Altichiero in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari’s Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero’s work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari’s account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero’s reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter’s death (by April 1393)