Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [56]
The decorative impulse was strong, not least because so many patrons relished it. In the 1420s the Venetian painter Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370–1427) was brought to Florence by the head of the Strozzi banking family to create a magnificent altarpiece for their private chapel. The central panel, The Adoration of the Magi (1423), is one of the jewels of the Renaissance—almost literally, for it glitters with gold and sumptuous filigree work, reminding us again that many painters started off in jewelers’ workshops and used paint to produce for their patrons huge, two-dimensional jewels to hang on their walls, the sacred subject matter being an antidote to luxurious worldliness. The three kings, with their scintillating garments, gave Gentile an excuse for a virtuoso display of his technique. But this glorious painting, which delights us as much as it clearly pleased contemporaries—it was widely influential—is also an exercise in perspective, as the royal procession meanders away into the distance, and in lighting, which is brilliantly rendered and highly naturalistic. There is another factor. Though the principal figures are idealized, the crowd of courtiers and followers behind them is, as it were, picked out from the streets of Florence and the canals of Venice, a wonderful collection of faces drawn from life in the third decade of the fifteenth century, coarse, shrewd, cunning, curious, smug and happy—the physiognomy of life.
This interest in people, who could be fitted into the demands of religious iconography, became a salient characteristic of Renaissance painting. Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–69) was an orphan brought up in a convent who was persuaded to take vows and then caused an immense scandal by running off with a nun. The Medici family, who had already recognized his talent, intervened to get him laicized, and the child born to the couple, Filippino Lippi (1457–1504) also became a highly successful painter. Filippo’s majestic frescoes in the cathedrals of Spoleto and Prato gave him the opportunity to paint some splendid crowd scenes. His Madonnas and saints are holy, serene and unworldly, but his crowds are common clay, men and women as he saw them. There is the same dichotomy in his contemporary Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455), who painted the Virgin and Child with impressive tenderness and holy simplicity (though with sumptuous color effects). His ability to inspire devotion brought him a multitude of ecclesiastical clients. Though a Dominican friar by vocation, he ran the busiest workshop in Florence, and was eventually summoned to Rome to work for the popes. Yet every face he painted is that of an individual character. His St. Peter Preaching (1433), part of what is known as the Linaiuoli Altarpiece (now in the Museo di San Marco in Florence), shows a group of people, each wrapped in his or her own thoughts—none actually listening to the sermon—as though all were sitting for portraits. There is a closely observed group of beggars in St. Lawrence Distributing Alms (1448) in the Vatican, which shows the same determined grasp of personality. But it has to be said that St. Lawrence’s splendid vestments are a work of art in themselves, and the architectural background, rendered in dazzling perspective and ornate detail, demonstrates other Renaissance obsessions, which preoccupied the saintly Angelico as much as they did more mundane practitioners of the art. Behind the new Renaissance sophistication, there is often a hint of medieval childishness.
That is particularly apparent in the masterpiece of Fra Angelico’s most gifted pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1420–97), whose Journey of the Magi (1459–61) occupies three walls of the Chapel of the Medici in their Florentine palazzo. This is more than a repeat of Gentile’s Magi, though clearly inspired by it, for there are three separate processions, one for each