MARGARITO D'AREZZO
Italian painter, known as Margaritone. The only documentary record of Margarito dates from 1262, when he was living in Arezzo. The nature and distribution of his surviving works suggest a thriving practice and a steady demand for his skills throughout Tuscany. Margarito’s fame outside Italy rests partly on Vasari’s account, partly on his easy identifiability among a host of anonymous contemporaries (most of his paintings are signed) and partly on the role imposed on him by 19th-century critics as an epitome of that barbarism into which Italian painting was deemed to have fallen by the late 13th century. Margarito seems to stand rather outside the main line of painting in Tuscany and has at times been dismissed as reactionary or provincial. Establishing a chronology for his work in the absence of any surviving dates is problematic.
He is one of the very few 13th-century Italian painters and the only early Aretine by whom we have signed works (examples are in the National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington). His paintings are clumsy, but they have something of the vividness and lucid brevity of a comic strip. Vasari, who also came from Arezzo, included a biography of Margarito in his Lives (saying he was an architect as well as a painter), and this is virtually the only source of knowledge on him, although a document of 1262 probably refers to him.
Margarito was one of the first artists from the Italian peninsula to sign his works, an action which signifies a new self-consciousness on the part of painters. His panels have bold lines and bright colours. These elements are drawn from Byzantine and Romanesque prototypes. They emphasise clear, though static, images and narrative; nevertheless captions were deemed necessary. Most of Margarito’s small number of works are either dossals or vertical altarpieces.
