Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with two Angels

we're in the Ute looking at properly believe is madonna and child with angels and it's so fun to see this painting after coming from the first room in the Uffizi which has three giant paintings covered in gold from the 1300s of the madonna and child those are so solemn and so steeped in the medieval tradition and this is so playful and so 15th century here we have a madonna and child that's really humanist in its approach so it's interesting because the other paintings really are very somber but there is a somber note here too in Mary's foreknowledge of the fate of her son nevertheless the rest of the painting feels very playful and even her youth and beauty really carry the day well I'm gone are those Byzantine yuan gay shion's of the face and the hands and she looks like a real woman who you might see on the streets of Florence a very beautiful woman but a real woman nonetheless and not only that but the Angels look like children that you might see playing on the streets of Florence and it always has seemed to me as though lippy when he wanted a model for the angels went out and found a couple of kids playing in the street and brought them into his studio and made them post look at that angel quote-unquote in the foreground who supports the Christ child and turns around and looks up at us with a really playful smile it's almost mischievous and lippy is actually being incredibly mischievous himself when we look at the other angel it's only the lower half of his face he came out below Christ's arms and it's ridiculous I mean you would never have an artist during the medieval period do something like that and look what's happened to Mary's halo here we are we're moving toward the high Renaissance where we'll have the complete disappearance of the halo with Leonardo da Vinci but here with FRA Filippo Lippi the halo is becoming just a simple circle that we can just barely make out above Mary's face and also around Christ and so those obvious sim of divinity of holiness I think felt very much out of place for FRA Filippo Lippi who wanted to create an image of the Madonna and Child with angels that looked very earthly and very natural and very real the frame of this window almost becomes the frame of the painting itself and so this seems to me that there's this self-conscious allied a of the frame of the painting and the frame of the window this is the conceit that the landscape is seen through a window but I think he's suggesting that the frame of the canvas is a frame that we look into as if we look into the window as well and that landscape behind her rendered with atmospheric perspective also looks very real everything back to the Chima buoy or the doochie with that flat gold background the gold of a heavenly space here Mary very much represented as a figure who we can relate to here on earth my favorite passage in the painting is actually the translucent fabric that she wears in her hair and the amazing lines and curves as that winds down around her neck and comes down in front of her or even the curls that we see in Christ's hair there's this love of beautiful curling shapes and we know that profitable EB was the teacher of Botticelli and so when I look at that I can see that emphasis on the decorative and on beautiful sinuous line and there's a kind of sensuality here that I think is hard to deny clearly yes the Madonna and Child with angels but a real love of the beauty of the things that we can see with our eyes