Art - Ned Denny is spellbound by the visionary work of the most sophisticated Renaissance chronicler

Something odd happens when an artist paints a portrait in profile. The central point is no longer the sitter's gaze, meeting and holding our own, but the weird extrusion of the fungus-like ear. All the other features are gathered at the front of the face, while this pool of seemingly molten flesh punctuates the desert of neck, cheek and brow. It is like a small showing-forth, a gently surreal reminder of the body's mysteries.

Such is the case, at least, with Pisanello's portrait of Margherita Gonzaga, one of only two surviving painted portraits by the artist. That's not the only curious thing about the picture - the extraordinary background, bathed in a twilit darkness, is equally compelling. Pisanello has painted an array of flowers and butterflies against some shadowy foliage, and they shine against the vegetal gloom like the galaxies in the images beamed down from the Hubble space telescope. This treacherous-looking hinterland not only defines the sitter's features but seems to beckon us beyond her, out of the world of men and into the night.

A flirtation between culture and the nocturnal realm against which it defines itself is typical of the world of the Renaissance court, of which Pisanello was the most sophisticated chronicler. One of the paradoxes of courtly life was the way that the most "civilised" of its diversions seemed to embody a yearning for the elegance or savagery of the natural world. Thus the princes and courtiers of Verona, Padua or Ferrara aped the extravagance of exotic birds in their dress, enclosed themselves in steel carapaces in order to fight like insects, and spent years training dogs and falcons for the hunt. Which of these activities doesn't seem an attempt to compensate for man essentially being a naked, defenceless monkey?

All this is made clear in an exhibition at the National Gallery by an abundance of secondary exhibits whose presence owes more, one suspects, to the scarcity of Pisan-ello paintings than to a burning desire to elucidate their context. So, to compensate for there being only four surviving pictures (two of which are in any case in the gallery's permanent collection), we are offered fragments of armour, the formidable "hunting cutlery" of Emperor Frederick III and pages from a 15th-century Book of King Practise and Queen Theory. It's interesting but a little museumy, and there is a fundamental difference between an artisan, however skilled, and the painter of the Gonzaga portrait. It takes just a brief glance at this or at a reproduction of one of his surviving (albeit much-damaged) frescos to see what a wonderful artist he was, a magician in whose hands the courtly fascination with birds and beasts reached its most sublime expression. Aside from the siren-song of the flowers in the Gonzaga portrait, there is an enchanting passage in the St George fresco in Verona that more than justifies Pisanello's reputation as an unsurpassed painter of the natural world. His dragon, inevitably, is less of a monster than an anatomically perfect lizard, surrounded by a pale jigsaw of human bones. Above it, a lion prepares to spring at a stag. The whole scene glows with a benign radiance, despite its savagery, as though the detached interest of the scientist had ousted the holy terror of myth.

These fragments give credence to the high claims made for Pisanello by his contemporaries, but the exhibition inevitably has an elegiac feeling to it. One's impression is that he is, primarily, a great lost painter. Even the miraculous little portrait-medals, with their strange allegorical scenes on the reverse, cannot make up for the absence, once one's appetite has been whetted, of more of his visionary pictures. What you can see, however, is a large number of beautiful preparatory sketches; mostly studies of animals, these bear more than a passing resemblance, in their freshness and delicacy, to those of Durer. In certain of them, he uses a technique somewhat akin to oriental artists, building the creature up hair by hair until its furry otherness quivers with life. Others construct the alien visage of a horse or deer with a delicate tracery of lines.

The painting that all of these sketches culminated in, The Vision of Saint Eustace, is one of the most spellbinding and mysterious of the Renaissance. It shows the moment when Placidus, a Roman soldier out hunting in the forest, encounters a stag with a crucifix glowing in its antlers. His supposed quarry has turned on him with an expression of infinite gentleness that mirrors that of the suffering Christ. And all around them, strangely illuminated in the primeval gloom of the wood, the creatures of the night stand magically revealed.

It's an essentially pagan revelation, in spite of the tacked-on crucifix, and the perfect vehicle for this nature-worshipping painter. Civilised man's yearning for a preconscious darkness has never been more powerfully expressed.

"Pisanello: painter to the Renaissance court" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 5950), until 13 January 2002

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