Sassetta

In a 1996 interview referenced in the current exhibition, he told Michael Kimmelman, then chief art critic of The New York Times, that a favorite work of his in the Met’s European painting galleries was “The Journey of the Magi,” by the early Italian Renaissance artist Sassetta.

We started out in the Met looking in silence at “The Journey of the Magi” by Sassetta, the 15th-century Sienese painter.

In a Western-civilization book, he found himself mesmerized by Sassetta’s Italian Renaissance painting “The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul.”

Mine reaches back to the early Renaissance panels of Sassetta and other Sienese masters, the small but powerful paintings of Mughal India and forward to 20th-century outsiders like Martin Ramirez and Forrest Bess.

And the walls around them were lined with Renaissance paintings: Sassetta, Bernardo Daddi, Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo.