Florence
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Cimabue, Santa Trinita Madonna
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Giotto, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata
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Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (Part 1 of 4)
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Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, Part 2 of 4
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Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, Part 3 of 4
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Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel, Part 4 of 4
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Giotto, The Ognissanti Madonna
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Giotto's The Entombment of Mary
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Andrea Pisano's Reliefs on the Campanile in Florence
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Follower of Bernardo Daddi, The Aldobrandini Triptych
Cimabue, Santa Trinita Madonna Cimabue, Maesta of Santa Trinita, 1280-1290, tempera on panel, 151 1/2 x 87 3/4" (385 x 223 cm), Uffizi, Florence Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris
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- We're in the first room of the Uffizi
- and we're looking at the absolutely monumental painting by Cimabue of the
- Madonna enthroned originally for Santa Trinita
- right here in Florence and it's about 12 feet high
- its huge and it's so big because that's a big church Santa Trinita
- and it would've needed to be able to be seen from the back of the church
- and it's important to remember that it would've been behind an altar
- raised up from the ground in the space of a church very different
- than the space that we see it in today, so all of that gold would've glistened
- in a very different way and kind of important because the church
- is relatively dark and so that gold would've been really wonderful and luminous
- but ofcourse it also has an important symbolic value
- that's the light of heaven
- one of the things that we look at when we think about Cimabue
- I think going back to Vasari who really starts his history with a renaissance
- of Cimabue is some hints of the beginnings of the renaissance
- and so when we look at this we begin to see some of that illusionism
- that we think about with the renaissance
- right now ofcourse this is 2020 hindsight and - exactly - Vasari
- was certainly not a careful art historian but I think that there
- is a space that she can sit in
- it's not a rational space -no- and you had mentioned
- that this is the space of heaven and so I think there's
- a certain degree of liaisons now this is a painting
- that would've been hung fairly high and yet somehow
- we're looking down at the step on which the Virgin's
- feet rest, we're looking actually down on the seat
- but we're looking across at the old testiment prophits down below
- and up at Mary herself and so there's all kinds of contradictions here
- right and yet we can read that the sides of her throne are closer
- to us, that the parts of the throne by her shoulders are
- set back into space, and theres even a kind of velocity that moves
- her eye back into space if you look at the lines that are painted
- on the steps for instance
- where the virgins feet rest, it does bring us back into space
- and it creates a kind of visual pathway
- and those figures of the prophits in the fort run are even closer
- still now let's start down with them, okay, because
- this is curious they're in a kind of impossible space in the
- basement under the throne, I mean what is that? (laughs)
- they did the predict the coming of Christ right?
- okay so this is very much a Christian perspective and the
- Christians are looking back to the old testament
- laying literally the foundation upon which Christianity is built
- so I guess it makes sense that they're below
- they're holding scrolls as opposed to books and that's how
- we can recognize instantly that they're not the evangelists
- that they're actually from the old testament
- Mary was an enormously important figure at this time
- Christ was a little terrifying to the medieval mind and Mary grew
- an importance what is known as the cult of the Madonna
- the cult of the Virgin as an intercessor to her son
- that is people would pray to the Virgin Mary and hopefully
- she would speak maybe to God on your behalf
- that's right and that's exactly how Cimabue shows Mary to us here
- she's pointing to Christ in a way addressing the viewer
- and then pointing to the Christ child her son and saying this
- is the pathway to God
- the pathway to salvation is through Christ
- now Christ for his part is looking back to us, you're absolutely right
- his two fingers are raised as if he's blessing us
- now the rendering of Christ is really interesting because of course
- compared to Mary he's quite small and he's the appropriate scale
- the problem is, atleast to our modern eyes is that he doesn't
- look like an infant his head is small in relationship to his body
- and he kind of has the features of a grown man -yeah- except in a little baby
- and one of the ways our historians have acknowledged this
- is that this is a symbolic rendering that Christ is shown as
- a man of wisdom and age is sometimes a way of expressing that
- symbolically then here is an all knowing God but here
- is God as a child
- although later in the renaissance that can eventually
- dissipate and we'll see a chubby baby in it's place
- so i'm noticing that the long gated features of Mary
- her long nose the sort of stylization around her eyes
- those almond shapes, her very elongated hand and that's coming from
- a Byzantine tradition that Cimabue is painting in
- what's interesting Zantham which had been a source of
- power and culture in the east actually a lot of the artists
- and intellectuals had come to Italy in part because of invasions
- and so there was at this moment at the end of 1200s at the beginning
- of the 1300s there was this infusion of intellectual capital
- of artistic tradition that comes into Italy and really revitalizes
- the traditions here
- so sometimes our historians refer to this period as the Italo Byzantine
- on the other hand Cimabue is doing things that point toward the renaissance
- he's using gold lines to articulate the folds of drapery
- but those lines instead of just sort of being flat and decorative
- really begin to describe a sense of the three dimensional folds of drapery
- and Mary herself begins to sort of fill out and be a little bit less
- of that thin elongated figure without any mass that we see before this
- we do have a sense of Mary actually holding the Christ child to some extent
- you know, keeping her -it's a little weightless-
- yeah but the figures are weightless and the striations
- of those gold lines that you were speaking about help to emphasize
- that almost two dimensionality of those figures
- but there are traces of chiaroscuro in the neck and the nose
- perhaps in the faces of the angels
- you know these are hints, they're subtle but ofcourse we can look
- back now and see that this is the beginning of a long
- development of increasing naturalism which people like Vasari
- will look back to Cimabue as the root of
- look for example the two foreground angels on either side of the throne
- half of their body's behind the throne
- giving us a real illusion of space and their foot comes forward
- and on the left the angels foot comes even a little off the throne
- but they are still very decorative and one could only imagine
- what those angels in the background are actually standing on (laughs)
- and you know the throne itself is so decorative
- maybe we should just take one moment and talk about the fact
- that this is on wood that this is painted with tempera
- that the artist is using very thin gold leaves, so that's real gold there
- that's been attached to the wood surface
- and we shouldn't underestimate the effort that it takes to create
- a panel of wood that can survive for so many hundreds of years
- without warping without cracking significantly
- and so there's a lot of workmanship here that sometimes i think
- in the era of 21st century go to the art store and buy your supplies
- we kind of forget about this "handmadeness"
- that we have here, in all aspects of the materials
- and I think that's an important point there was not so much the seperation
- between the art and the craft as we understand it now
- you know he is painter and craftsman
- mixing his paints, working on the wood panel, preparing it
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