c. 1475. Tempera on panel, 410 × 305 cm, Cathédrale St Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence
Central panel of Froment’s triptych commissioned by King René of Provence, this is the most important work of the Provençal artist. The kneeling figures on the wing portray the donor and his wife.
129. Martin Schongauer, 1450–1491, Northern Renaissance, German, The Holy Family, 1475–1480, Oil on panel, 26 × 17 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
130. Hans Memling, 1433–1494, Northern Renaissance, Flemish, Madonna Enthroned with Child and Two Angels, late 15th c., Oil on panel, 57 × 42 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Hans Memling painted his Madonna Enthroned with Child and Two Angels during the second half of the fifteenth century. The Virgin and her child are seated on a throne amid lavish surroundings. Golden rays emanate from the Queen of Heaven’s head, and the two musical angels are eager to entertain her son. Above, an arch is adorned with cherubim who carry beautiful garlands of fruit and flowers, an allusion to abundance in nature, a gift which Mary, like female deities of the past, was believed to bestow on her followers.
131. Hugo van der Goes, c. 1440–1482, Northern Renaissance, Flemish, Adoration of the Shepherds. (Central panel of the Portinari Altar), 1476–1478, Oil on wood, 250 × 310 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
This big triptych, commissioned by the Florentine merchant, Tommaso Portinari, for the Church of S. Egidio in Florence, is van der Goes’s masterpiece. It shows a great emotional intensity, rarely gained by other artists. The Child is isolated, in the core of a devotional circle as the Virgin meditates on his destiny. The sudden irruption of the shepherds contrasts with the solemnity of the other characters.
132. Antonello da Messina, 1430–1479, Early Renaissance, Southern Italian School, Italian, St Sebastian, c. 1476, panel transposed on canvas, 171 × 85 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Antonello da Messina had a fundamental influence on Venetian painting (especially on Bellini) because of his knowledge of oil painting (that he learnt from the Flemish artists). He also used a lot of this knowledge for his portraits. This painting was a pendant to St. Christopher. The perspective has a very low vanishing point and the frame is narrowed so that the saint is monumentalised.
133. Hans Memling, 1433–1494, Northern Renaissance, Flemish, Portrait of a Man at Prayer before a Landscape, c. 1480, Oil on panel, 30 × 22 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Memling’s portraits show a lot of attention paid to the position of the head and hands. The man’s devotion is made obvious here in the representation of his hands in prayer and the church in the distance. The tightly framed composition gives a strong sensation of intimacy to this portrait.
134. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), 1445–1510, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Primavera, c. 1478. Tempera on panel, 203 × 314 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The painting, sometimes called Primavera, but now and again also Realm of Venus, is Botticelli’s most celebrated masterpiece. This work is one in a series of paintings depicting heathen myths and legends in the form of antique gods and heroes. Just as convincingly and naively, and with the same enthusiasm, Botticelli makes the beauty of the naked human body his task. In the large presentation of Primavera he does indeed describe an antique subject, stipulated by his clients and advisers, but he penetrates it with his mind, his imagination and his artistic sense. The composition is built up in nine, almost life-size figures in the foreground of an orange grove. The individual figures are borrowed from Poliziano’s poem about the great tournament in the spring of 1475, the Giostra, in which Giuliano was declared the winner. The artistic appearance of Primavera which, apart from the dull old layer of varnish, is well preserved, deviates from most of Botticelli’s paintings in so far as that the local colours are rather secondary. This is how the artist tried to bring out the full beauty of the figures’ bodies, which, apart from Venus and Primavera, are more or less naked. He enhances this with the deep green background, covered with flowers and fruit. There, where local colours occur to a greater extent as, for example, in the short red robe of Mercury, the pale blue decoration of the god of wind or the blue dress and red cloak of Venus in the middle, the colours have been strongly tinted with gold ornaments and glaze.
Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi)
(1445–1510 Florence)
He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi – would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master’s son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master’s realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet.
Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative.
It has been said that Botticelli, “though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance.” As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna’s head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli’s pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to ‘line’ not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself.
This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master-draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.
135. Michael Pacher, c. 1430–1498, Northern Renaissance, Austrian, Altarpiece of the Early Church Fathers, c. 1480, Oil on panel, 216 × 380 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Gothic in the canopies, the characters’ poses and the contorted hands, the altar of the Austrian painter is also strongly influenced by Italian art in the use of perspective, low viewpoint and figures close to the picture plane recalling Mantegna’s works.
136. Ercole de’Roberti,