Masaccio

Nicholas Eckstein's Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence extricates this intensely studied monument from preoccupations characteristic of traditional art history: patronage, connoisseurship, style, conservation history, technique, and materials. This is notable because all these topics have prompted an extensive scholarship. Giorgio Vasari oriented the chapel to the future and drew a line from the Brancacci frescoes to those by Michelangelo at the Sistine chapel, marking a new tradition of excellence and modernity in Florentine art. Eckstein's orientation is to the past, and his goal is to understand the chapel as an expression of the multifaceted identity of the Carmelite order in Florence well before the painting of the mesmerizing frescoes in the 1420s and 1480s. His chapters seek to reconstruct not only the (much­altered) church of Santa Maria del Carmine as it stood in the fifteenth century but also the neighborhood around it. Felice Brancacci, patron of the decorative program, appears as an early focal point, but the book progressively widens its lens to consider the chapel as the possession of many communities. Eckstein does not attempt to penetrate the walls of the chapel and explore a new spatial clarity and psychological intensity in narrative painting. Rather, his analysis encompasses a wide range of ways that contemporaries approached, regarded, and used the chapel. The Brancacci chapel is for him a means to gain insight into the spiritual life of San Frediano, a gritty, working­class neighborhood, and the frescoes are the product of monks and artisans, patrician families, and widows of modest means. In fact the book's title does not reference the frescoes at all, but is rather a metaphor Felice Brancacci used to describe the Sultan's court in Cairo. The first chapter traces the origins and history of the Carmelite order in Florence and highlights the status of Peter as the apostle to whom contemporaries looked as an exemplar of bedrock faith but also fear and self­doubt. Eckstein reconstructs the interior of the Carmine chapel by chapel as a network of devotional micro­zones, with a fine­ grained attention to family patronage. The modern tourist makes a beeline for the Masaccio frescoes through a separate entrance. Eckstein is at pains to demonstrate how deeply imbricated the Brancacci chapel was within the interior of the Carmine, where many sacred spaces interpenetrated and overlapped. While the Carmelites could not ask for a clearer symbolic expression of their deep identification with the Roman papacy, the Brancacci frescoes also operated within an elitist ideology of leading citizens asserting their authority and control. Eckstein argues, not altogether persuasively, that the compelling scenes of Peter healing the sick and ministering to the socially marginal would have been for the Brancacci a reassuring alternative to the threat of social chaos and revolt. Virtues of the book—its widely dispersed attention and refusal to grant a privileged voice to the artists, order, or the patron in generating meaning—also hamper the advancement of a propulsive and coherent argument. Major claims about how the Brancacci frescoes must have functioned within the cultural imaginary of Florence in the turbulent 1420s startlingly appear at the end of the first chapter but seem disembodied and poorly founded in the shadowy figure of Felice Brancacci, as if they have wandered in from another kind of book. The abrupt swerve into a hard­edged, socially oppositional interpretive mode of setting the frescoes against their orthodox Christian iconography departs as suddenly as it arrives, and the book resumes its stately pace and broad­based texture.

Dieci grandi opere d'arte del passato interpretate da dieci scrittori:
Ferdinando Albertazzi, Sara Boero, Teresa Buongiorno, Roberto Denti, Ermanno Detti, Aldo Gerbino, Angela Nanetti, Emanuela Nava, Roberto Piumini, Costanza Savini

e da cinque illustratori contemporanei:

Antonella Abbatiello, Alessandra Cimatoribus, Emanuele Luzzati, Sophie Fatus, Lucia Scuderi

Illustrazione di copertina: Roberto Innocenti

The present paper discusses some new findings on the topic of Masaccio's Trinity fresco pers- pective reconstruction. Some scholars have tried to reduce the fresco's anomalies with the help of photogramme- trical reproductions and computer analysis. On this basis, it has been argued that Masaccio used the normal case of costruzione legittima. It is very likely that Masaccio took the lines of the plane joining the abaci of the capi- tals as a guide for drawing the vanishing lines of the coffered vault. However, in doing so, he followed an erro- neous method of construction disregarded till now. The aberrations thus discovered strongly support the view that Masaccio's Trinity fresco is not a model of linear perspective. The thesis that Masaccio designed the fresco with the help of a ground plan and elevations is dubious, and the search for the distance point is condemned to remain an unending problem.

This essay elaborates on Roberto Longhi’s reading of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, spanning a period of about fourty years, from Longhi’s debut on ‘La Voce’ (1911) to his decisive Proposte per una critica d’arte (1950). Firstly, it discusses the importance of Vasari’s influence in shaping Longhi’s aptitude to read artworks as well as to use artistic literature in the early years of his training as an art historian. Secondly, it offers an examination of Longhi’s main studies on Piero della Francesca (1914; 1927), showing how the scholar adopts the data and vocabulary of the Lives against the positivist tradition. Thirdly, it delves into the ‘Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio’ (1940), casting light on Longhi’s ability to distinguish between the texts of both editions of the Lives, namely the Torrentiniana (1550) and the Giuntina (1568). Finally, it shows how Longhi’s familiarity with Vasari’s work gives rise to a different, multifaceted geography of Italian art, as the Stefano Fiorentino (1951), in particular, suggests. By addressing some stylistic, historiographical and aesthetic issues, the paper aims to clarify Longhi’s position in the context of the critical debate on Vasari during the 19th and 20th centuries (from Cavalcaselle to Berenson and Lionello Venturi).

Conservadas en distintos museos o perdidas, fuera de su contexto original y rodeadas de obras diferentes, la «Adoración de los Reyes Magos» y las otras diez pinturas que se conservan del «Políptico de Pisa» plantean una pregunta sobre cómo reconstruir, a pesar de su dispersión y fragmentación, la forma en que éstas eran vistas y experimentadas originalmente.

Nicolaus Cusanus, canon lawyer, Catholic cardinal, and arguably the most innovative philosopher-theologian of the fifteenth century, remains a puzzling intellectual figure with his paradox-centered philosophical works which, after a century of focused scholarly attention, still divide commentators on the issue of how to place them in the intellectual context of his time. Given the closely-knit intellectual-artistic milieu of early Renaissance Italy, to which Cusanus has strong connections, scholars have recently taken up the task of connecting Cusanus’ thought with ideas expressed in contemporary Renaissance artworks. This thesis develops an argument for such a connection, focusing on Masaccio’s 1427/28 fresco The Trinity, itself most likely a collaborative work between an innovative artist (Masaccio), a painter and trained theologian (Alessio Strozzi) and an educated humanist and artist (Brunelleschi).
First, Cusanus’ philosophical method in De Docta Ignorantia and contemporary writings is examined and a novel formulation of it is proposed, able to reconcile the seemingly contradictory features of this complex treatise by the systematization of multiple levels of paradox building upon each other. Then, the artistic technique of linear perspective, newly-invented at the time, is investigated and found to provide the crucial intellectual link, as uniquely suited for representing a systematic progression through levels of paradox. Finally, Masaccio’s Trinity is examined and the features of its systematic, perspectivally informed treatment of its subject matter (the same as Cusanus’ own subject: the doctrines of the Christian tradition) are investigated. The artwork and Cusanus’ treatise are found to have in common a fundamental paradox-centered method for systematizing the contents of the tradition, which places them both within a well established Christian tradition of thought about paradox. In accordance with recent developments in the literature, this is proposed as a solution to the long-standing issue of placing Cusanus within his intellectual context.

A drawing that has come to light in a French private collection is here identified as a copy by Michelangelo of a figure from Masaccio’s frescos in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence. Part of a group of studies of earlier masters made probably c.1492–96, it exemplifies Michelangelo’s life-long admiration for the work of an artist who was regarded as one of the founders of modern painting.

Masaccio’s famous fresco in Santa Maria Novella consists of two parts; the upper zone focuses on the three persons of the Trinity and the lower depicts a fictive tomb and a skeleton. The words uttered by the skeleton (“I was once what you are ....”) introduces a temporal aspect that adds specific meaning to the figures of the Trinity in the upper half. In fact, ancient philosophy saw time as tripartite and the Fathers of the Church considered the modalities of time to be united in an Eternal, triune God. This idea must have been familiar to Late Medieval and Renaissance visual culture since illustrators of Petrarch’s Trionfi always visualized the final triumph, that of Eternity, in the shape of the Trinity. In light of this, Masaccio’s Trinity fresco is just as much an image of Time and Eternity as Death and Salvation.

In Italian art of the fifteenth century, novelties in painting and architecture appear to have mutually supported each other in a remarkable way. Even before Renaissance architecture dominated the building practice along a broad front, its pictorial representation served to instruct and disseminate the new ‘classical’ art of construction. At the same time, the reference to the canonized architectonic idiom of form from antiquity also promoted the establishment of linear perspective in painting. The efficiency and efficacy of perspectival representation could be demonstrated especially impressively by the example of clearly subdivided constructions. Without rational architectonic structures, the persuasive conquest in the Quattrocento of visual spaces would have scarcely been conceivable. Renaissance perspective hence found its congenial object in Renaissance architecture.

The eminent importance attached to architectural representation and its innovations during the early Renaissance could not be without its consequences in the way images were understood. Because, in principle, every picture is situated within real architectonic surroundings and must respond to this context, special—if not singular—status must be attached to the pictorial representation of architecture. In Italian painting of the Quattrocento, this special status of architectural representation had to be fundamentally renegotiated because a building and its structural elements simultaneously acted as the guiding pictorial motifs contributing toward establishing the way linear perspective represented, and hence had a share in, the development of a new conception of pictures. Consequently, it was a matter of determining the relation between the pictorially represented architecture and the image’s real architectonic surroundings.

These ‘aesthetic’ implications of architectural representation in the early Renaissance are at the focus of the study “Architectures of Vision. Buildings in Quattrocento Painting.” The point of interest is less the history of motifs or the share that pictures had in the history of architecture, therefore their influence on the theory and practice of architecture of the fifteenth century. The question to be raised is rather: What understanding of images could be formed and articulated in a pertinent depiction of architecture? What conception of the conditions, possibilities, and limits of visual representation is articulated in the “architectures of vision” which were to become so characteristic of Quattrocento painting?

The analysis broaches the lead issue of the conception of images during the early Renaissance in a series of specifically chosen typologically intercoordinated case studies that examine more closely the usage of architectural representation and its relation to each of the concrete architectonic surroundings. Analyses of frescoes and panel paintings, works in sacred as well as profane contexts, individual pictures as well as groups, show that architectural representation by no means exclusively served to make visual representation unambiguous and ‘transparent’. The analyses of these works concentrate wholly in this sense on aspects that have been marginalized in the theory of Renaissance art and—as a consequence—also in art historical research.

The analyses reveal that representation of architecture mostly has the dual function of not only creating an illusionistic spatial depth, as a ‘stage’ of pictorial representation, but also, at the same time, structuring the image plane in such a way that the illusion of space is partially retracted again. In many cases it is deployed to raise irritating doubts about the boundaries between architectural representation in a picture, the architectonically designed framings of the image, and the architectonic instrumentation of real space. Subtle infractions of the rules and leaps in architectonic logic also add special potential to the pictorial representation. Not least of all, pictures of the Quattrocento use architectonic elements to effectuate a mise en abyme in the image, by embedding an element, e.g., an architectonic framework, within the pictorial representation that reflects the basic structure of the entire image. Representations of architecture in pictures of the Quattrocento thus prove to be productive, variously deployable visual operators. In many cases their primary service is not elucidation but exploration of the character of reality of what is being displayed in the picture. Thus the representation of architecture often stimulates protracted observation and reflection. Only by this means does painting do justice to the special challenge inherent in the subject matter which in the fifteenth century is mostly religious: Biblical events or saints can be presented without committing them to a presence in the here and now.

Close readings of three central texts of the Quattrocento precede the case studies, in order to be able to profile the variety of ways in which architectural representation is used in painting, as an independent contribution toward contemporary discourses on images from the Quattrocento. The report that Antonio di Tuccio Manetti gave of Filippo Brunelleschi’s first demonstrations of perspective; Leon Battista Alberti’s comparison between a picture and a window; and the consideration of images portrayed by Nicolaus Cusanus at the beginning of his text De visione Dei ought to reveal essential potentials as well as problems with representing architecture.

Case studies on selected pictures of the Quattrocento build upon the considerations that were developed in the wake of Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Cusanus. Exemplary works are examined in nine chapters for how they define the relation between the pictorially represented architecture and the real building contexts of the images. The selection of analyzed images encompass well-known ‘icons’ of painting of the early Renaissance, such as Masaccio’s Trinity, the sketch books of Jacopo Bellini, Giovanni Bellini’s Pala di Pesaro, Cosmè Tura’s Roverella altar, and the Berlin ‘ideal city’ panel. In addition, there are paintings by Domenico Veneziano and Piero della Francesca, as well as frescoes by Andrea Mantegna, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Filippino Lippi. Less well-known works are also taken into account, such as by Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano and Bartolomeo Montagna, which in light of the examined question prove to be surprisingly innovative and complex. These case studies are designed to be readable also as independent contributions to the analysis and interpretation of relevant artwork. In all these cases, an analysis of the pictorial architectures open up a new avenue toward interpreting the images involved.

The study’s readings and exemplary case studies offer fundamental critique of the comparison, still topical today, made between a Renaissance picture and a view from a window. In 1435 Alberti parenthetically compared the perspectivally designed picture with a finestra aperta—an analogy that implicitly suggests a clear differentiation between image and surroundings, namely between the image space and real space. Although Alberti assigns to architecture the function of offering to pictorial representation a clear and unambiguous structure, analyses of the exemplary pictures draw attention to other, partly contrary effects. The purposeful use of complex architectural depictions frequently allows contradictions to be experienced and stimulates irresolvable processes of perception. Differentiations between various levels of reality are repeatedly subjected to revision throughout the observation, so none of these differentiations can become permanently and bindingly fixed.

Hence, as the object of visual representation, not only does architecture open up and structure illusionary spaces, but it also simultaneously draws these window views into question by letting the flatness of the image become conspicuous or by challenging the picture’s relation to its frame and surroundings. These ambivalent visual phenomena have the consequence that the viewer cannot set the representation in the picture unquestioningly into a presence in the here and now. The complex, persisting processes of perception in which the viewing becomes entangled in the ambiguities rather let him or her experience another time, the temporality of actually viewing the picture. A closing outlook on the study therefore takes these observations about the representation of architecture during the Quattrocento as an opportunity to present what profit might be gained by a systematic analysis of the temporality of an image’s reception aesthetics. The closing chapter sketches, on one hand, the outlines of this approach toward picture analysis, which specifically pursues the question of how pictures influence the temporal extension of the perceptual process and arouse the recipient’s awareness that the picture is not fully accessible to him or her in a single instant. On the other hand, the closing chapter pleads that a precise analysis of the temporality of viewing pictures will permit a differentiated response to questions regarding the much-discussed ‘power’ of images: The “architectures of vision” in the Quattrocento show that images can exert ‘power’ on us by entangling us in lengthier perceptual processes that are not entirely under our control.

Art historians have often looked back on the Italian Renaissance as a signal moment for the emergence of modern art. In doing so, they evaluate the modernity of the period in conscious hindsight: the Renaissance is modern insofar as some aspect of their own modernity can be seen to originate in it. Whatever the merits of this approach, it sheds little light on what it meant when Renaissance writers themselves called art modern. What is modern to us was not necessarily modern to them.

Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy reconstructs a historical concept of modern art on the basis of sources written between the 1390s and 1440s. The central point of reference in these sources was Giotto, the early fourteenth-century painter who, as one writer put it in 1442, “first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures.” The word “modern” was used in a wide variety of ways throughout this period, some quite polemical, others rather prosaic. To call art (ars) modern, however, was to invoke a stable, well-defined concept whose roots ran deep in late-medieval intellectual life. According to this concept, to make an art modern was to set it on a new foundation in science (scientia) and rationalize it accordingly.

As familiar as this formulation may sound in principle, each and every one of its key terms — art, modernity, science, rationality — meant something strikingly different in this period than it does in our time. The hallmark of modern art was not verisimilitude or expression or virtually any of the achievements that art historians associate with Giotto today, but rather the invention of techniques that aimed to imitate nature in its very manner of operation, aligning the concrete, step-by-step process of painting with the inner workings of nature itself. By reclaiming this concept and tracking its complex relation to early Renaissance concerns such as linear perspective and the canon of proportion, the book not only establishes a novel framework for the visual analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, but also unravels a fundamental master narrative of Western art history from within, clearing the way for renewed discussions of alternative modernities, including those that precede the story of modernism as we know it.

To what extent was ‘originality’ a Renaissance myth?
The notion of originality is evident in Vasari’s Lives of the Artist. His accounts are examined, in relation to Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. The inner and outer worlds of the artist are considered, as well as processes of change in the art of painting.

Assignment paper, 1996, By Isabella M H Demetriou (nee Wesoly)

This past summer my colleague, Candice Smith Corby and I were commissioned to recreate an accurate replica of Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. For this paper, we would like to share our experience of collecting research, performing test samples, and the stages of recreating the fresco. In order to give context to our project, we will describe basic qualities of the fresco painting technique as well as the history of Masaccio’s original and the chapel in which it resides.  Most importantly, our presentation will address the discrepancies and allowances one needs to reconcile when creating a historically accurate but contemporary replica of an iconic image from the past.

How does the space of Masaccio’s Trinity in Santa Maria Novella work? In his Vite, Giorgio Vasari admired the illusionism of the frescoed altarpiece, tirata in prospettiva, seemingly ‘piercing’ the wall of the church. Since the painting’s rediscovery in 1861, the Trinity has continuously attracted scholarly attention, and with the work of G.J. Kern in 1913 became the object of a series of perspectival ‘reconstructions’.
But a reconstruction of what exactly? The fresco’s combination of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin, St. John, donors, and skeleton below, does not hint at a real space. Was verisimilitude the painter’s aim? The problematic composition of God the Father and Christ Crucified complicates the image.
This paper revisits Masaccio’s canonical painting looking at its transcendence instead of its illusionism. By placing it in the context of Florentine devotional paintings that reacted to it, the Trinity reappears in its full ambiguity, reconsidering its immediate impact.

The paper opens with a brief overview of the development lines of Florentine painting in the 17th Century: from the continuity with the works of the so called “reformers” in the first half of the century to the following update on Baroque models, due to Pietro da Cortona’s stay in Florence and, especially, to the academy established by Cosimo III Medici in Rome (1673-1686). It considers afterwards the Vite di Pittori written by Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri by 1742: the comparative analysis of four biographies (Anton Domenico Gabbiani, Tommaso Redi, Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani and Masaccio) will highlight how the author punctually recognises the stylistic difference between contemporary academic and non-academic painters, esteeming the first because of the their compliance with the draftmanship of great Florentine masters of the 15th and early 16th Century.

In 1925, thanks to a scholarship from the Royal College of Art, London, the young Henry Moore found himself travelling in Europe over six months. This travel included a stop in Italy - intended as a possibility for the young artist to visit the principal museums, monuments, and galleries of Europe, and to develop a direct knowledge of the Old Masters. Italy was identified as the principal place for Classicism and Renaissance art models, which instilled in Moore some initial feelings of reluctance. He was concerned to overcome those academic artistic models which had accompanied his art school instruction. Moreover, in those years, the young artist was particularly interested in non-European primitive sculpture, most of all those of Egypt, Mexico and Africa, displayed in the British Museum and reflected in contemporary works by sculptors such as Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
After a brief stay in Paris, Moore's trip continued to Italy, stopping in Florence, Siena, Pisa, Rome, Assisi, Ravenna, Padua and Venice. In a completely unexpected manner, the young sculptor was deeply touched by the painting of the Italian Masters of the Trecento and Quattrocento like Giotto, Masaccio, Giovanni Bellini, and Andrea Mantegna. In their work Moore admired the expressiveness and the plastic synthesis that was sculpture-like, as can be seen in several drawings and notes made by Moore at the time. The lessons learnt by the sculptor became a fundamental part of his research and artistic development. In the 1940s, Moore looked to mix the “Mediterranean Classicism” learnt in Italy, with the elementary and primitive art he admired. This led to a new and fertile phase that characterized his work in the post-war period.
This paper aims to highlight the trip to Italy realized by Moore in 1925, in order to understand better, by analyzing the notes and designs of the artist at that time, which artworks he saw and studied as well as why and how they touched and influenced him and his artistic path. Moreover it intends to trace a relationship, by identifying similarities and differences, between Moore's interest for the Trecento and Quattrocento Italian artists, and the trend for rediscovering that artistic period that also characterized the works of the artists of the roman magazine “Valori Plastici” (1918-1922), such as Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Arturo Martini.

Lustre in the dark: The perception of Early Netherlandish painting in renaissance Italy Variations in the effects of light are the reason why Northern and Italian art of the fifteenth century mimics reality in different ways. Italian artists attempted to define our concept of three-dimensionality by means of geometrical perspective and lume (= spatial lighting). Northern artists especially used lustro (= lighting, lustre). Glossy objects in the foregrounds of Flemish paintings helped to draw the scene closer to the beholder. Lustro was therefore even used in open-air daylight scenes. In Leonardo’s mind the glossy effect of the related Italian concept of splendore in the dark bestowed the scene with a certain gracefulness (grazia). This is what must have attracted 15th-century Italian art lovers to Northern art. Splendore was achieved by tonal transitions in layers of oil paint. Lustro, however, did not allow for any natural depth of field (focus). As a consequence Flemish masterpiec...

Lustre in the dark: The perception of Early Netherlandish painting in renaissance Italy

Variations in the effects of light are the reason why Northern and Italian art of the fifteenth century mimics reality in different ways. Italian artists attempted to define our concept of three-dimensionality by means of geometrical perspective and lume (= spatial lighting). Northern artists especially used lustro (= lighting, lustre). Glossy objects in the foregrounds of Flemish paintings helped to draw the scene closer to the beholder. Lustro was therefore even used in open-air daylight scenes. In Leonardo’s mind the glossy effect of the related Italian concept of splendore in the dark bestowed the scene with a certain gracefulness (grazia). This is what must have attracted 15th-century Italian art lovers to Northern art. Splendore was achieved by tonal transitions in layers of oil paint. Lustro, however, did not allow for any natural depth of field (focus). As a consequence Flemish masterpieces were negatively judged in 16th-century Florentine art theory. The Florentines experienced the meticulous rendering of details as disturbing.

Owing to the fame of Masaccio’s depiction of the “St. Peter Healing the Sick with his Shadow” in the Florentine Brancacci chapel, its forerunners in San Piero a Grado and Assisi were barely considered for their own sake. Consequently, important implications have been overlooked. By focusing on iconographical details and the respective local contexts, the current study proposes that both the San Piero and the Assisi examples are dependent on apocryphal writings, mediated via the Golden Legend. Furthermore, the results suggest a locally specific double function; a dualism which consists in the fact that 1) each not only to propagates the Petrine primacy, but is also intended to 2) attract pilgrims in San Piero, or to 3) serve as a church- and order political statement in Assisi.