Pisanello

Pisanello (Antonio di Puccio di Giovanni de Cereto) was an Italian painter active in the courts of northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. Sources reviewed for this profile place his death in Rome in 1455. His birth year is generally given as before or around 1395, though the exact date and birthplace are not confirmed in the material available here. By the mid-1430s he was active at the court of the House of Este in Ferrara, where the panel now known as Portrait d'une princesse de la Maison d'Este is thought to have been painted, probably between 1435 and 1440. No school, degree, or dated apprenticeship record survives for him in the sources consulted; his training would have followed the workshop apprenticeship customary for Italian court painters of his generation.

The panel passed through a Paris sale to the collector Felix Bamberg around 1860, was later owned by Ch. Picard, and was purchased by the Musee du Louvre from Picard in 1893. Its attribution to Pisanello is treated as settled by the Louvre and by standard reference works, though the detailed history of that attribution was not established in the sources reviewed for this profile.

Scholarly attention to this panel has centered on its attribution to Pisanello and on the unresolved identity of its sitter. The Louvre and standard reference works, including Wikidata and the English and French Wikipedia entries, treat the attribution to Pisanello as settled following the museum's 1893 acquisition of the panel. The sitter's identity remains debated: proposed candidates include Marguerite de Gonzague, Ginevra d'Este, and Lucia d'Este, with no single identification treated as certain by the Louvre.

No confirmed all-time auction record exists for this artist or for this specific work in the sources reviewed. The panel is a permanent holding of the Musee du Louvre, acquired by purchase from Ch. Picard in 1893, and it is not a work in active market circulation. Broader auction activity for other paintings or drawings attributed to Pisanello was not established in this research and would require dedicated Old Master market research beyond the scope of the dossier assembled here. This profile should be read as documentation of the artist's identity and this painting's institutional history rather than as a market analysis.

This entry documents a single Old Master panel permanently held by a national museum, not an artist with an active, trackable auction market. There is no catalogue raisonne, no living estate, and no gallery or dealer representation to evaluate. Collectors interested in Pisanello's broader output should consult dedicated Old Master specialists and museum scholarship rather than treat this profile as a market guide. Because the name commonly associated with this record is a painting title rather than a personal name, provenance and cataloguing questions should always be confirmed against the artist's documented name, Pisanello, and against the Louvre's own curatorial record for this specific panel.