(upbeat piano music) Dr. Harris: We're in the Uffizi
looking at Fra Filippo Lippi's, Madonna and Child With Angels, 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. Dr. Zucker: Those are so solemn and so steeped in medieval tradition and this is so playful. Dr. Harris: 15th century, here
we have a Madonna and Child that's really humanist in it's approach. Dr. Zucker: 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. Dr. Harris: Well, and gone are those byzantine elongations of
the face and the hands. She looks like a real woman, who you might see on
the streets of Florence. A very beautiful woman, but a real woman nonetheless. Not only that, but the
angels look like children that you might see playing
on the streets of Florence. It always has seemed
to be as though Lippi, 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 pose. Look at that "angel" in the foreground, who supports the Christ child and turns around and looks up at us with a really playful smile. Dr. Zucker: It's almost mischievous. Lippi is actually being
incredibely mischievous himself. When we look at the other angel, it's only the lower half of his
face peeking out below Christ's arm. It's sort of ridiculous. I mean, you would never have an artist, during the medieval period,
do something like that. Dr. Harris: 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. Those obvious symbols
of divinity, of holiness I think, felt very much out of
place for Fra Filippo Lippi. He wanted to create an image of
the Madonna and Child With Angels, that looked very earthly and
very natural and very real. Dr. Zucker: The frame on this window almost becomes the frame
of the painting itself. It seems to me that there's
this self-conscious aligning of the frame of the painting
and the frame of the window. There's the concede that the landscape is seen through a window, but I think that 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. Dr. Harris: That landscape behind her, rendered with atmospheric
perspective, also looks very real. I think back to the Cimabue or the Douche, 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. Even the curls that we
see in Christ's hair, there's this love of
beautiful curling shapes. We know that Fra Filippo Lippi
was the teacher of Botticelli. When I look at that, I can see that. Dr. Zucker: That emphasis
on the decorative. Dr. Harris: And on
beautiful sensuous lines. There's a kind of sensuality here
that I think is hard to deny. Clearly, yes, the Madonna
and child with the angels, but a real love of the
beauty of the things that we can see with out eyes. (upbeat piano music)