Patrick Bade
Art in Florence and North Italy, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Art in Florence and North Italy, Part 1

- [Lauren] Alright, Patrick, it’s a few minutes past, so whenever you’re ready, I will hand over to you.

• Right, good. Thank you, Lauren. So this is a fresco by Masaccio, of the Holy Trinity, that is painted on the wall behind the high altar of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. And I think it’s hard to imagine just how astonishing this picture was, when it was first painted there, in 1427. Nobody would’ve seen anything remotely like it before. It really marks a new beginning in Western art. And the first flush of the Renaissance in Florence, Renaissance means rebirth. And it’s a rebirth of classical culture. The humanists of this period in the early 15th century, they were reading classical text, they had a certain inferiority complex, they felt that since the fall of the Roman Empire, that there had been the dark ages, and they wanted to return to the culture of, they wanted to revive the culture of the ancient world. Now, plenty of sculptures exist, and of course, buildings exist, but hardly any paintings ‘cause it’s not till the 18th century, that Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated. And of course, they in themselves, hardly represented the best of ancient painting. It would be a bit like if Miami or Bognor Regis were excavated, and the art found in those cities was deemed to be representative of the Western culture of our time. So, but they had, what they did have, were literary descriptions of paintings. The most famous artists of the ancient world was Apelles, he was the court artist of Alexander the Great. And there were all these descriptions about how real his paintings were. You know, there were stories about how birds would peck at the grapes that he painted, and people would, you know, think that they could walk into his pictures, and so on.

But what Apelles, we really don’t know what his paintings looked like apart from these verbal descriptions. I don’t think they would’ve looked like this, because Apelles didn’t have a mathematical or linear perspective. This is one of the first, if not the first demonstrations, of how to use linear perspective to give you an illusion of space. You feel that there is, the wall is opening up, you could enter into that barrel-vaulted chamber behind the crucifixion. Now, the man who, is said to have invented perspective is the architect Brunelleschi, and I’ll come to him shortly, but Masaccio is the first major artist to put these ideas into practise. And then you can say effectively, from this moment forward, from the late 1420s forward until the 19th century, right up until Impressionism, I suppose, it was the goal of Western artists to create an illusion of reality, of the real world. Now, Masaccio was actually his nickname, his name was Tommaso, Thomas. And it’s Masaccio is a sort of, not exactly a diminutive, it has the connotations of being a bit of an oaf, being clumsy. And I think this is quite important because also one of the great new features of his art, he’s breaking with the very graceful, decorative, delicate art of the Gothic period, producing something much tougher, and much more monumental. Now, he was born in 1501 or 2, and he died in sort of, 1401 or 2, and he died in 1428. So he never made it to 30. It’s rather extraordinary to change the course of western art and not even make it to the 30.

Oh, now why has this frozen? Oh, right there, I see it’s not frozen, Now for comparison, this picture, this actually is not, it’s really two generations before Masaccio. This is a work of, no, I suppose, one generation, yes. No, two generations before Masaccio. It’s by an artist called Margarito of Arezzo. It’s very unusual, in that we actually know the name of the artist, that he signed his pictures, which most mediaeval artists didn’t. We’ll see that’s a new feature of the Renaissance, that artists not only often signed their pictures, and we know who painted most of the pictures of the 15th century. Sometimes they even included self-portraits in their pictures. And I’ll show you some this week and next week. So this is an altarpiece, and it’s in what, Vasari, Now, Giorgio Vasari, I have to say something about him. He is an artist of the 16th century in the Mannerist style. And he’s a bit of a secondary artist, but he’s very, very important for us because he decided to record the lives of the artists, Vasari’s “Lives Of The Artists,” You can buy it in Penguin paperback.

It’s fun to read because he was a gossip and a bitch, and that’s always fun. And he tells you lots and lots of anecdotes about all these artists. And most of what we know about the artists I’m going to be talking about for the next few weeks comes from Vasari. And he knew about this artist, Margarito of Arezzo, because Vasari himself was from Arezzo, and I think you know how local patriotic Italians are. And he described his work as being in the, the Greek manner. Of course, he didn’t mean ancient Greek, he meant Byzantine Greek. This is very much like an icon. So there’s no attempt here at all to give you a sense of reality. There’s no attempt to make you think you could walk into this picture, well, you can’t, because you’ve got this gold ground that actually prevents any illusion of spatial recession. So what is its purpose? Well, its purpose is partly decorative. It’s to adorn the house of God. So it’s a precious thing, and you can see it’s largely covered in gold and it would glitter and glimmer in the candlelight. But its most important function is to tell stories. Remember, this is a time when very few people could read or write. So it’s like a comic script, It’s wonderfully graphic, actually. Here is a Christian saint who’s being martyred, and he’s being boiled alive. And we can read the story, there are all these horrible heathens who are boiling him to death. And we know there are a lot of them. And because you’ve got these little semicircular shapes, like coconut shells in the background that shows you there are huge crowds of these horrible heathens.

And an angel is coming down to take his soul. So as I said, it’s a story that’s being told very, very effectively. So the date of that is something like 1270, 1280. And in the immediate generation after that, we have Giotto, who’s still an artist of the Middle Ages, he still belongs to the Gothic period, but you can see him as being a forerunner of the Renaissance. This is what’s called a predella panel. A predella panel is part of a polyptych. polyptych is a multi-paneled altarpiece, You have the, of course, the main panel, and you have, sometimes you have wings, and then you have strips of small pictures, usually, that run along the bottom. And that’s what this is. And it shows the story of the Pentecost, that’s from the Christian New Testament. And this would’ve looked, I think, quite startling when this was painted, probably, oh, it’s the beginning of the 14th century. So it’s actually a century before Masaccio, because you can see here already, he doesn’t have the benefit of a full knowledge, of linear perspective and how things recede into space. But through observation, he’s noticed how lines recede. And if you look up at the ceiling, the coffering, coffering is always very useful.

We saw that in the Masaccio Trinity for giving you a sense of recession. So you do have a sense of space. And the other thing he tries to convey is a sense of volume. You’ve got these two figures seen from the back in the front of the picture, and they’re shaded, they’re modelled, and you can see that they weigh something. You know, you feel that you could put your arms around them, you could try and lift them, but they would be heavy to lift. So here’s these, these two pictures, by the way, I’m going to, I make no apology for the fact that a lot of the pictures I’m going to talk about today and in the coming weeks are in London collections. Sometimes people write in at the end and they say, “Well, why didn’t you talk about the Hermitage?” Or, “Why didn’t you talk about, you know, the Metropolitan, or whatever.”

Well, I have been to the Metropolitan a few times, I’ve never been to the Hermitage, but nevertheless, I feel better, talking about pictures I know really well, and I have been working, I mean the National Gallery collection is like my family. I’ve been working with these pictures, teaching with these pictures for nearly half a century. So, and also the National Gallery, actually for the period I’m talking about, the Italian Renaissance, the National Gallery has the most extensive and the best collection in the world outside of Italy. There’s no other museum, not the Louvre, not the Met, not Washington, that can actually match the National Gallery in this period. So here are two pictures that are in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, and you can go from one to the other. And let’s do a little compare and contrast here, you can see that the Margarito of Arezzo, as I said, it’s very decorative, it’s very flat, there’s a strong emphasis on patterns, She is seated, but where is the Virgin’s bottom? You don’t really know. And where are her knees? Whereas, you look at the Masaccio on the left-hand side, she’s volumetric, the throne that she’s sitting on is also conforming to the laws of perspective. It’s constructed like a piece of architecture, and you can see how it recedes, you can see where her bottom is, Underneath the drapery of her clothing, you can see that she has knees.

What else do I want to say about these two pictures? Well compare the angels, which of course, if you’re not, I suppose angels fly anyway. But if you’re not particularly bothered about recession and reality, you can put them wherever you want them on the surface of the picture. And I’d like you to also notice the difference in the way that the halo of the Christ child is depicted, the Margarito of Arezzo is just a circle around Christ’s head. You may think the Masaccio baby is ugly, people often tell me that, though, I can’t say I find any babies very beautiful, but it’s a real baby and it weighs something. You don’t feel that the Margarito baby is perched on her lap, but it doesn’t seem to weigh anything, this baby really weighs something, if you dropped it, it will fall on the ground with a, “Thunk.” And it’s got a rather baby-like gesture with the hand. And of course, this is really intriguing, that the halo is not circular, it’s elliptical. So Masaccio is trying to think of a halo actually as a physical object, exhibiting in space that can be foreshortened. Now here’s another picture in the National Gallery that, it usually hangs in the same room as a Masaccio, and often next to it.

So many, many times I’ve taken groups to the National Gallery, and we’ve stood in front of these two pictures, and done a compare and contrast between them. The painting on the right-hand side is by Gentile da Fabriano, who was considerably older than Masaccio, but outlives him. And we don’t know an exact date, but it’s probably the same decade. It’s probably also the 1420s. And it’s still essentially a Gothic picture. Well, actually, as you can see, the Masaccio also has a pointed Gothic arch at the top. But, and that the Gothic shape of the Masaccio, you can see that the classical throne actually fits quite awkwardly into it. And you can imagine that many art lovers, or actually many religious people in the early 15th century might have much preferred the Gentile. The Gentile da Fabriano is much prettier. The Virgin, you know, the Virgin and child are delicate, and graceful, and pretty, and doll-like, compared to this massive heavy figure of the Virgin and a massive heavy baby of the Masaccio on the left-hand side. And although there is an indication of a body underneath the blue drapery, it’s far less convincing than, you know, the knees and so on, the structure of the body underneath the drapery than with the Masaccio. And let’s have a look at some details that as I said, it’s not graceful, it’s not pretty, it’s quite clumpy and clumsy.

This is not quite as sharp as I would like it to be. But I can still make some points, again, about the halo of the Virgin, which is the traditional circle around the head, but the elliptical halo of the baby, and how close can we get? No, we can’t get that close, but if you can, you see, you probably can’t see it in the hem, the gold decoration of the hem of her robe and also in the halo behind the Virgin, you can see what looks like Arabic writing. And it is Arabic writing, actually, but it doesn’t make any sense. This is a great mystery, I don’t think anybody knows quite what the answer is, why? this is called pseudo-Kufic. And so of course, in many ways, as Trudy has pointed out, the Arab world was greatly in advance of the Christian world throughout the Middle Ages. And one thing that was very, very highly prized by Westerners were Arab ceramics, tiles and plates, And they weren’t allowed to have the depictions of humans on them. And Arab tiles and plates, and ceramics, they’re often decorated with very beautiful Arabic script. And people, they didn’t understand it. I mean, it might have said, you know, “God is great, Allah is His prophet, and down with the Christian infidels,” they didn’t know that.

They just saw it as beautiful, mysterious writing. And it’s strange that for quite some time in the 15th century, Florentine artists adopted this writing without really knowing what it meant. Now look at this, this would’ve been, has I think people seeing this, this Masaccio Madonna, also dating, of course, from the 1520s, for the first time, they would’ve just gasped at the way this lute is foreshortened. So it seems to be sticking out of the picture, it seems to be sticking out into the space of the viewer. you know it’s, I always think of, you know, this first World War posters where the arm comes out and points to you, and says, “Your country needs you.” It’s the same device of foreshortening that pulls you into the picture. Here is a better detail of the Virgin’s face and this strange pseudo-Kufic Arabic writing in her halo. So this is Florence in the early 15th century, it’s an economic powerhouse, at this point, it’s still technically a republic, and a kind of oligarchy, it’s wealthy merchants who really rule the city. And the wealthiest and the most successful are, of course, the Medici, and the Medici Bank throughout this period is the most powerful bank in the world.

And here are two figures, you are hearing about from everybody in these lectures. The first really, really important Medici who effectively ruled the city is Cosimo de Medici. And he was born in 1389, died in 1464, so he was long lived for that period. And so spending on art, I mean, nothing has really changed there. Think of, you know, the Saatchis, you know, a lot of Russian oligarchs, and so on, very, very wealthy people spend on art to show, well, show how much money they’ve got, and to show how cultured they are, and so on. And it’s been reckoned that Cosimo de Medici spent the equivalent of $500 million in his life on art. And he patronised many of the best artists. He patronised Donatello, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and so on. And on the right-hand side, we have Lorenzo de Medici, who was ruling Florence effectively in the 1470s. So we’ll hear more about him next week because he or his family, or his immediate family circle, were the patrons of Botticelli. And we think that they commissioned Botticelli’s “Primavera,” and “Birth of Venus.” Now this is a building that plays a very important role in the birth of the Renaissance.

This is the baptistry next to the cathedral, and it was already an old building by the 14th century, it dates back to the 12th century, and it’s an a style that’s called Tuscan Romanesque. So you’ve got the round-headed arches, typical of the Romanesque style, but we have many features that look very classical. You’ve got pilasters, you’ve got columns, you’ve got capitals, and all this kind of thing. So it’s one of those styles that you could see as being, you could see it almost as being antique survival as well as anticipating many of the features of the classical Renaissance of the 15th century. And it’s important because of three sets of bronze doors. The first set were by the 14th century, and they’re by an artist called Andrea Pisano. And they were considered a tremendous technical feat when they were cast in the 14th century. We can see here, images of the baptism of Christ. So that was the first set of doors. And then in 1401, the very wealthy cloth importers’ guild decided to commission a new set of bronze doors and they held a competition. And that date, 1401, the competition for the second set of doors of the Florence Baptistry is often taken as a kind of symbolic starting point of the Florentine Renaissance. Various artists competed, they all had to, by the way, fit their designs into this quatrefoil shape, which is a Gothic shape. It’s a mediaeval Gothic shape.

You find it everywhere in Gothic architecture all over Europe. And the two front runners were Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi. And amazingly and wonderfully, their competition entries still exist, and you can see them in Florence, and they, both of them have a bit of a problem fitting their compositions into this rather awkward quatrefoil shape. In the end, of course, it’s Ghiberti who wins the competition. But it’s, I think when you compare the two, there are pluses and minuses on both sides. The Brunelleschi is certainly much more dramatic, you know, look at the gesture of the hand on the throat, this is of course, Abraham and Isaac. It’s really quite brutal with Abraham clutching the throat of Isaac and pushing back his head. And the knife is just about to plunge into his throat, and the angel restrains him at the last second, so it’s very dramatic. Both of these pieces show this burgeoning interest in classical art. You can see that both of them have looked at classical sculptures, the crouching figure, bottom-right in the Brunelleschi, is based on a very famous antique sculpture, The “Spinario,” the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot.

You can see that, but the altar, in both case is very similar. It’s based on Roman or Greek altars, classical altars. And I would say that the body, very beautiful nude body of Isaac in the Ghiberti has a really convincingly classical look to it. He’s looked at lots of Greek and Roman sculpture before making this. So what was it in the end that decided the committee to go for Ghiberti and not for Brunelleschi? I think possibly, Ghiberti is more successful in unifying his composition. There seems to be a slightly awkward separation of parts in the Brunelleschi. But in the end, I think it came down to very practical matters, that Ghiberti’s little relief was made out of fewer pieces of bronze. There were more separate parts that had to be soldered together and bolted together with Brunelleschi, And also the Ghiberti actually used less bronze than Brunelleschi did. So it was going to be probably more durable, and it was going to be less expensive. And in the end, I think that was the bottom line. So here are the first set of Ghiberti doors, which again, as you can see all in this quatrefoil shape, and we’ve got, the Adoration of the Magi on the right-hand side. And you can see him, ‘cause the perspective is in the air, everybody’s interested in perspective and classical architecture.

So he’s tried to give a convincing architectural, spatial setting to this scene on the right-hand side, but it’s tricky for him to fit it into the quatrefoil shape. And here, this is the Annunciation to the Virgin. And the same things can really be said about that. And two more scenes from the first set of the doors, all based at the first set of doors, are all Christian Bible, Christian New Testament. And we have the Christ as the boy, debating with the elders in Solomon’s temple on the right-hand side. Look at the beautiful, again, classical architecture he imagined for Solomon’s temple. And on the left-hand side, a later story from the New Testament of Christ driving out the money lenders from the temple. So they were generally considered to be an absolute triumph, the first set of doors, and they took him a quarter of a century from 1401 to 1425. 1425, it was decided yet another set of doors, a third set of doors. And Ghiberti was the inevitable choice. These are the doors that Michelangelo later dubbed, “the Gates of Paradise.” And that name has stuck ever since. Well, you can see that these made a tremendous, has tremendous progress and change between these, and these panels, and you can see he’s been allowed to escape this time that what would’ve become by this time, at 1425, very old fashioned format of the quatrefoil.

And instead, he’s got these large rectangular panels. And this time the stories are from the Jewish Bible, they’re from the Old Testament, and he has lots of stories to tell. So he has to include several episodes in each panel, that’s called continuous narration. So as I said, most mediaeval artists are completely anonymous, we don’t know the names of most mediaeval artists. We do know the names of the great artists of Renaissance, and thanks to Vasari, as I said, we know quite a lot about them. And here is an early example of an artist who’s so prestigious and so appreciated that he’s allowed to include his self-portrait. So here’s the middle-aged Ghiberti, you can see, a balding man, and he’s included his own bust on the, “Gates of Paradise.” So this is Genesis, so we’ve got the creation of Adam, the creation of Eve, and the expulsion from Paradise, are all in this panel.

This one, I really like this, this one has a certain currency, a certain aptness, if you remember the story of Joseph in Egypt, and he wins power and influence because he can interpret the dreams of the king of Egypt. And one of the dreams he interprets, he predicts supply chain problems, and he tells the king of Egypt to stock up on supplies. Too bad we haven’t got a Joseph advising our current government in the UK at the moment. But again, very interesting here, this quite remarkable use of perspective in this relief to create this circular, very classical building in background. Now looking at architecture, I would get back to Brunelleschi. So everybody is going down to Rome, going down to central South Italy, and they’re making drawings from Roman buildings, and they’re taking measurements. This is the old sacristy in Florence, that dates from about 1440, and it’s one of the great masterpieces of Brunelleschi. And here, as with Masaccio, you can say yes, this is a beginning of something, he’s now returning to a classical system of proportion, and he’s using a classical vocabulary of ornament, pilasters, pediments, columns, friezes, in a very correct way, in a very harmonious way.

And this is really the basis of Western architecture, much of Western architecture, right through to the early 20th century. Perhaps he’s most famous of course, for something which is more, I would say, an engineering feat than an aesthetic one. And that is for creating the dome to crown Florence Cathedral. It was an enormous width to this dome, and it had really defeated everybody who wanted to make a dome that would actually stand up. So this was his great triumph that, and as I said, it’s more of an engineering triumph than anything else. And on the left, it’s actually a Victorian painting by Lord Leighton in Leighton House, “The Death of Brunelleschi.” And in this painting, I think it’s based on a story in Vasari, he’s brought to contemplate his as yet unfinished dome as he dies. Now to the great sculptor of the earlier Renaissance, this is Donatello, who’s a decade older than Masaccio, but they certainly knew each other. And I think Donatello has learnt a lot from Masaccio. This is a shallow relief sculpture in marble, that’s again in London, it’s in the V and A, has the greatest collection outside of Italy in the world, of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Wonderful collection of masterpieces of Donatello. The subject is the Sermon on the Mount. And it’s generally believed that this relief was made to go in the Brancacci Chapel where the frescoes were by Masaccio. And if we make a comparison, we can see that these bulky, heavy, volumetric figures have a lot in common with the figures in the frescoes of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel.

The kneeling figure in the centre is the Virgin, and rather like the Masaccio Virgin, she’s not graceful, and balletic, and pretty, she’s a heavy volumetric figure. Going to go back a minute to the previous slide to talk about this. There’s a very, when you go to see it in the museum, it’s actually exhibited on eye level. But that is not correct, because it’s very clear from the way he’s placed the figures, that it would’ve been, this was something that Donatello and other Renaissance sculptors really took into account. Where is this sculpture going to be seen from? And this relief must have been high up. It must have been above eye level. You can tell that from the way that you can’t see any of the ground in the foreground 'cause it’s outside your eye view. It’s in very, very shallow relief. It’s something like a quarter of an inch. And he still manages, in an extraordinary way, to suggest spatial recession. And he uses two forms of perspective. You can see if you look at the row of the Apostles or the figures to the left, you can see as they recede into the distance, they become smaller. And on the extreme left, you can see a row of trees that become smaller. So creating these orthogonal lines that go towards a theoretical vanishing point, but perhaps no subtle and extraordinary thing in this sculpture, when you think of, you know, it is only like a, you know, quarter of an inch, half, not even half an inch depth, is his use of aerial perspective.

Now, most people think aerial perspective is bird’s eye view, it’s not. In painting, aerial perspective is the way that colours fade and contours dissolve as you go further into the distance. Well, that’s easy enough to do in painting, especially in oil painting, but to actually do it in a white marble sculpture is really an extraordinary feat. This is also in the V and A, only two panels of this terracotta, it’s, terracotta is cooked earth. It’s clay that’s been fired. This is, so when you see something like this, it could either be modelled, or it could be cast. And of course, if you’re buying a piece of terracotta sculpture in an antique shop, junk shop, auction, it’s always as well to determine if you can, whether it’s modelled or cast. 'Cause if it’s modelled, it’s unique, and it is the direct work of the artist. And if it’s cast, of course, it’s taken from a mould, and you can, theoretically, you can have multiples of it. This is generally believed to be models. And the reason for that, is to do with the clarity of the detail in this piece, which is extraordinary when you see it in reality, and the sharpness. And you can also see evidence of him actually working the clay while it’s still soft. So these are scenes from the Passion of Christ with, you know, him being flagellated on the left, His flagellation on the left, the crucifixion in the middle. And the missing panel must have been either an entombment or a resurrection. And then you can see again in this shallow relief, he’s giving you a sense of depth.

And again, using techniques of perspective and referring back to the classical world, these great barrel vaults inspired by the basilica of Maxentius and the coffering. I put in the Masaccio again, bottom right-hand side to show you how useful the coffering is, to help create an illusion of receding space. This is a bronze relief that adorns a pulpit in Sienna Cathedral, where, and a very dramatic piece, it’s the feast of Herod. And if you know that story in the gospels, the Christian gospels, it’s John the Baptist denounces Herodias, the wife of Herod, her daughter dances for King Herod, and he’s so pleased, he says, “You can have anything you want.” And her mother persuades her to ask for the head of John the Baptist. So here, you’ve got something, I suppose, he’s depicting a court probably as he would’ve known one in Italy. And you can see, you know, the musicians in the background playing the music, Salome’s still dancing, and the executioner has brought in the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter. And you can see Herod, reacting with absolute horror, gesture of horror with his hands and his wife, you can see her gesture is one of saying, “Why, why?” Everybody else is horrified, but Herodias is arguing for this execution. Once again, in a shallow bronze relief, giving a quite extraordinary sense of relief. Now, one of Donatello’s greatest achievements was this statue probably commissioned, we think it’s commissioned by Cosimo de Medici, of David. And so this again, is a first in many ways. It’s the first life-sized, free-standing nude statue since the fall of the ancient world, since the end of the ancient world.

And it’s the first free-standing unsupported bronze. So it’s also technically a tremendous feat. And 'cause the Renaissance artists and the humanists, they knew that the freestanding male nude had been a key subject of ancient Greece and on into the Roman period, this is Polykleitos, many versions exist of this, many copies on the right-hand side. So certainly, Donatello is trying to emulate, he’s trying to put himself on a level in a way, with the great ancient sculptors. Although I think the differences are really interesting, that he is much more naturalistic, the Donatello. I feel it’s more based on observation from a real body, than it is based on the formula drawn from a classical sculpture. Very much discussed, very controversial, you know, a rather beautiful, rather effeminate boy, Donatello was said to be homosexual, and to employ his studio assistants more for their beauty than their talent, and this is a very beautiful, rather effeminate boy. This great topic of interest, really, is the prevalence of homosexuality in Florence in the 15th century. I mean, sodomy was still a criminal offence. And every now and then, there would be, sort of, the Catholic Church would get its act together or inquisition, or whatever, and they’d do a kind of roundup of people, and there were tens of thousands of cases of people being accused and tried of sodomy, including Leonardo Da Vinci, the young Leonardo Da Vinci in Florence. You think, why? Why was it so very, very prevalent? And Florence was notorious for it. And I think it’s an interesting question, of you know, about the nature of homosexuality. I think, to me, this suggests that a large element in homosexuality is cultural.

So, you know, rather than something that’s necessarily sort of born or inbred, these rather feminine low-slung buttocks of David, and 'cause one of the problems with any freestanding statue is the weakness of the legs, the ankles, the legs are what can break. So you can see this rather suggestive feather of the helmet of Goliath, which goes right up to the thigh in rather a sort of sexy way, with this sculpture, is actually there for a very practical purpose of making sure the thing doesn’t topple over or break. David was a sort of special here in Florence, Florence saw itself as a sort of plucky, underdog fighter against the big boys like Milan, and the Papacy, and France. So he was taken as a sort of symbol of the city. And there were the three very famous Davids. There’s the Donatello on the left, there’s Verrocchio, who I feel, of the three Davids, is the one who probably, is most convincing as the teenage hero of the Jewish Bible. And another figure, apocryphal figure of course, from the Jewish Bible, is Judith. And she has something of the same kind of meaning, at least at this period, I know I talked quite a bit about this recently, as, a person of courage and virtue who can defeat brute strength. This is a very late, again in the V and A, a bronze, he’s such a varied sculptor, and he’s very, very long lived, and works in so many different styles. And this is a relief from right at the end of his life, which is, it looks so modern, that with all this kind of distortion and exaggeration, it’s a very, very, it’s of course, a “Pieta.” And think of the serenity of the Michelangelo “Pieta” that we’re going to be looking at in a couple of weeks. There’s nothing serene about this.

It’s tormented, passionate grief that’s being expressed. And I think it’s got this very rough finish, and I feel that’s actually, it’s almost like an expressionist piece of sculpture in its rough quality. If that had been smoothed, I think the piece would lose a lot of its power. Another extraordinary expressive piece of sculpture by Donatello, of the penitent Magdalene. These again, this is in the V and A, and this is a very, this is called the Chellini roundel. And it’s, as you can see, it’s a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and child, I can remember the excitement when it was found, It had apparently been used in the country house as an ashtray, or something like that. And it came up for sale, it’s recognised as Donatello, and identified, as we know the story about this as a piece that he gave to his doctor, Dr. Chellini, I’m going to show you Dr. Chellini in a minute, probably to thank him for, or pay him for medical treatment. And it was a piece that could really have been a nice earner for Dr. Chellini, because the back of it is actually a mould. And when the V and A acquired this, they made, they took cast from it, in glass, as you can see on the right-hand side. And so, I suppose theoretically, that is an original Donatello, even though it was cast centuries after he died. And you could have bought one of those.

And here is, now wouldn’t you like him as your doctor. A wise sympathetic doctor, with the experience of a long lifetime. I think he’s probably, he’s in good nick, but he seems to have lost his teeth 'cause he’s got these rather sunken cheeks. And this is one, it’s by a sculptor called Rossellino, and it might have been made from a live cast of the face. It’s like a map of a face. He’s really mapped out all the, you know, the wrinkles and the saggy bits, and the creased bits and the, you know, the flesh under the chin. it’s an incredibly detailed map of a face and it’s extraordinary when you think about it in the Middle Ages, 'cause portraiture as an art form pretty well died. And when you start to get portraits, of course, they’re mainly kings, or saints, or popes, or bishops. But this is a new thing in the 15th century and it’s part of the Renaissance philosophy, and part of the emphasis on humanity and the individual, that he may have been a successful doctor, he may have been quite wealthy, but the fact that you could, he would want to be commemorated in marble in a permanent way, that’s a very new thing. And so, this is a lesser artist, but very wonderful artist, Domenico Veneziano, as his name would indicate, originally from Venice, but spent most of his career in Florence.

And this is, again, it’s a predella panel, this format, this horizontal format suggests that it was one of a strip of small panels from a polyptych. And the reason I show you is to go back to this theme, of this fascination with perspective. Perspective, it was the new toy, it was the equivalent of, I don’t know, computer graphics, but bigger, more important. So all, all these artists, and this is 1440s, mid or all throughout the 15th century, artists are really exploring perspective, and what they can do with it. And there are great many altarpieces like this, where it seems to be set on top of a giant chess set. 'Cause obviously, that helps you with the line, the orthogonal lines leading towards the vanishing point. Another artist who is totally obsessed with perspective was Paolo Uccello. And Vasari tells us about this. He said he went actually a bit doolally, went sort of kind of crazy 'cause he’d be sitting up all night working out problems of perspective, what he could do with it. And according to Vasari, his wife would come downstairs in the middle of the night and say, you know, “Paolo darling, will you come up to bed?’ And he’d push her aside, saying, "Perspective is a very wonderful thing.”

So she was a kind of perspective widow. His most famous work is actually, consists of three enormous panels, commemorating a Florentine victory over Sienna, at a place called San Romano. So this is called “The Route of San Romano.” And the three panels exist, but they’re separated. This is the London panel, there’s a panel in the Louvre in Paris, and there’s one in the Uffizi. And so you can see him battling, struggling, as I said, with these problems in perspective. One of the things that artists found very difficult, they could do a sort of like a stage set foreground, if possible, on, as I said, on a giant chess set. And they could do a wonderful backdrop. What they really had problems with was how to go from the foreground to the background. It’s the middle ground. And we find all sorts of solutions to this problem, of how to get from the foreground to the background. I love Uccello’s solution. In fact, I’ve copied it on my bathroom door here in London, this wonderful hedge with orange trees with beautiful flowers and oranges, and very decorative. But also, now let’s see if we’ve got any, oh, this is the Paris panel. But what I think would’ve been quite astonishing and is completely new, is to have a horse’s bottom pointing out towards you, foreshortened. Earlier than this, horses would’ve always been shown in profile. And then if you look at the ground, I hope you can see it well, in the foreground, the floor. You can see how all the broken lances and weapons have, they’re all falling in a pattern, either parallel to the picture surface, or in orthogonal lines, receding towards a vanishing point.

And so, that’s again, to help create a sense of perspective. Here again, you’ve got these horses seen from behind or lying on the ground. Has a bit of trouble with the, he just can’t quite get the foreshortening right with this fallen soldier here. He’s sort of shrinking towards his feet. This picture, also in the National Gallery, is a strange mixture. It’s, “St. George and the Dragon.” So we have the dragon facing us foreshortened, the horse, not galloping directly at us, but at a kind of angle, and also quite foreshortened. But when you look at the princess, oh, you feel, oh, she’s a leftover really, from the Gothic period. There’s not much sense here of a body underneath the clothes. She’s very stylized and graceful, and decorative, and still very Gothic. I’m going to move on, my last artist, I’m going to talk about very, very briefly, is Fra Angelico. And he’s born 1395, and dies 1455, and he was a Dominican friar, and apparently, a very religious man. And interestingly, in 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II, and which is the first stage to sainthood. So if anybody prays to him, and they win the lottery, you need to let the pope know so that he can move onto the next stage, and be properly sanctified as a saint. He’s a wonderful artist, a very touching artist. I mean, the sincerity of his religious belief I think, really comes through. He’s again, an artist where I’d say, you know, ‘cause they, it’s rare for something to, a change to happen so radically overnight as happened with Masaccio, for instance. So you find the artists of his generation immediately afterwards, they’re absorbing his innovations, but often also retaining aspects of the Gothic style.

If you look on the left-hand side, we’ve got two stories here, of course, we’ve got the expulsion from Paradise on the left, and we’ve got the Annunciation of the Virgin on the right. If you look at the left-hand side, you can see this wonderful rendering of this flowery paradise that looks like a Gothic tapestry, a strong sense of awe. so from 1536, with 1536, he moved into a new-built friary, the friary of San Marco. He had his own cell there, which still exists. And he lived there till the end of his life, and he decorated the whole friary with frescoes. This, of course, this is a tempera painting, this is egg tempera, we’ll see the beginnings of oil painting next week. So these very bright, pure colours, use of lapis lazuli, and so on. The frescoes are much more chalky, and less intense in colour. This again, this is in the Louvre in Paris. And you can see, he’s certainly taking on board aspects of the revolution brought on by Masaccio, if you look at the floor, it got quite convincing perspective, and we have a sense of volume and bulk to the figures. In fact, you can see figures, have figures depicted from behind, this is all new. And I’m going to finish with this picture, which is of the Last Judgement , again, with a very spectacular perspective of this long strip of tombs which are opened as the dead come back at the Last Judgement.

And I want to finish with this lovely detail of his idea of heaven, the heavenly paradise, the heavenly Jerusalem, of lovely fun and games, of people frolicking in a beautiful flowery park. And rather anachronistically, I’m going to end with a piece of music, which dates are much later, but which describes the same thing, which is the Christian idea of the afterlife. And this is the, “In Paradisum,” the final movement of Faure’s “Requiem,” which seems to me, to match the mood of this painting perfectly.

Right, well, let’s see what questions and comments we have.

Q&A and Comments:

Alan’s saying, how am I, I’m fine, but not thrilled to be in London, to tell you the truth.

Q: Did you notice that people often make that comment about Italian babies looking like little old men?

A: I’m not so well-acquainted with babies that I can really comment on that.

Yes, Masaccio’s, that wonderful singing blue of the Virgin’s robe by Masaccio is lapis lazuli, which I’m sure you know, is found in Afghanistan. So it was extremely precious, and very, very expensive. So again, it would’ve been a great status symbol for whoever paid for the altarpiece, and often in contracts, it was stipulated how much gold you’d lose, used for the gold leaf, and how much blue the lapis, as it was such an expensive product, had to be brought halfway across the world, across the Mediterranean, through Venice, and then it has to go through a process of grinding down and purification.

Q: Could those letters in the halo not be Aramaic?

A: I don’t think they are, I don’t think they are, but it’s an interesting idea.

Q: What is in the background of Madonna and the lute?

A: I’m not quite sure about that.

Q: Somebody else asked about Aramaic, is spending vast amounts on art a sign of one’s interest in art? Or could it just be an investment that will enhance in value over time?

A: No, I don’t think they, it was for, I think it’s various things. I don’t think it’s investment 'cause it wasn’t going to get sold. It’s not till much later, that I think people buy art as investment. Not really till the 17th century in Holland, you have people buying art as investment. It’s investment in your future in the sense that, well, two things. One is you’re impressing your contemporaries with how rich you are, and how pious you are, and you’re also trying to impress God, because you’ve probably done lots of naughty things. I’m sure, Monty Golden, you’ve never done anything naughty, but if you had, you know that when you die, if it’s not, well, if it’s really bad, I’m afraid you’re going to hell. But if you’ve just done lots of naughty things, you’re going to spend time in purgatory, and you can get time off in purgatory with good deeds, and showing how pious you are by spending lots of money on altarpieces,

I’m not totally bald, excuse me, Ghiberti, somebody says, looks like me. I’m not quite bald yet. Right, to see the work of Ghiberti, with a head or an arm emerging from the relief’s surface is, yes, it certainly was. It was a great technical feat at the time. The creation of those doors, How do fashion and art, that’s a whole subject, there’s a lot in there. I’ll tell you one of the most interesting topics, of course, is the arrival of the delegation in Florence from the, not the Ottomans, the Byzantine emperors who are wanting help from the West against the Ottomans. And so a lot of Italian artists were very fascinated by their clothes. And you know, they say, it’s often said that those, in Piero della Francesca, for instance, that those extraordinary hats were taken from the Byzantine delegation.

Thank you for your very nice comments. Thank you for the trivial observation, I don’t think it is trivial, it’s probably quite important. Jewish Bible is not the same as the Old Testament of the Christians. Unless of course, you think of the Septuagint as the Jewish Bible, Judith-free. Oh yes, I mean there, yeah, that’s clear. And I think I pointed that out, that there are a number of books that the Christians accept as in the Bible that the Jews don’t, I know, I’ve never been to Russia. Hermitage is on the list.

Why is Mary always, I think for the same reason in any religion. Well, Mary was a Jew, she’s a Jewish girl. Jewish girls would cover their heads, wouldn’t they?

Q: Do we know Donatello’s doctor’s name?

A: Yes, Dr. Chellini, is it on my list? Yes, it is on my list, if you check that out.

Homosexuality, as the medical profession has already determined, is innate. I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t, I really don’t think I believe it. I think it’s, but anyway, it’s a matter of opinion and a matter of debate, but, and this is not really the place for that debate.

Nice comments, thank you all very much. Any expulsion in manufactured garments, almost as odd as Mary and Jesus, you’re right, yes. I hadn’t thought about that. that they’ve already managed, they’ve already been to Marks and Spencer’s and got their clothes at the time of the expulsion. And the music at the end is Faure, “Requiem,” and that is the last movement, And I never tyre of it, it is the most heavenly music. It really is heavenly. Interestingly, Faure was not, I mean it was one of the most beautiful pieces of Christian music, but he was not himself actually a believing Christian.

Funny comment, yes. Looks like paradise is lovely women frolicking in the garden with only one gent looking down, 72 women of the Islam world. I don’t think so, but it’s a nice idea. The paperback I mentioned, Vasari’s “Lives,” and I think, have I not, I don’t think I put Vasari on my list for you. Vasari is V-A-S-A-R-I, and yeah, you’ll enjoy it, it’s a fun read, as well as an amazing source of information about the Renaissance.

Did common people have access to, yes they did. “Cause they, well they had access to all the art that was in the churches. They wouldn’t have had necessarily, access to art that was in the palaces, but actually, common people did very often get into palaces too. They were received in all the palaces.

Q: How did the Enlightenment look at this period?

A: Well, I think they, this period in some ways, I don’t want to over-exaggerate it because the world is, until the 18th century, is, you know, one where the Western world is overwhelmingly religious and Christian. But I think you could see the Renaissance as the forerunner of the Enlightenment in many ways. Could I send the slide?

Hey, Mindy, if you Google Dr. Chellini or Rossellino, you’ll find that head, you’ll find multiple images of it from different angles. Why am I sorry to, I find, well I don’t know, I find this country very depressing at the moment, but we better not get into that. It’s really in a terrible state, and I don’t see it getting better. Faure, "Requiem,” again.

And that seems to be the end. So thank you all very, very much. I think there’s a bit of a gap now before I do the second part of the Quattrocento, that’s Florence and North Italy in the second half of the 15th century. Buh-bye, everybody.