Original subtitles

Good afternoon. I would like to share with you three artists whom I tend to think of as specialists,

I put them under that rubric, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, and Domenico Veneziana.

As Renaissance artists explored the natural world and developed new means of representing

it in paint on a two-dimensional surface, some of them naturally became especially fascinated

with one or another of the available artistic means of achieving this representation. The

common aim was shared by many artists whose individual emphases naturally differed. This

lecture will look at two or three paintings by each of the three artists whose contrasting

interests I think will be readily apparent. Of course, many of them were fascinated by perspective,

the most radical innovation in Renaissance art, which we've discussed in some detail when we

looked at Masaccio. Paolo Uccello, U-C-C-E-L-L-O, was devoted to the study of foreshortening and perspective.

Andrea del Castagno, C-A-S-T-A-G-N-O, since I've begun, Andrea del Castagno found ways to make his

figures look almost like painted sculptures. And Domenico Veneziano, bringing with him from his

native Venice the fascination with color and light that have always typified that city's art,

introduced a tonal delicacy and pastel palette that were uncommon in Florence.

For a painter like Paolo Uccello, nothing was as compelling as the construction of a fictive space

that was a credible image of real space, in which he could place figures and objects in a measurable

spatial relationship to each other. Paolo Uccello was born in 1397. He lived a very long life. He died

in 1475. And he received his initial training as an assistant in Ghiberti's workshop when the first set

of baptistry doors were being developed. And you'll recall that Donatello was also assisting in that shop

at that time. Uccello later worked on mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice in the 1420s,

and he designed stained glass for the Florentine Duomo. But it's as a painter that he is known,

drawn to the art through a fascination with the new science of perspective.

Although rather little survives of his oeuvre, most of that is remarkable for its focus on perspective

and foreshortening. You're looking at a fresco, a painted monument to a condottiere named Sir John

Hawkwood, painted in 1436. It's in the cathedral in the Duomo of Florence. The monument to Sir John

Hawkwood, a fresco on the wall of the cathedral, the inside wall, is Uccello's earliest dated painting.

John Hawkwood, the subject, died in 1394. He was an English mercenary soldier. They're called

condottiere in Italy, and he commanded the Florentine army up until the time of his death. In gratitude for

his services, and in honour of the republic, of course, the Florentine government decided to

commemorate Hawkwood's military success in defeating the the Milanese forces of John Galeazzo Visconti.

In 1394, after Hawkwood's death, the city fathers had initially decreed an elaborate tomb for him in

the cathedral, and it was going to be one of a series of tombs to great men in Florence, great heroes.

And by the way, you can see the close relationship between the secular and the sacred here. It's in

the cathedral, but it was the city fathers who ordained it. It was soon decided that a less

expensive fresco would do just as well, and one was in place soon after. Uccello's fresco replaced

the first fresco, and I'm not sure why, and I don't know that it's known. Perhaps the first one,

which probably was done by the turn of the century, wasn't satisfactory. Perhaps it got damaged.

Perhaps they just didn't like it. But it was replaced by the one that you see here.

This fresco, which you have to understand is life-size as though that were a life-size

equestrian sculpture, so it takes up a very large space of the wall, was originally on the inside

wall of the west facade, the entrance facade. It was later moved, frescos can be moved,

to the north wall of the church. It is an illusionistic image of an equestrian monument,

painted in monochrome pigments, which obviously was a lot less costly than an actual stone and

bronze monument would have been. In the painting, Uccello, in love with perspective, uses two perspective

systems with different viewpoints. Why would he do that? He needed to balance illusion with aesthetic

concerns. If you'll look at it, the tomb, which supports the horse, is seen sharply from below.

You see here on the base of the tomb, you can see that quite, you're looking up at the underside of this

corbelled projection of the fictive base. This is all flat, all painted, but you are looking up at it

as you stand on the church floor as though it were a real tomb and you're seeing the under part of it.

However, he shows the horse and rider almost straight on. Had he shown the horse and rider from the same

low viewpoint, he would have had a rather unpleasing view of the horse's belly and a distorted face

of John Hawkwood that would not have been pleasant and you probably wouldn't have recognized him.

So, if you insist on a single foreshortened point of view, it presents aesthetic problems. And so,

we had this switch, this change. The painting is a very powerful image of this Condottiere,

a painting which gives us a sense of his importance to the community and to the Republic of Florence.

Let me say one further word about one point perspective. One point perspective is rigid.

If there's no alteration or variation or modification of it, it means essentially that you're standing

absolutely still with one eye closed because it's a monocular system. It's not the binocular system

that we actually, the way we actually see. And it's very rigid. If you start moving away in viewing the

painting that was made with that perspective from one point or another, the perspective starts to fall

apart, starts to not work very well. Or in this case, had they used one point throughout, it would have been

simply unpleasant. So, two point perspectives were developed in order to deal with this, to deal

with this problem. And various modifications of the one point perspective was, were introduced.

I should say one further word about this Condottiere, John Hawkwood. Who's John Hawkwood? Well, he was an

Englishman as I said, but he wasn't called John Hawkwood in Florence because the name was too difficult.

John became Giovanni. That's easy enough. But they couldn't manage the initial H or the WK together.

And of course, they don't end with consonants, so we have Giovanni Acuto. And that is how he was known

in Florence to his compatriots.

This is Uccello's, one of Uccello's, Battle of San Romano.

So, there are three paintings, once all together, now in three different museums,

large paintings of battle scenes that once decorated a wall of the bedchamber of Lorenzo

de' Medici in the Medici Palace, painted probably between 1438 and 1440. Since they were in that

bedroom, since they were, we know from an inventory that they were there, we think also they were placed

end to end in a frieze, which would have been about 10 meters, 34 feet long. Huge frieze of battle

scenes, and you just can imagine, if you will, this one repeated several times. Since they were there

and they stayed in the Medici possession through the 16th century, it's always been assumed that

they were commissioned by the Medici, perhaps by Cosimo de' Medici. But in fact, recent research has

discovered that Lorenzo de' Medici liked them so much that he confiscated them from the family who

owned them. The Bartolini, I'll try it again, Bartolini-Salembeni family. The Bartolini-Salembeni

family, after the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1495, they complained about this, they wanted some

reparation. They said that one of the brothers had agreed to sell it, the other one had not, and Lorenzo

had simply gone, sent somebody in to take them anyway, probably between 1479 and 1486. So art

history is being rewritten all the time. Lorenzo simply took what he wanted. The painting, The Battle

of San Romano, is typical of the trio. The other two are, this is in London, the other two in the Uffizi and

the Louvre. Although representing an engagement with the Sienese forces in 1432, it is more pageant

than battle, with brightly caparisoned horses and agitated banners distributed rigidly across the

painting. A very, very, very pageant-like presentation. I used a word which I like, caparisoned,

which in fact refers to outfitting a horse with ornamental trappings, but it's a lot simpler to

say caparisoned, and besides, it's a word that came in to English during the Renaissance and into

Shakespeare. And it has a certain gait to it that sounds, that sounds nicely processional to me.

When you look at this, everybody is struck by the wooden toy quality of the horses and the soldiers,

and it stems from Lucello's preoccupation with achieving convincingly foreshortened figures

within a perspective grid. Now, the grid is set up by the things that have fallen on the ground below.

The orthogonals, the receding diagonals, principally consist of fallen warriors in steep perspective,

together with broken lances and pieces of armor. And those all set up the perspective

movement from the foreground into the background. And that lends itself, obviously, to a kind of

rigidity. The suspended animation of the foreground figures is replaced in the landscape with something

rather delightful, because there are a few figures still, if you look back in the landscape here,

beyond the hedge. A few soldiers continue to fight, and they're wonderfully meandering fields and vineyards

on a hillside back here. It's a much more naturalistic approach back there, because he's no longer concerned

with this, with making his perspective work as well as he can. By the way, no sky is visible here to

counter the busyness of the scene and to sort of modify it. And it's probable that the paintings were

originally taller and were cut down to fit a new location. They may even have had arched tops to fit

into an architectural setting. Here it becomes apparent that Uccello, like his teacher Ghiberti,

retains stylistic affinities with the international Gothic and its decorative tapestry-like compositions.

There are some portraits among the soldiers, notably the central horseman. He is Nicola da Tolentino,

the Florentine captain, his wonderful hat. He is carefully characterized. He is an obvious portrait.

Before leaving Uccello, I have to tell the famous story told by Vasari that I think we can assume is

true. Uccello was working late in his studio one night, and his wife called him to bed, his long-suffering

wife, oh, come to bed, Paolo. And he replied, perspective is such a sweet mistress.

Andrea del Castagno, whom I will look at next, and he's not the only artist who had this preoccupation,

was preoccupied with volume over other aspects of painting, with sculptural solidity of figures.

That solidity of figures and of objects was paramount for him. Castagno gives us something which quite

clearly is related to Uccello's John Hawkwood monument. It was meant to be a pair. And incidentally,

the subject of it is Nicola da Tolentino, whom we just saw as Condottieri in the battle scene a minute

ago. So this is his separate monument in the cathedral to join, to be a pair with the painting

by Uccello 20 years earlier, because now we are at 1456. And this too was initially on the wall just

inside the door, and then moved to the north wall, as was the Uccello. Andrea del Castagno was born

about 1419. He died in 1457, and he focused his attention, as I say, on the human figure, which he

painted with a muscular three-dimensionality that is imposing and occasionally almost overwhelming.

In addition to the device of foreshortening, he achieved this power, this foreshortening,

this sense of power through powerfully sculptural modeling, in which abrupt shifts from light to dark

describe the structure of the body while giving it emotional heft. If you look at Nicola da Tolentino on his

perch, the Condottieri, you will see that it is very similar in several respects to the monument of John

Hawkwood. Executed in 1456, it was also moved, as I say, and we are looking here again at something in

which two-point perspective has been used, a shifting point, I should say, of perspective, because again we are

looking up at the tomb and straight on at the horse and rider. The painting is almost convulsively modeled.

If you look at the body of the horse, it's as though he were modeling in clay. Every lump and

part of the horse is overstressed, whether it's the legs or the rump or the body of the horse, the head, rather

extraordinary head. In fact, he's really given it every possibility of light and shadow to suggest a very

strong, a very strongly modeled three-dimensional figure. He uses the double perspective system, the two

points of view, to make the painting more attractive, as his predecessor had done. In the National Gallery in

Washington is this painting of the young David, David of David and Goliath, by Castaño, probably painted

about 1450, a painting which is considerably abraded. It's been much rubbed and the underpaint comes through

in the color of the skin and so forth. Nonetheless, it still projects a convincingly angular bony physique,

especially in the legs of, in the legs of David. This painting perhaps is puzzling you in its shape. This

painting is a notable survivor of a type which was probably fairly common, for it's actually painted

on a leather shield intended for carrying in processions. David was considered a patron or guardian

of the city of Florence, and so you can imagine this being carried in a parade. If you are looking at the

painting itself behind the painted surface, you can actually see the rivets, the circular surface, the

convex surface of the rivets that hold the handles in place on the reverse side of the painting. So

it's not painted on canvas but on leather and is in the shape of a shield. The curved support,

by the way, also accentuates the immediacy, the physical immediacy of David to us. The device of

a simultaneous narrative which we've seen often in earlier lectures is again used here because

although David has not even released the stone from his sling, he's about to throw it, the head of Goliath

already lies at his feet. The job is done though the stone hasn't been thrown, and of course it's

it's symbolic and used for that purpose. Earlier than either of the preceding works, Castanio's Last

Supper is his masterpiece. It is an extraordinary painting, but ironically this painting had no

influence upon subsequent artists of his day because it was frescoed in the refectory, the dining room

of the convent of Santa Polonia, and Santa Polonia at just about the time the painting was done

was placed under clausura, meaning it was a closed community. Only the nuns of the religious community

could enter the building at all. Their relatives couldn't enter, nobody could come in, so it was a

convent under clausura, and the Benedictine nuns there were the only people who got to see this

masterpiece, and they saw it every day when they dined. It's extraordinary because you can imagine that

it might have had a very great effect upon subsequent painters, and particularly subsequent painters of

the subject of the Last Supper had they had they seen this. The Last Supper is frequently painted for

obvious reasons in convents or monasteries dining halls. You often, if I understand correctly, the dining

table, the communal dining table would have extended outward from the middle of that wall into the long

refectory. And so, and often of course they dined in silence, and they would look up at the Last Supper,

at this image, this important image of the Last Supper. As he has painted it, his painting creates the

illusion of another room opening like a stage at the end of the nuns dining hall. Now although we only

see a little bit of the wall above it, I must tell you that he painted that as well, and the center scene

is a crucifixion. And when one does see the whole thing, the interesting thing is that it comes forward.

That is to say, it's very much on the surface of the wall. There's a landscape, but it doesn't read

as depth. It's all very much forward. In contrast to the scenes above, this part of Castaño's work in

the dining room really pushes a hole in the wall. And just as deep as the room is needed for the upper

room of the Last Supper. And a long table, that wonderful white of the dining, of the cloth of the

dining table, a long table stretches across this room with Christ and all the apostles, except for

Judas, seated behind it. Judas is pretty obviously on this side of the table. Not subtle at all, but

the conventional way of showing Judas and of showing where the traitor is seated. Judas is on the near side

of the table. While the presentation of the figures is very reserved, very statuesque, the individual

characterizations of the apostles is remarkable. Some are interacting, but most are wrapped in thought.

It is an interesting arrangement. Some people have criticized that as being too static. I've never

quite agreed with that, because I think the separateness of most of these figures lends it a very quiet and

very contemplative quality. As I say, some converse, although very mildly, but for the most part, for the

most part they are isolated. And he treats them very differently. If you want a study of beards, you

couldn't find a better painting, because I don't think there are two beards alike. There are long beards,

there are shorter beards, there are medium beards, there are white beards and dark beards, and some are

coiffed differently. It really is highly individualized in that way. And the robes are treated in a similarly

individualized way, and a very interesting range of color, of shifts of tonality. I'm looking at the robes

beneath the table, where you can see them clearly, moves across the painting. He establishes the space

very clearly, but it is this sculptural quality of his figures that really commands our attention

in this. The coup de grâce here is the remarkable use of the decoration of that upper room where the

Last Supper takes place. It is marked particularly by large marble panels on the wall behind the Apostles,

six of them. And they are all different. They're all different types of marble, different cuts, different

colors, different designs. But directly behind the group of Jesus, Saint Peter, and Judas is a tempest. That

right there, that extraordinary explosion of marble pattern literally is a tempest. It literally announces

the drama that is implicit in the betrayal which will be announced at this supper. And you get the

principal figures gathered together right at that point. It's almost a shock, especially in the

context of this very staid sculptural group. Without much motion, much interaction, suddenly

you get the architecture doing the work for you. Andrea del Castagno died from the plague in August 1457,

which is a reminder that although the great plague of the middle of the Trecento, 1348,

was never equaled. Plague, the plague broke out from time to time after that. Still other artists,

like Domenico Veneziano, were attracted by the potential of color to create atmosphere. An illusion of

air surrounding objects, an effect of distance in a landscape by painting far mountains in a blue haze that

emulated the visual experience of reality, and we've seen Masaccio do it. And Domenico Veneziano is an artist

who became fascinated with the potential of color and colored light. Little solid information exists on his early life.

He was born about 1410, we presume, died in 1461. We don't precisely know where he was born,

but his name reveals his birthplace. He came from Venice. And while quite a few Florentine artists spent

some time working in Venice, including Uccello and Castagno, they didn't have much impact upon Venetian

art. Domenico, on the other hand, had a noticeable effect upon Florentine art and upon Florentine painting,

although the dating of most of his work is undocumented. His very Venetian preoccupation

was with color that was pale but light-suffused, a palette quite different from the usually more

assertive Florentine palette. Using tempera, he created a tonality closer to fresco painting. The

emotional effect of his preferred pastels is gentle, lyrical, and it makes his painting seem

bathed in air. The painting you're looking at is his so-called St. Lucie altarpiece, painted about 1445,

now in the Uffizi. It was painted for the Church of St. Lucie, Santa Lucia de Magnole, and then removed

later, of course. It is about, to give you an idea, about seven feet square. The square format is

interesting, not that common. About seven feet square, it depicts the Madonna and child enthroned

in the center of a triple arcade and flanked by two saints on either side, St. Francis and John the

Baptist on the left, and St. Lucie, St. Zenobius, the male saint with the mitre, and St. Lucie on the right.

Zenobius, whom you don't encounter outside of Florence, was a fifth-century bishop of Florence,

and he was a patron saint of the city, and John the Baptist was a patron saint of the city as well.

The visual charm of this painting is matched by its quiet seriousness, and each saint is distinctly and

aptly characterized. Let me say a word, however, about the joining of all these saints together with the

Madonna. I've already shown you in the preceding lecture a sacred conversation, a Sacra Conversazione,

this idea of the saints and the Madonna in the same space, occupying the same space, and somehow

psychologically occupying the same space, as opposed to the Gothic way of having a niche for one and a

niche for another, and they're all separate. Here they all occupy one space, and although you really

can't say that they're conversing one with another, sacred conversation is a nice phrase, but not always

totally accurate, but John the Baptist does look out at us. You recall that Filippo Lippi did the same

thing, look out at the viewer, get our attention, and then gesture to the Madonna and child, draw our

attention to what is significant in the painting, and this is a particularly lovely and gentle example.

The space is quite shallow, but very consistently ordered by perspective, he just doesn't make a big

thing out of perspective, he's much more interested in this wonderful sense of light playing through the

space. If you look behind the Madonna and up, you see that it opens to the sky, so in a way it's,

one almost feels the air entering into the composition.

This is a predella panel from that altarpiece. Beneath each of the saints there was a small painting

in the lower part of the frame that had a scene relating to them. Beneath the Madonna there was the

Annunciation, beneath John the Baptist was a picture of the young John the Baptist in the wilderness.

It is remarkable because it is one of the, one of the remarkable early male nudes in Renaissance painting,

and it has an extraordinary charm, just remarkable. All of these panels have been separated. The original

altarpiece is in Florence, but the others are in several museums around the world, and this one is in

the National Gallery. The nude figure of the young Baptist discards his cloak on the ground, and in his right

hand he has the hair shirt that he will wear during his sojourn in the rocky, what a wonderful rocky,

barren, cold, sharp wilderness. It doesn't, it doesn't give us much. It may look like a toy wilderness,

but it has a tremendous effect of, of isolation and of, of discomfort in it. The figure, by the way,

the, the figure of John the Baptist may be, have been inspired by Ghiberti, by one of his figures,

specifically one of his young Isaacs on the baptistry doors. The art of each of these three painters

was not exclusively about one aspect of style. They were interested in all aspects of style, but they did

have preferred specialties. And that delving into a special aspect of how to create a real world on a

two-dimensional surface suggests something of the experimental art laboratory that was Florence in the

15th century. Thank you for your attention.