the three-figure group of the angels.

37 Matteo, as is well known, knew the Baptism of Christ of his compatriot at first hand. The influence of art from outside the Sienese school, while definitely present in Cozzarelli's work, seems therefore to have arrived to him through - perhaps multiple intermediations. The Sinalunga altarpiece may well appear in this new light as a later reworking of the idea of the Budapest-Moscow Baptism, but whether they both derive from a lost work of Matteo di Giovanni, as Bruce Cole hypothesized for the Sinalunga piece,

38 or Matteo transmitted his experiences in another way remains unknown. Since at this time Cozzarelli was at least occasionally still working with his master, executing, it seems, in 1479 the predella of Matteo's Santa Barbara altarpiece, he surely had the 35 Cf. St. Michael Archangel (Museo Bardini, Florence); Tobias and the Archangel (Galleria Sabauda, Torino); Hercules and the Hydra (Uffizi, Florence); Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (National Gallery. London). 36 Pollaiuolo's influence on Matteo di Giovanni is notable, for example, in the Flagellation-lunette (Duomo, Pienza) or in the Assumption of the Virgin (National Gallery, London), and possibly in a small and badly conserved//erc«/es and Antaeus pointed out by Andrea De Marchi (cf. Angelini, A., mFrancesco di Giorgio e il Rinascimento a Siena 1450-1500 [ed. Bellosi, L.]. Milan 1993, p. 144, fig. 2). 37 Cf. Hartlaub, G.F., Matteo da Siena und seine Zeit. Strassburg 1910, p. 137, n. 92, and Lenzini Moriondo, M., in Arte in Valdichiana dal XIII al XV111 secolo, exhib. cat. (ed. Bellosi, L., - Cantelli, G., Lenzini Moriondo, M.), Florence 1970, p. 27. 38 Cole, B., Sienese Painting in the Age of the Renaissance, Bloomington 1985, p. 105.