Original subtitles

Good afternoon. At the outset, I want to say again that in this course the emphasis is on artists and

their art, not on the larger historical, political, social milieu of the Renaissance. And again, as I

did in the last lecture, I want to say that historical essentials will not be ignored. Italy,

after all, was a locus of ancient Italian, ancient, pardon me, ancient classical civilization, and it

was also a locus of the Catholic Church from the beginnings of organized Christianity. The

Christian religion and the Roman Catholic Church were the central force in Europe during the Middle

Ages between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Europe, after the fall of the

Western Roman Empire to the Goths in 476 AD, had only one unifying force, Christianity, as represented by

the Roman Church. It was only in Italy, however, that it was also a centralizing force. It gradually

assumed a role as a temporal power through a succession of events. The map of Italy, which you

saw in the last lecture, we see again a 1631 map, and I point out to you the city of Rome on the Tiber,

simply because that is what I'll be emphasizing for a few moments. In 313, the Emperor Constantine

issued the Edict of Milan, which granted tolerance to Christianity, one of the most important events

in history. Many churches were soon built in Rome, including St. Peter's, the old, original St. Peter's,

which stood for a thousand years. The Constantinian Basilica is how we refer to it, and many of the

things, or some of the things, that were in that Constantinian Basilica of the early fourth century are

there today in the Baroque Basilica that we know to be St. Peter's. It was a, and remains, an

extraordinary symbol of power, the power specifically of the Roman Catholic Church. In the middle of the

fifth century, Pope Leo I, Leo the Great, as he is usually referred to, began to assert temporal power

for the Church. His claim, or the claim that the Church asserted for temporal power, was supported

by a spurious document called the Donation of Constantine, which purported to record Constantine's

gift of the Western Empire to the papacy. It was a forgery, but a forgery that was only uncovered in the

15th century, in the Renaissance, in fact. Another non-event, the legend that Pope Leo had talked

Attila the Hun out of invading Rome also furthered this claim of temporal authority. Leo X in the

Renaissance had himself painted as Leo I, having Attila stop at the river and not invade Rome, and

there have been several bad movies on the subject as, as well. One of them said, they will, what they

said that day will never be known. Indeed, it never will. Charlemagne, the next step in our story of

Christian temporal power, in a sense, is Charlemagne and his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by the

Pope in the year 800. The Holy Roman Empire that was thus created may be described as a union of

Christian Western Europe, with the Pope as spiritual leader and the Emperor as political leader.

Paradoxically, this resulted in persistent conflict between the Church and the Empire of Charlemagne's

successors that lasted for centuries. By the early 13th century, the papacy reached a high point of

temporal power. I wanted to show you at this moment a map of Florence, and the map of Florence is an

engraving done in the late 16th century. That map of Florence shows you the general plan of Florence,

with its walls, its original protective walls running around it, with the Arno River running through it,

here, running through the center of the city, not quite the center since you have much more of the

city on one side than the other, and the four bridges that at that time crossed, crossed the Arno. The

larger side, of course, is the area where the cathedral is, there that I'm pointing with the arrow,

and down very near to the bridge, we have the piazza which holds Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall at this

point. That's the, that is the oldest and central part of the city. We'll be dealing also in a lecture

or two with the other side of the Arno, which is known in Italian as the Ultrarno, the other side,

and which is much shallower, which quickly comes up against the walls and the hills outside of Florence

on that side. In Italy, the geographical centers of art around 1400 were the city states into which

the peninsula was divided. Central Italy, and especially Tuscany, came to be dominated by Florence

for much of the Quattrocento, and now I've introduced a word and some Italian terminology which we need to

look at. In Italian, the 14th century is called the Trecento. The literal meaning is 300. It's

shorthand. Mila, for 1,000, is dropped. Instead of saying Mila Trecento, you say Trecento, for the

1,300s. Likewise, the 15th century is called the Quattrocento, and the 16th, the Cinquecento.

There are others, but those are the ones that involve us, and since the Italian terms are commonly

used in art historical writing and speaking about Italian art, even in other countries, we will often

use those terms in these lectures. Besides, they have a nice Italian role to them and are worth getting

to know if you don't already. Around the year 1400, a distinctive late medieval style of art became so

widespread in Europe that it has become known as the International Gothic. It flourished in Italy well

into the Quattrocento. After the beginning of the Renaissance, we still had a Gothic style going on

side by side. The International Gothic style is characterized by brilliantly colored decoration,

expressive drawing, usually curvilinear. Its forms, although they're three-dimensional to a degree,

nonetheless favor flatness over the illusion of volume. International Gothic art is lyrical. It tends

to be celebratory. The habitual use of gold ground for the gold for the backgrounds, we speak of gold

ground paintings, the habitual use of that gold accentuates all of those characteristics. There is an

interesting quality in International Gothic, and that is that it is naturalistic. That is to say,

it is realistic in the depiction of observed details, for instance, of landscape, of animals,

of costume. This is, I think, a supportable definition, but it is partly mine, of naturalism,

a naturalism as a detailed realism, not as realism in certain other senses that we will talk about

later on. But that kind of close observation of natures of, the nature of, the details of nature,

and so forth, is an important part of the style. The content of International Gothic art is usually

religious, reflecting the dominance of the Catholic Church in European culture. Into this culture,

in Italy, were born in the 1370s and the 1380s, an important group of artists. Some, like Lorenzo

Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano, retained the Gothic style of their youth, making art of great decorative

expressiveness. Others, like Lorenzo Ghiberti, began their career in the late medieval style and ended

in the newly developing style, the art of the Renaissance, the style, if you will, of the

Renaissance. The three artists just mentioned were all connected with Florence, though not all the time.

Lorenzo Monaco's paintings are marked by intimacy and restraint, by a delicate lyricism. He was born in

Siena, not in Florence, about 1370. He moved to Florence, where he entered a monastery and practiced

his art. That's where he got his name, of course. Monaco means monk. So Lorenzo the monk, Lorenzo Monaco.

And by the way, we never say Monaco. It's either the whole name or Lorenzo, once you've established who

you're talking about. I wanted to show you a very small and very charming panel, which is in the

Metropolitan Museum in the Lehmann Wing. This is a nativity, but it is a small panel, which was once

part of a large altarpiece. We don't know what altarpiece now. These became separated. I mentioned

the duchos majestà had been cut up and sold, parts of it sold off. That happened very frequently, and

predella panels, because they were small, were the first to go. A predella, I must say, is the pedestal of an

altarpiece. The bottom part is separate, like a support for the bottom of the frame, and it's often

decorated with or composed of small paintings, whose subjects reflect the theme of the large altarpiece

above, and often, if there are individual saints above, for instance, specifically connected between

the saint and the scene in the predella below. This painting, which I want to spend a few moments with,

is one of the most charming small predella panels that Lorenzo Monaco or anyone produced. It is, as you see,

a picture of the Holy Family with the stable here, a stable which is quite beautifully fitted into,

look at the roof of it, fitted into the enlarged quatrefoil design of the frame. This is a gothic

framing element here, and he uses that to just nestle the roof of the stable into the ox and ass,

looking over the manger, looking at the Christ child, who lies on the ground, not in the manger,

but on the ground, supported, as it were, only by this glow, this aureole of golden rays which emanate

from him, a sort of symbol of humility that he's placed on the ground in this way. And the Madonna

kneels in adoration of her child, and with her hands in prayer. On the left-hand side, a wonderful,

rocky, very abbreviated, but a nice sort of shorthand for a rocky landscape, through which

they've had to pass, and here's some foliage as well in the left-hand corner. On the right-hand side,

Saint Joseph is seated in the foreground in lovely red, and the colors here are quite beautiful. Look at

the look at the colors of the Madonna with the lilac of her dress, and the cloak in two tones of blue,

and then the shifting reds in the cloak of Saint Joseph, and yellow on the sleeve, very beautiful,

quietly shifting colors. And he looks straight up, so straight up that he seems neckless. It's

quite a feat. His head just goes straight back on his shoulders, and he stares straight up into the

sky, by the way, leaving his halo behind. Halos in this period are not, as it were, an organic part

of the body. They don't stick to the head like a hat. They sit behind it as a plate, and if the head

turns, the plate frequently stays, as it does here. Well, where is he looking? He's looking straight up,

but what he is looking at is in the background, quote-unquote. The background, we have an angel

in the sky who is announcing the birth of Christ to the shepherds, and here are two of the shepherds

in the field below. Wonderful figures. You see how they're bent back in a great arc as they look up in

astonishment, as well they should at this angel telling them of the event. Well, this is very odd,

because Joseph looks straight up, and yet he's theoretically looking at them. So the background,

it doesn't really exist as a convincing space. It is all pulled together into one plane in a

decorative fashion. This is typical of Gothic art, including international Gothic. One more thing here

that may be of interest to you, and we may be able to return to it later. Do you see the foreground

and this rocky edge, a kind of cliff as though it opened, especially in the center here, a kind of

rift in the ground, rather threatening, right in front?

I suspect, in fact, this is, in a way, Dante's hell down there. You will find it later, and when we

get all the way to Botticelli, I'll try to remind you of this when we look at a nativity by Botticelli,

and I think, in fact, that this may be a kind of very brief indication of hell at the edge and salvation

right on the brink of it, placed right there. Very beautiful, a very beautiful touch, actually. So

when I say naive, as I did at the outset, saying this is a naive work, well, it's a sophisticated

naive work. There's a lot of thought and a lot of nuance that goes into such a work. What I mean by

naive is that it has a charm which touches us, a visual charm which touches us immediately. Lorenzo Monaco,

from that small panel we saw, also painted this huge altarpiece, which, as you see, it's predella

along the bottom. Each of those panels, similar in size to the one we just saw, all the way across

the bottom of this, and with the side posts, almost lintel-like on the sides of the altarpiece, also with

small paintings of saints mounted in them. The large main part of the altarpiece, and then on top of that,

on the three pinnacles, we have figures as well. The Annunciation on the left, pardon me, on the

left-hand side, the Angel of Annunciation, on the right-hand side, the Madonna, and the symbol of God

the Father at the very top of this. Now, this huge altarpiece by Lorenzo Monaco, today in the Uffizi,

and I don't think I've mentioned that yet, and I think one should know that the Uffizi, if you don't

already, is not only the Great Museum of Florence, but that it means offices, U-F-I-Z-Z-I, the offices.

That was what the building that it's in was built for, and it's retained that name ever since, and of

course, it's one of the great museums in Italy, particularly for Italian art of the Renaissance.

This painting, of course, came from a church before it was moved into, in later years,

moved into the museum. It's an extraordinary painting. It's expansive. The whole field of the

painting opens up from left to right, and in the center, we have the subject, which is the coronation

of the Virgin. The painting, by the way, comes from about 1413 also, about the same time as that previous

small painting, and the coronation of the Virgin, which Christ bestows a heavenly crown upon his,

upon his mother's head. They are, therefore, understood to be in heaven, to be above earth.

That is below the rainbow shape, which arches across the bottom. Earth is below, is below that. And a host

of saints gather on either side of them, many of them quite recognizable. What is particularly beautiful

here is the color, and among the colors, none more beautiful than the white. The white of the Madonna's

robe, normally the Madonna's associated with blue, but now in her heavenly, heavenly guise as she is

being crowned by her son, she is shown in white. And a saint in white to the far left, another to the far

right, anchors the composition, but it also gives a beautiful flow of light, starts a beautiful flow

of light tonality which runs across the entire painting. It is extraordinary, exquisite color.

The figures are large, they're very gracefully drawn, there are effects of volume of three dimensions,

and yet they, that effect of volume is counterpoised by a certain weightlessness. They have a kind of

magical weightlessness, a floating quality. The artist is not interested strongly in the bulk, the weight,

of the figure, per se. I hesitate to pass from it, but I shall to show you the same subject treated by

an artist who we mentioned a moment ago, Gentile de Fabriano. Gentile de Fabriano was born about 1385.

He died in 1427. Their lives, Lorenzo's and his, are almost, are almost the same, at the same space

of time. They are almost exact contemporaries. Gentile de Fabriano traveled widely in Italy. We often

don't give enough credit to the ability of people to travel in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They

got around a lot, and he traveled throughout Italy, only a few years in Florence, but very important

years. His paintings are sumptuous in color. They usually have brilliant gold backgrounds against

which the figures of the religious narratives are placed. You see the difference in going from that

previous painting. Not that, not that there is nothing medieval or late gothic about the, about

the Lorenzo Manico, but here in the Gentile de Fabriano, gold takes over in a sense. The gold of

the backgrounds, the gold of all of the architectural decoration of the, of the pinnacles above the,

above the individual scenes. A very elaborate altarpiece, one by the way which has been recently

reconstructed frequently. They were taken apart and not quite sure how to put them back together again,

but in any event, what a different effect. Instead of that vast court, which we just had in Lorenzo

Manico, a whole court of saints standing there on either side of the Madonna, this is divided into

separate compartments. It is compartmentalized. It is an earlier piece of art, and that is part of the,

part of the point, point here. The coronation of the Virgin, in this case, painted probably about 1400,

and today in Milan, in the museum there is called the Brera, B-R-E-R-A. This is simplicity itself,

when compared with Lorenzo's full court of attendant figures, as I, as I mentioned a moment ago. We have

only in the center, Jesus and his mother elevated above the earth against a golden background, while

below a tiny angel, a band of tiny angel musicians play. Can you see them right across the bottom here,

a little arc of angel musicians accompanying the event? The rest of the altarpiece subdivided into these

compartments. Gentile di Fabriano also painted and is very famous for his Adoration of the Magi of 1423,

also in the Uffizi. His Adoration was painted in a much more thoroughgoing way, that is to say,

it is not subdivided in the same way, but one continuous space. We have at the top of it a group

of figures entering here, a large train of figures through a city gate, finally winding around and

coming down to this area of the front of the altarpiece, where the Magi kneel and stand before

the Holy Family. It is a very influential painting, a much imitated painting. It is glorious in the rich

costumes of the Magi and often physically enhanced by the building up of the surface in gesso, actually

in a kind of plaster of Paris, to emulate the crowns, for instance. They're actually built up three

dimensionally and then painted, and so it gives it an extraordinary presence. Crowded with figures,

it has all of the atmosphere of a pageant, and it must have appealed greatly to contemporary

Italians who loved public events. Let me show you a bird's eye map of Florence. I won't dwell on it,

but it's a handsome map with the Arno flowing through, and on the left you can see quite clearly

the tower of the dome, pardon me, of the cathedral here, and the Palazzo Vecchio down a little further

toward the river. Many other towers, of course, in a city like all Florentine, like all Italian medieval

cities, there were many more towers originally than are there today. Stylistically, Lorenzo Ghiberti,

who was one of the greatest sculptors of Florence and of the Quattrocento, occupies a transitional place

between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I want to point out to you on this map the baptistry,

right in front of the cathedral. It's right there, the cathedral facade right behind it. It is the

baptistry which we'll be looking at in a moment. Ghiberti has a transitional spot between the Middle

Ages and the Renaissance, half his work belonging to the Gothic era, half to the new style.

The air view, which I show you now, of the cathedral and baptistry, in 1401, Ghiberti won a public

competition, which I'll talk about in the next lecture, if I may, to design a set of bronze doors

for the north side of the Florentine baptistry, perhaps the most venerable monument in the city.

His chief competition for the project was Filippo Brunelleschi, whom we will also talk about in the

next lecture. The Florentine baptistry, which I show you now, from the east side, standing in front of

the cathedral, is of course dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. It is San Giovanni, the baptistry

naturally devoted to him. And it is one of the most venerated buildings in Florence. Dante called

it Belle San Giovanni, beautiful San Giovanni, Saint John. And although this is a Romanesque structure

from the 11th and 12th centuries, by the 14th century it was popularly thought to be a Roman building.

That's how little understanding of history there was at the outset of the Renaissance.

Again, communal memory might have been at work here because the foundations of a temple of Mars

have since been discovered under the baptistry, so there may have been a communal memory in a sense.

Ghiberti's doors on the north side of the baptistry were designed and produced over a long period,

1403 to 1424. It shouldn't be imagined by the way that Ghiberti was doing nothing else during that 20

to 25 years. He had many projects, but this was the ongoing project which required a large workshop.

Stylistically, these doors belonged to the late Gothic period. They were originally, by the way,

installed on the east side facing the cathedral doors. They have been moved and are now the north doors.

The doors. Since there are 28 panels on the doors, the field for each narrative scene is quite small,

quite reduced, and that required Ghiberti to focus his attention on each composition.

Moreover, the shape of each field is a quatrefoil, greatly complicating the compositional demands.

This is a standard Gothic shape, and it made composing within it quite interesting. Each scene had to be

carefully condensed and confined to meaningful essentials. A further obvious limitation, the absence of color,

other than gilding, of course, concentrated the artist's efforts especially upon expressive figures, gesture and pose.

Unexpectedly, the narrative of the life of Christ begins not at the top of the doors, but at the bottom of the doors,

not all the way at the bottom, but in the third row from the bottom, just above a double row

of panels which represent the four evangelists and the four fathers of the church. The evangelists whose

gospels recorded the events of the life of Christ, and the fathers of the church whose writings enlarged

upon and interpreted that life. In other words, they are placed at the bottom of these doors as the

spiritual and theological foundation of the church. We're going to look at two early scenes in the

narrative. Let me locate them for you. The Annunciation is at the far left, third row from the bottom.

The Adoration of the Magi in the same row, two panels over, or second from the right. Those are the two

that we will examine, and that is their position. And then the rest of the scenes move chronologically

upward. The Annunciation. This is one of the most obviously, one of the most frequently represented

subjects in Christian art, since it's the announcement by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she will be the

mother of the Messiah. The event is described only by Luke among the four evangelists or gospel writers.

In the words, Hail thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women.

Ghiberti's composition is superbly simple and clear. A horizontal shelf is fitted

into the lower cusps of the quatrefoil, here and on the right, as a ground plane, a shelf as a ground plane,

and a vertical doorway is provided to and frame the Virgin Annunciate. The doorway is also symbolic,

since Mary is the door through whom Jesus entered the world. The Archangel Gabriel, on the left, and God

the Father at the upper left, releasing the dove of the Holy Spirit, each emerge from a corner of the

quatrefoil. Let me point out, by the way, the elegant way in which the angel's wing is fitted into the angle of that

quatrefoil. What a beautiful, beautiful composition. The angel arrives on a on a little platform of clouds,

you can actually see them here, a little platform of clouds, and he hasn't yet lit. The convergence of the two

diagonals, that of the angel and that of God the Father, toward the Virgin, dramatizes the moment of

incarnation. She herself instinctively pulls back from the arriving angel very naturally and very

beautifully. She seems very much a young girl. At the same time, that curve of her body is very much

part of the repertory of the international Gothic style. Although much more crowded, the adoration of the

Magi is similarly composed. A canopy above the Virgin's chair provides cover for Mary, the child, and

Joseph, standing here with his hand on one of the pillars. An arcade continues from that portico toward

the left side, and there the Magi and their retinue have arrived, eight in all, I think, and crowd into the

space, but they're arranged with great care. The eldest king has been prostrate on the ground, and now he

slowly raises his head and hand to kiss the child's foot. Joseph and Mary look down in, well, quiet

surprise, I think, and look at their hands. The echoing hands of Joseph and the Madonna are very beautiful here.

The prostrate king, the Magus, links the Holy Family with the left side of the panel, and the other two Magi

stand in front. At the left, their bodies in opposing curves to each other, their robes beautifully,

expressively arranged. Of the attendants behind them, the most interesting is the African here with the

monkey on his shoulder, representing the prophecy of Isaiah that all peoples would come out of the East

to worship the Messiah. That tradition of an African among the Magi or their followers is a very

consistent one. While this project was proceeding, Ghiberti was commissioned to produce a life-size bronze

statue, the John the Baptist, which you see here, designed and cast between 1412 and 1414 for a niche

on the exterior of Orsan Michele, the Gothic chapel of the guilds, whose interior we saw at the end of the

last lecture. It has a curvilinear sweep to the pose, the body, comparable to Lorenzo Monaco's painted figures,

but with a forceful humanity that suggests a shift in attitude, if not yet in style. Beautifully modeled,

strong, deep modeling of the drapery, and a very forceful modeling of the face itself,

all give this a great, a great power, and it is a wonderful piece moving from Gothic, in a sense,

toward the Renaissance. Finally, let me show you a sweeping view of that beautiful city of Florence,

just to remind you where all this activity was taking place. In the next lecture, we will take

an introductory look at Florentine architecture and a further look at the sculpture on the baptistry doors.

Thank you for your attention.