In early spring, a carpet of flowers appears in parts of my lawn. It includes crocuses, blue scillas and white anemones, followed by white violets. It is the result of a no-mow March and it makes me think of flowery foregrounds in great Italian paintings, including Botticelli’s Primavera in which 40 types of flower can be identified.
I look on mine with two such paintings in mind. Each has a detailed carpet of flowers in its foreground. London is not short of excellent exhibitions but the National Gallery’s Pesellino is unmissable. It is small, free of charge and open until March 10. Its finest items are two long panels, acquired by the gallery in 2000, whose subject is based on the Bible’s Book of Samuel. One shows the triumph of young David over Goliath, the Philistine striker. The other shows David riding in triumph with Goliath’s severed head. Preceded by King Saul, he is heading for a walled city before which eight young women are waiting. Like almost all of the men, they are blonde.
I grew up with these paintings as they belonged to my mother’s family for more than 100 years. Little known, they establish Pesellino as a Florentine maestro before Botticelli. The gallery likes to record what its paintings mean to individuals, so I have been there to explain what these masterpieces mean to me. Part of it is botanical, part of it is a boy’s dream. Very few paintings by Pesellino survive and none equals these two long panels, completed in Florence by 1456.
I have known and loved them for 70 years. The National Gallery’s restorations sometimes arouse controversy but Jill Dunkerton’s work on these two is brilliant. One scene segues into another, but a flowery ground-line persists under them. First, young David is keeping sheep alone on a hillside among animals, precisely rendered, and birds, which are clearer after cleaning. He selects stones from a brook and then, a mere boy, he volunteers to King Saul that he will meet Goliath’s challenge to a duel. Goliath, more than 9ft tall in the biblical story, dominates the next scene, a handsome giant wearing kneepads of gold, but his forehead shows a bloody mark where David will strike him with a slingstone.
Goliath lies dead on the flower-spangled ground while David cuts off his head. On the gilded doors of Florence’s Baptistery, the master Ghiberti completed a similar scene by 1452, inclining modern experts to date Pesellino’s panel soon afterwards. In its centre, a blackly armoured knight charges on a white horse, but nobody knows whom he represents. Dozens of other warriors, superbly profiled, are fighting for their lives. In the background, carefully painted trees (beeches or chestnuts?) wind up to a finely walled city, Jerusalem.
In the Triumph panel, young David is being transported, followed by a procession of horsemen. He holds Goliath’s severed head by the hair while Saul precedes him, driving towards yet more young men. The eight ladies are there to meet them, wearing stylish Florentine hats.
As a boy, I used to study these amazing paintings in my uncle’s hall while my parents prepared to deliver me back to boarding school for the winter term. Aged 13, I took heart from young David, and interpreted his slingstones as shafts of intelligence. I was a newly arrived scholar among hugely tall older boys, many of them Philistines. If David could triumph, so could I, I told myself, by beating them in the termly exams and returning in triumph to the walls of Windsor and a train to my welcoming family.
I marvelled at the exactly painted animals, the white hounds, lions, a cheetah, even, and a small bear.
Pesellino’s heirs admired them and said he kept many wild animals in his house. The various horses, 78 in all, are painted with special understanding, all stallions, as shown in conspicuous detail.
Noting them I reflected that I too would soon mature. Then I would need partner and I chose the blonde girl at the right edge of the Triumph. Her sweeping pink dress, now cleaned, has peacock feathers in its pattern. I have yet to meet her but I admire the flowery foreground on which she stands.
Aged 12, I was already a committed gardener and while drawing strength from prepubescent David, I scrutinised the white violets and anemones among many other leaves, variously detailed. The violets are exact. The anemones are Anemone trifolia. I am still trying to pin down the dozens of leafy plants, individually rendered.
These panels, my family believed, were panels for a chest, or cassone. They have been proved right by restoration, which has found their filled-in locks and marks from bunches of keys. I was also taught they were made for the Medici family, a commission for which Pesellino went the whole nine yards, using gold leaf and silvering and compressing so many mini-pictures, beautifully under-drawn, into two big ones. Scholars have detected devices on helmets and clothes that belong with the Medici family but I grew up with an important fact: that scenes of David’s triumph had already been shown in Florence during celebrations of the Journey of the Magi, a major theme for the Medici’s self-promotion.
The gallery’s website has described the panels as “joyful” and suggested that, like many others, they were painted on chests for a newly married couple. I do not see joy in the fierce scenes of battle and Goliath. Precise theories are perilous, especially when so many unnamed profiles are visible, as if high society in Florence had enlisted in the army of King Saul. However, I propose that the panels belonged on chests related to young Giuliano Medici, born in October 1453. David is not a portrait of Giuliano, but alludes to what I later sensed, that a little boy, blond at the time, could grow to triumph over his enemies. David was a symbol of freedom for Florentines, already patronised by the Medici.
Cleaning has revealed that a young man is extending a welcome, not a ring, to a young lady by walled Jerusalem. He does not resemble David. I suggest he alludes to Giuliano’s uncle Giovanni, who married Ginevra, also a Florentine, in 1453, the year of Giuliano’s birth. Painted by 1456, the panels, in my view, allude to what Giuliano may achieve and to the older Giovanni’s meeting with his future bride.
All grandiose masters, writes the expert Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, “have an impatience with mere vegetable or inanimate matter”. In Gozzoli’s famous painting of another procession, his Journey of the Magi, there are white rose bushes but most of the foreground is bare. Not so Pesellino’s, also for the Medici but a few years earlier. By then, white anemones had already been painted in the ground of the garden in Fra Angelico’s great Annunciation in the Medici’s favourite Florentine convent. White anemones would also flower in Filippo Lippi’s Adoration, painted later for the Medici palace’s chapel.
The white flowers in Pesellino’s carpet were traditional, but he combined them with hundreds of leaves and stems observed, like his horses and other animals, from nature. Curators are often botanically blind, but Pesellino was not. Enjoy these dense masterpieces and the girl in her peacock dress, but remember: she is spoken for. I pre-trothed her 65 years ago.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
