Belbello da Pavia, un protagonista del Tardogotico tra la Lombardia e Venezia

This study focuses on Giovanni Belbello da Pavia, a miniator that has been working from the beginning of the third to the end of the seventh decade of the 15th century. His activity took place during the crucial years for the most important courts of the northern Italy, including the Visconti, the Este and the Gonzaga, and it ended in Venice at the service of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. His artistic production marked the transition from the late Gothic period to the Renaissance. His youthful and training phase is currently being studied and clarified, but it remains problematic due to the total lack of attestations regarding those years. Reliable data on the miniator can be associated with an already mature period of his career and has been obtained from a collection of documents kept at the State Archives of Mantua, covering the period from 1442 to 1462. These documents exclusively testify of about his activity for the Gonzaga family, by which he was commissioned to decorate the missal known as the Missal of Barbara, today kept in the Archdiocese of Mantua. Much of this research was dedicated to the archive survey, by focusing the attention on the funds of the State Archives of Mantua and Milan, with the aim of retrieving documents regarding the miniator and his activity, especially during the years in which the information was completely missing. By conducting this study, it has been possible to discover some unpublished documents which demonstrate that the relationships between the commissioner and the artist were extremely tense. In the State Archives of Milan, it was found a letter sent by the ducal chancellor to the monks of the Certosa di Pavia, asking for asylum and assistance for Giovanni Belbello da Pavia, now old and reduced to poverty. This document, dated October 1473, is very important because it proves that the miniator was still alive on that date (while the most recent attestation known dates back to 1462) and allows to extend the chronological terms of his career