Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi were the most important painters in Florence after the death of

Masaccio, although they show very little of his influence. Fra Angelico, who was born about 1400

and died in 1455, spent most of his career in the service of the Dominican order, first in Fiesole

and then in the convent of San Marco in Florence, which today is a museum of his art. Nothing is known

about his early training. He was born Guido di Pietro in Fiesole. Fiesole is located, situated in

the lovely hills immediately to the north of Florence with beautiful views of Florence from

Fiesole. Fra Angelico, as he is known to us, led a straightforward, outwardly uneventful life as a

painter for the Dominican order to which he belonged. Once thought to have been born in 1387, he is now

believed to have been about the same age as Masaccio. Already painting as a layman by 1417,

he soon entered monastic life under the name Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, where he lived in the friary

for many years. That we don't know him today as Fra Giovanni is owed to a contemporary writer who dubbed

him the angelic painter, and it took. The Annunciation, I'll say more about it in a moment, but I'll identify

it now an Annunciation from about 1430-32, now in Madrid in the Prado. The Annunciation is a

subject much associated with Fra Angelico. He obviously absorbed the international Gothic style,

as exemplified by Lorenzo Monaco, which would have remained especially popular in the conservative

monastic communities. Remember Lorenzo Monaco was a monk. And his work reflects also the influence of

Ghiberti and Masolino, but he also would have seen Masaccio's achievements when they were new. And these

stylistic options all seem to have appealed to him, and his work is marked by the ability to choose among

the dominant styles. His most extensive work was done for San Marco, the Dominican monastery in Florence,

which he decorated throughout, and the church of the monastery as well. Fra Angelico painted numerous

versions of the Annunciation that are similar in composition, though different in other respects.

This painting in the Prado is divided into three nearly equal segments, with the principal scene set

into a double arcade at the right. The Archangel and the Virgin each are set within a single arch,

framed in their own archway, directly facing each other, and I hope you understand me when I say

gently substantial in their physical presence. They are rounded physical figures. They are fully modeled,

but Angelico's approach is so gentle that they have a great delicacy. The physicality

is not overemphasized. They incline, the two of them, they incline their bodies symmetrically toward

each other. The radiant pink of the angel's robe contrasts wonderfully with the deep blue

of the Virgin's cloak. At the left, in a delicately flowered lawn, which has a very international Gothic

feel to it, Adam and Eve are seen. You see them here, the upper left. Adam and Eve are seen as they are

expelled from Paradise. They look thoroughly bereft and without any energy as they leave. And the angel expelling

them is just above them here. Why are they there? Well, their fall is atoned by the Incarnation, which is implicit

in the Annunciation.

This large deposition, a large altarpiece now in San Marco, painted about 1435, completed a commission that

was originally given to Lorenzo Monaco for the Church of Santa Trinita. Lorenzo painted only the Gothic pinnacles

at the top, the pointed areas, and the flanking pilasters of the altarpiece of the framework before

he died in 1425. We don't know how long, we assume, about ten years before it was picked up by

Frangelico. And when he painted the main scene, the central scene, he did something very different than

Lorenzo Monaco had done in the surrounding framework. He successfully created a volumetric,

a space with volumetric columnar figures, a coherent space. I'll come back to those figures

in a moment. That space includes a very lovely landscape in which we see Jerusalem on the left

and the Tuscan hills on the right. Of course, the artist hadn't been to Jerusalem, but the real point

here is to put the biblical scene in your own backyard, in your own setting, so that it is familiar to you.

There's no middle ground, by the way. That is to say, the eye goes from the foreground figures to the

background landscape, and there's no connecting middle ground. But the poetic landscape is rendered in the

same perspectival continuum as the foreground. It is controlled by the foreground figures. The artist

uses the triple arcade, which is still a gothic arch. It was preordained, it was given to him, as it were,

the triple arcade of the frame to effectively organize the very hushed emotional drama around the body of

Christ. It's organized as well by the rhythmic placement of colors, the tones of blue and red.

Just let your eye glide over that surface for a while, and you recognize how, for instance,

these two figures in red, kneeling left and right, start a pyramid that goes up to the figure helping to

lower the body of Christ. And there are blues surrounding the body of Christ. So this very, very

subtle and lovely use of different tones of blue and red to organize the surface is part of its beauty.

Those columnar figures, and I am looking at the ones here, one of the onlookers, perhaps

a person who was in the monastery, and here one of the saints who is helping to lower the body.

The drapery is given a great straight fall with pleats. It really does look columnar, like the flutes in a column,

and it lends a great dignity to these figures, a great supporting quality. And in the center,

the diagonal body of Christ is gently, gently, gently brought down along, slightly broken diagonal,

slightly broken down to the lower left. Extraordinarily effective. Between 1430 and 1435,

Frangelico painted two versions of the Coronation of the Virgin. At first glance, they're quite similar,

yet they have very important differences, and I'll show them both to you. The Coronation of the Virgin that

you are seeing now, the earlier version, was painted for the Dominican convent in Fiesole. It's now in the Louvre.

It was probably painted between 1430 and 1432, and it's large. It's about seven feet high.

Although the majority of the crowd of, a very large crowd of saints and angels whom you see here,

are little more than heads arranged in serried rows. The kneeling foreground figures, this whole group in

the foreground at the bottom, are fully solid creations in the manner of Masaccio. They kneel on a tiled

pavement that is laid out on a perspective plan, and the tiered throne behind, which rises beyond them

here, is as solid as it is opulent. The kneeling Madonna and Christ, the Madonna kneels in front

of Christ as he crowns her, are equally physical, equally of the physical world. Now, the second

Coronation of the Virgin, which is in the Uffizi today, painted about 1435, just a little later,

was originally painted for a church named Sant'Egidio, which then changed its name later, was

reconsecrated at Santa Maria Nuova. Eventually, the painting left the church, came to the museum.

It's about half the size of the first painting that we looked at. Same subject, Coronation of the

Virgin, half the size, but the real contrast is not in the size, but in the mystical, ethereal glow of

the painting. Here, all the attendant figures are placed on clouds, all of them. Look at the bottom

here. You see these, this is a, these are clouds down here, and they're all sort of treading gently

on the, on the clouds. And of course, the Madonna and Christ are also here on clouds, and what is

probably a, probably a little angel heads among them, I can't be sure. And the brilliant golden

rays that fan out from the top like swords above and below the divine group are the most startling and

beautiful part of the painting. It's a completely different approach, or a very different approach,

if not completely. It's not without elements of Renaissance style, but here Fra Angelico has

chosen to endow the heavenly court with a visionary appearance which is closer to late medieval painting

than in the first treatment of the same subject. Between 1438 and 1440, Fra Angelico painted

a very large altarpiece in a fully Renaissance style for the rebuilt church of San Marco. Since San Marco was

under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, and since the patron saints of the Medici family were the physician

martyrs, Cosmos and Damien, these two saints prominently feature in the altarpiece.

Medici means doctors, and so the doctor saints, Cosmos and Damien, when you see them, they're either

in a Medici altarpiece or in something commissioned by a, by a hospital or a medical confraternity,

or something of that sort, that's where they appear. The altarpiece itself was terribly damaged from an

early, and I mean 19th century, over cleaning. But the small predella panels, which they ignored,

escaped that fate, and this is one of them. It shows the beheading of saints Cosmos and Damien,

and it is a painting of a delicate beauty that underscores the gruesome martyrdom. This is an

interesting thing. Contrast can so often evoke more emotion. You take the delicacy of style and

show something horrible, and it can, it can jangle, as it say, jangle the nerves extraordinarily. There

is a kind of naive literalism here that is more horrifying than expressionistic exaggeration could

ever be. The, the heads of Cosmos and Damien in the foreground still retain their halos. They have been

beheaded, and here they are, and they still have their halos on, the beheaded, beheaded, well, the heads

lying there. While the just decapitated brother still kneels, right here, with blood spouting from his neck

while his head has already rolled and joined those of his brothers. And of the youngest boys,

one is about to receive the blow here in the middle, while the last, still waiting over here,

has even managed to elicit the sympathy of one of the stolt soldiers standing beside. There's a kind of

pre-cinematic progression of murders in the staging of the five brothers. And, and it moves me for another

reason. We've all read of, for instance, Nazi atrocities when one person was arrested for plotting

against the party or the power, and the whole family who were not complicit in it were murdered as a

warning, and it still happens. These, these paintings, these old master paintings tell stories

that unhappily are not passé. The city wall on the left in this painting, and the curving road which leads

from the foreground executions, and executions were very familiar to Florentine viewers, into the equally

familiar gentle Tuscan landscape. The, it has a fluid, fluidity of transition and a unity of the landscape

parts, even though it's a very small painting. It marks an advance in the representation of painted space.

To me, and I speak personally, but to me the most fascinating aspect of Fra Angelico's art is his

ability to switch between a late medieval style, complete with brilliant gold backgrounds, and a more

realistic Renaissance manner, perhaps depending on the demands of the commission, the intended location

of the painting, perhaps simply the patron's taste. It's interesting because we have a rather romantic

notion that an artist's style is inviolate, sacred, not to be changed without much soul searching, and

certainly not to be changed because somebody might buy the picture if you agreed to change the style. This

notion reflects the concept of the artist as a genius, rather than the artist as a craftsman, and it's the

artist as a craftsman, which was the usual attitude toward artists before Michelangelo. The painting I

show you next, which will be a transition between Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, is a much discussed,

well-known, much-loved painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. And I think it's always nice to

occasionally look at a problem picture. More pictures are problem pictures than one imagines, but

this is one in which the authorship has been much discussed. And here I use it to introduce Fra Filippo

Lippi into the story, and to suggest what is an apparent collaboration between him and Fra Angelico. I put

collaboration in quotation marks because they were not working side by side, but rather in the way that

Fra Angelico had completed an earlier altarpiece by Lorenzo Monaco, we have something that seems to be

similar here. It's been suggested that in this painting, The Adoration of the Magi, painted about

1445 in large part, that it was designed and painted, much of it, some of it at least, by Fra Angelico

before he was called to Rome by the Pope in 1445. You didn't turn down the Pope's request that you

come to Rome to work at the Vatican, and so he left an unfinished altarpiece. And it fell to Fra

Filippo Lippi at some point to complete the painting, possibly after Fra Angelico died and was unable to

return to the work. The not-so-simple question, one of connoisseurship, is who painted which parts? So,

let's play connoisseur. Actually, the only way you can play connoisseur is to spend hours in front of

the painting and in front of related paintings looking at them, and that, of course, is half the fun.

It's now generally agreed, and when I say that, of course, that means there are a whole lot of

people who don't agree. It's generally agreed that the Madonna and Child, here in the right foreground,

with the magus kneeling in front of them, are the work of Fra Angelico. It seems likely that he'd

laid out much of the composition, and perhaps painted in many parts, at least in basic outline.

After inheriting the work, Fra Filippo Lippi may have revised many of Fra Angelico's unfinished figures,

and added others of his own invention. And the final painting may contain more passages by Lippi

than by Fra Angelico. The round format is called a tondo, T-O-N-D-O, and it's a very popular form in

the Renaissance. And in this work, the artist's composition has been brilliantly adapted to the

tondo form, with the procession of magi entering through an arch at the upper left, right here,

through this arch, following the curve of the frame, through a path at the lower center,

where they meet the Holy Family with the stable behind, and then the movement continues at the upper

right, where people exit along a steep path out of the scene at the top right. So you have a

beautiful, beautifully worked out, it's a very large painting, and beautifully worked out composition.

There are many symbols in this painting. As one can imagine, there are often lots of animals,

flowers, birds, and so forth, which are symbolic, and which are hard to keep in mind. But the most

noticeable symbol here is surely the large peacock perched on top of the manger, of the stable rather.

The peacock is a symbol of immortality, because its flesh was believed to not decay. And so it became

a symbol of immortality, but it's a symbol of many things, as you know. So the peacock can stand for

many different things. But here it's placed very prominently. Moreover, it calls attention to the

to the support of the roof of the stable, where those supporting trusses, the arrangement of them,

you see here, can suggest both the cross and, because there are three prominent members, the trinity.

This kind of, we don't think symbolically anymore, but people did. And they would see this pretty

quickly. It wasn't something that had to be instructed, had to be told to them. I believe,

by the way, and I'm not sure that a lot of people agree with me, but you see there are a lot of semi-nude

figures on the wall up here, on this fragmented wall, broken wall. Well, the broken wall,

ruin like this, can represent the fall of the pagan world in the face of Christianity.

And these figures, to me, just inside the gate and on the way to the nativity scene,

could be considered neophytes, figures ready to be baptized, as we saw in Masaccio. That, at least,

is the way I tend to judge, I tend to interpret it here. Fra Filippo Lippi, who worked on this painting

so much, was paint, was born, pardon me, about 1406, died in 1469. He was placed in a Carmelite monastery

by his very poor parents, and he took vows there in 1421. The monastery, the Carmelite monastery that

he was placed in as an orphan, was the, well, as a volunteered orphan, as a poor child, was the one

centered on Santa Maria del Carmine, the Brancacci Chapel. And Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the

Artists, asserted that it was watching Masaccio at work in the Brancacci Chapel, in the monastery

church, that determined Filippo to become an artist. He was, as almost everyone knows, an irresponsible

young man, however, often failing in his artistic contractual obligations and absolutely failing

in his monastic vows. Famously, he fathered children with a nun, Lucrezia, married her, left the

monastery. They later married. They were given permission. And even though he left the monastery,

he continued to sign himself Frater Philippus. He didn't abandon the connection. His character

and life have made him a natural subject for imaginative speculation. And in Robert Browning's

mid-19th century dramatic monologue, which you may know, he has the painter say,

you should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls.

Well, Lippi was probably fifteen, not eight, when he entered the monastery. Apparently he did more

than kiss the girls. But soon after, Vasari was surely correct in asserting that he watched Masaccio

at work in the Brancacci Chapel. He may even have assisted Masolino and Masaccio in some small ways

as he watched them there, and that decided him to become a painter. The influence of Fra Angelico

was added to that of Masaccio. Poetic delicacy added to significant form, charm and inward quietness in equal

measure. This altarpiece, a very imposing, very beautiful painting,

the Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, is known as the Barbadori altarpiece, B-A-R-B-A-D-O-R-I,

a family name, the family that commissioned it, the Barbadori. It was begun in 1437. It's a handsome

and assured painting. It was for a chapel, the family chapel, in the Church of Santo Spirito, which was

just, as I may have mentioned when I showed you the map, just two blocks from the Carmine itself.

The frame, as you see, has three round Renaissance arches, not pointed Gothic arches as the Lorenzo

Monaco Fra Angelico painting did, the deposition. It divides the picture space. It contrasts with Lorenzo

and Fra Angelico's earlier deposition, and which was, of course, initially designed by Lorenzo,

who was a Gothic painter. Here, the arcade is more integrated into the pictorial space, because the

scene is set in an interior rather than in a landscape, and because it corresponds, the frame,

corresponds to the dense intimate figure groupings. They are carefully arranged according to this,

to the arch, which is the frame, but conceived as part of the pictorial space, and the columns,

which are painted behind it in the space. The unified composition of the saints and angels,

with the Madonna and child, make this an early example of the sacred conversation. In Italian,

sacra conversazione. We'll encounter it frequently from now on. A sacred conversation is one in which the

physical and psychological connectedness of all the figures in the altarpiece, one with the other,

departs from the Trecento idea of isolation, of one in its own space, its own niche, separate,

but rather they gather together here and interact both psychologically and physically.

And interestingly here, this is a history of halos, I guess, in contrast to Fra Angelico

and to Masaccio. The halos of the holy families in the Barbadori altarpiece are transparent, rather

than solid gold discs. You can actually see through them, perhaps you can see that on the Madonna's

halo. You can see the vault behind. So there's something really quite wonderful. It's more mystical,

at the same time it's still a physical piece which attaches to the head. Moreover, Lippi has learned from

Masaccio to depict these halos in foreshortening, just as Masaccio had. There's much more I'd like

to say about this painting, but I'm moving on to an Annunciation. An Annunciation still in the spot

for which it was painted, the Medici Church of San Lorenzo, painted about 1440. A wonderful Annunciation,

and again, Lippi has integrated an arched frame with the painted architecture of the scene within.

Whereas Fra Angelico's Annunciation, which we saw first this afternoon, used a central column to

separate the angel and the virgin, Lippi places both angel and the virgin Annunciate on the right

half of the panel, while two additional angels are placed on the left-hand side of the pillar,

which divides the panel. Lippi uses these angels to draw us into a pictorial world. When we discussed

perspective in Lecture 5, we mentioned Alberti, who talked about perspective, but his book contains much

more than interesting material on perspective, much, much more, including how figures should be posed

and composed. In Lippi's painting, the addition of the two angels, which is not required by any written

authority, it's not in Scripture. It allows him to invent a variety of different poses among the angels,

and Alberti praised that kind of variety. And Alberti said, a painting in which there are bodies

in many dissimilar poses is always especially pleasing. These kind of rules, there are more observations

than rules on Alberti's part, are of great importance during the Renaissance. Alberti went on,

and this is a perfect example of this dictum, if you look at the angel at the left-hand side who looks

at us. Alberti said, I like to see someone in a painting who admonishes and points out to us what's

happening here. And that's exactly what happens. The angel looks at us, points over to the Annunciation

on the other side, brings us into the picture, doesn't ignore us. So it's not just a window onto the

world. Not just that picture opening, but rather an opening in which we're invited by the actors in

the painting to join us. That angel provides the initial entry into the pictorial space. He points

at the Virgin on the right side, which keeps our attention on that group. Behind the Virgin, the brightly

lit orthogonal, the receding diagonal of the building on the right-hand side back here, leads the eye

rapidly to the vanishing point at the end of the deep garden. That vanishing point, however, is located

just to the right of the central pillar of the front plane, thus returning our attention immediately to

the front and to the subject, to the significant subject of the Annunciation. The complex interaction

of space and surface of movement and counter-movement is a remarkable feature of Filippo Lippi's paintings,

and here and elsewhere. Filippo Lippi is justly famous for his exquisite lyrical interpretations of

the Madonna and Child in different settings, various settings. This one is a seated Madonna and Child,

a very beautiful, beautiful panel in which the Madonna is seated in a, you see, in a very elegant

Renaissance chair. Look at the arm of the chair here. She is inward in her gaze. She doesn't hold

the child. She has her hands folded in adoration. It's the two angels, one whom you see in the foreground

and one whose face just peeks out from under the Christ child's arm, who lift the child up to her,

but she doesn't look directly at the child, and a beautiful landscape which is, which is beyond the

painting, a very rocky and, and a sort of fantastic landscape. I will show you two adorations of the

child. The adoration imagery is when you have the child on the ground, not in a manger but lying on the

ground or on some very, very minimal support here on the gown, the hem of his mother's dress,

and the Madonna adores the child, and Saint Joseph in this case sits beside. A seated Joseph and a kneeling

Mary contemplate the Christ child lying on the hem of the Virgin's garment. Angels look above with an

inscribed scroll, hover at the top while subsidiary saints here and over here flank the scene in the

background. Saints that would have been specific to the location in the church or the chapel.

Another is this adoration of the child with the young John the Baptist and Saint Romualdo. Here is

John the Baptist to the right. Joseph is not here. It is now just the Madonna. Beautiful colors of her

costume, extraordinary delicacy of line, and she adores the child lying in a kind of glow on the ground.

A Baptist over here, Saint Romualdo down here. The expressive potential of a night scene of a

nocturne is magnified in this picture. You won't see Saint Romualdo often. He was a 10th century

Benedictine hermit monk and he is typically in paintings commissioned by the Benedictines. In this

painting, the iconography of the painting includes at the top of the adoration scene, the hands of God. Do

you see them here and here? Just the hands of God and the dove, more prominent here of the Holy Spirit,

to create a mystical trinity united with the prophecy of the Baptist concerning Jesus. The painting

is suffused with the most beautiful, shimmering, irrational luminosity. The final ingredient

in Fra Filippo Lippi's art was his innately simple, direct style. And here Robert Browning was right on the

mark. And of course, he puts the words into Filippo Lippi's mouth. If you get simple beauty and not else,

you get about the best thing God invents.