What Paintings Tell

by Michael Djordjevitch

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The above is a late fifteenth century painting in the National Gallery, London, one of a set by an unknown painter now called the Master of the Griselda Legend.  Here we see a fully realized Public Loggia set in an idealized urban landscape, something which is far more easily achieved through painting than building.  

Further along these lines, Sandro Botticelli in his Calumny of Apelles (c. 1494–95), offers us a detailed look inside one completely imagined Loggia.  Though nearly monochrome in coloring, this monumental room is filled with figural sculpture, both freestanding and in relief, framed and bounded by architectural elements.   

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That these paintings are consistent with a longstanding tradition, and one which applies to artistic production at all scales, can be seen in this next work, Giotto's freestanding Baroncelli Polyptych, painted around 1334 for a family chapel in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, and partially reframed a century later.

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Below we see this retable in context, placed upon its altar and set beneath the chapel’s stained-glass liturgically east-facing (ad orientem) window, mediating between the setting of the chapel and the celebrant and offering a focus for the worshipers.   Before us a colonnade frames a vision of Heaven, making present a threshold between us and the transcendent.  And this colonnade is itself bounded, set within its own frame, which provides for it a fitting place upon its Altar.

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Giotto's (1267 - 1337) oeuvre has come to be seen as straddling the late Medieval and early Renaissance worlds, working within the Iconic and Liturgical/Theological conventions of the High Middle Ages and bringing a new artistic approach to the figures inhabiting it.  By contrast Dante (1265 – 1321) is usually presented as representing the culmination of the Middle Ages.  And yet, Dante’s realism concerning the depth and breadth of the human condition in the light of the Divine had its direct artistic corollary in Giotto’s naturalism, depicting fully rounded human beings playing out their destiny in the space of a here and now that is bounded by the divine and a setting for the eruption of the transcendent into the everyday.

The work which authoritatively preserves for us the image of a complete artistic whole by Giotto is his Capella degli Scrovegni, a Church constructed immediately adjacent to the Scrovegni Family Palazzo, and both built within the remains of the Ancient Roman Arena in Padua (thus, known more widely as the Arena Chapel).  

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Here we are presented with Painting and Architecture working together, through architectural frames; fictive architectural frames structure the entire interior and operate as thresholds into a multiplicity of worlds.  From Giotto’s Arena Chapel to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel is a clear artistic  continuum and a short and direct path.  It would be surprising and unusual if Brunelleschi’s work, occurring as it did at the midpoint of this path, did not directly participate in this cultural trajectory and within its cultural/theological matrix.

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Encountering Brunelleschi's final work in the light of Giotto's then --- is quite bracing.  

Nor need we merely speculate that Brunelleschi worked in a similar way.  We can see it clearly in the pulpit he designed for Santa Maria Novella, commissioned in 1443 by the Rucellai family and finished by the sculptor Andrea Calvalcanti, Brunelleschi's adopted son.

Before us are a set of sacred scenes framed within an architectural ensemble which obeys the typological and design conventions of an early Christian church pulpit.  That the elements are in that all’ antica manner, which Brunelleschi was at the time being celebrated for reintroducing, should not distract us from what this work has in common with that of Giotto’s: through architecture, creating a threshold between the here and now --- and representations of the Divine interacting with our world.  

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What we have been surveying, then, has been that deeper personal, artistic and cultural/theological context for our pioneering architect, who, suddenly in middle age, had been given the commission in 1419 for his first architectural work, a new institution in Florence called the Ospedale degli Innocenti.  Can we be faulted for striving to visualise that work within its originating living context?  None of this takes anything away from the Ospedale’s also revolutionary character.  But, we should not forget that the pioneering journey Brunelleschi was on was the very one which triggered the Renaissance and led to its mature culmination, the Baroque.  It did not trigger the 1920’s avant garde and all that that movement has wrought.  Nor was it the (much) before-the-fact harbinger of that movement.  For the true harbingers see Kenneth Frampton’s, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture.  

For more on Giotto’s frescoes at the Arena Chapel see below:

Buildings Which Speak

Could this colorful, image-laden portico from the late fifteenth century today give us an insight into what Brunelleschi might have intended for his own first major architectural work, the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence?

by Michael Djordjevitch

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This wonderfully vital building is the Loggia of the Ospedale del Ceppo, a Renaissance monument in the once-independent Tuscan city of Pistoia, northwest of Florence.

Well off the well-beaten tourist path, our Ospedale is easily recognized as a version of Brunelleschi's better-known Ospedale in Florence, and like that building this one too was once the public face of a charitable institution. 

Founded in 1277 by a confraternity, The Companions of Santa Maria, the Ospedale del Ceppo was dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the poor.  "Ceppo" (Latin cippus) refers to the hollowed-out tree trunk where, in times past, offerings intended for the poverty-stricken were left and collected.  This Ospedale would become Pistoia's principal hospital following the onslaught of the Black Death in 1348.

Pistoia lost its status as an independent polity in 1401 when it was conquered by the hugely successful and rapidly expanding neighboring Republic of Florence.  In 1456 the Ospedale del Ceppo invited one of Florence's most prolific and versatile architects, Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (1396 - 1472), to restore and expand its buildings. (For more on Michelozzo, see the entry from June 29, 2017) When in 1501 the Pistoian hospital was placed under the direct administration of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, its new directors commissioned a new facade whose arcaded loggia was intentionally modeled after Brunelleschi's for the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. 

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The portico's prominent polychrome frieze, made of glazed ceramic, was created from 1525 onward by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni della Robbia (1469 - 1529), and his student Santi Buglioni (1494 - 1576), together with other members of their atelier.  The frieze depicts the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, which are visually separated by figurative representations of five of the Cardinal and Theological Virtues.

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The artistic style of these works is the fruit of the pioneering efforts of the brothers Andrea (1435 - 1525) and Luca (1399 - 1482) della Robbia, who famously developed and promoted the use of glazed terracotta for sculpture, and whose artistic impact can still be seen throughout Tuscany and beyond.  Their vibrant and colorful glazes made their artistic products more durable and more expressive.  By its third generation their atelier had committed itself to exploring a wider polychromic palette.

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The Tondi below the frieze were sculpted at the same time by Giovanni della Robbia, here working alone.  They depict the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Glory of the Virgin, along with a number of coats of arms, that of the Medici unsurprisingly being the most prominent . 

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And thus this arcade speaks.  Through the language of the figural arts it speaks symbolically, within the conventions of a cultural shorthand, but also directly, as even today we can see right before us charitable actions unfolding, such as people feeding the hungry or clothing the poor.  These scenes are then separated by individual figures, allegories of the virtues, who through the specific objects they hold, and through their dress, signal their allegorically embodied meaning.

And do we not also see, when we look through the eyes of our two-and-a-half-thousand-year artistic tradition, something akin to the Triglyph-and-Metope frieze of the Ancient Greek Doric temple?

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Also in Pistoia, there once stood, though only for a fleeting quarter century, another jewel of a building, the Loggia dei Mercanti, which took up and further explored the basic composition of the Ospedale loggia.  The Loggia dei Mercanti, designed by Raffaello Brizzi (1883 - 1946), was begun in 1908 and finished in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, and it graced the city until its gratuitous destruction in 1939. 

Here we again see, though more compactly, the syntax of our High Renaissance Pistoian Loggia with its division into framed and sculpted panels, and the same fruitful union of sculpture and architecture.  Here then is an example of the long-lived momentum of a vital artistic culture stretching back to the Renaissance, and though we are separated from it by decades of modernist design practice, this artistic culture still remains intelligible to us to a considerable degree.

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In later postings we will briefly return to this recent Pistoian Loggia, and also turn to the one other surviving Renaissance Loggia in this Florentine colony with extensive ornament.  But next week we'll take a look at a number of paintings to illuminate Brunelleschi's likely intentions for his revolutionary Loggia in Florence.  

What About Those Frames?

What are those splashes of intense color doing here, other than harshly intruding onto the clean, pristine surfaces and crisp architectural framing of Brunelleschi's Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence?  Aren't these clean, crisp lines and surfaces the very elements we most celebrate in Brunelleschi's architecture?  And aren't they compromised by the animated frescoes we see here under these vaults?  

by Michael Djordjevitch

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In reviewing these familiar images, however, we are compelled to notice where exactly those intrusive splashes of color are found: above doorways---thresholds---where they consistently fill up the whole field of the lunettes above them.    

Stepping back, we see, however, that the outer surfaces of the building are not much affected by the various contingencies within the colonnade. 

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It is here that we might recall that much of the writing on this monument focuses on its proportions.  Indeed, these are strikingly straightforward, a simple composition in C Major, as it were. 

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But is this proportional system what we actually see when we visit or view the Ospedale?  Certainly, to a degree, but demonstrably---not only.  What we see, more directly and insistently than its proportions, are the various relations between the pietra serena architectural elements.  It is true that these elements relentlessly frame spaces and surfaces, from the vaults beyond the colonnade to the walls above and behind it.   

Did Brunelleschi then anticipate that these surfaces and spaces throughout would remain neutral fields, empty and un-ornamented? 

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The frescoes we see on the ospedale's walls and vaults quietly suggest, perhaps not.  

The most striking of the vividly colorful frescoes in the portico is found above the central entry.  It is  the work of Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612), a notable Florentine painter, who painted them around 1600.

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Poccetti's fresco, in its captivating charm, is immediately recognizable as indebted to Michelangelo's work at the Sistine Chapel, which, through its mesmerizing and comprehensive authority had already formed the artistic horizons of Poccetti's immediate artistic predecessors, the likes of Pontormo (1494 – 1557), Parmigianino (1503 – 1540) and Annibale Carracci (1560 – 1609).

As in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, we have here at the Ospedale a painted composition of sculptural and architectural and human figures, framing painted scenes.  These architectural figures, virtual doors and windows, while providing perches for virtual sculptures and human figures, offer glimpses into worlds beyond.

By way of the mediating art of fresco painting we have the intrinsically related arts of architecture and sculpture working all-together, and conjuring up a mesmerizing Threshold, a window onto a Transcendent World. 

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Is this, then, how Brunelleschi intended the framed fields of his architecture, here and elsewhere, to be filled? 

While he was certainly the most celebrated engineer builder of his time---witness his achievement at the Duomo---Brunelleschi was also celebrated in his time as a painter, the inventor of pictorially coherent perspective, a stage designer for festivals, a sculptor, considered equal to Ghiberti, a builder of fortifications, a hydraulic engineer, and an architect of many works, including his crowning achievement at the Duomo, the Lantern to his Dome.   

Looking beyond this painting, and discovering through recent careful scholarship that every one of Brunelleschi's architectural works, other that his very last, the Lantern, is significantly incomplete, we are compelled to re-consider the whole of his architecture in the light of what is demonstrably complete and whole.

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Where Brunelleschi's artistic works are complete, they consistently integrate sculpture and painting with architecture.  Brunelleschi's one surviving painting, his Holy Trinity, in Florence's Santa Maria Novella, was a collaboration between himself and Masaccio (1401–1428) where Brunelleschi composed the whole and Masaccio contributed the figures.  This painting presents many of the familiar elements of Brunelleschi's architecture, both planar and volumetric.  Here, along with the human figures, the architectural elements work to frame a vaulted space filled with the Very Icon of the Transcendent.  Human and Divine figures and architectural elements are intimately related: cannot, in fact, be considered separately from one another.

From the evidence of a complete Brunelleschian work, then, we might imagine that the pietra serena elements at his Ospedale constitute not only frames, but also frames for figures and scenes, such as we see in Poccetti's fresco and in Brunelleschi's own Holy Trinity.  As in the Holy Trinity painting, these figured frames are also thresholds, portals into imagined, and transcendent realms.  

Thus, these painted idealized visions, of worlds beyond our everyday-own, present an architecture that is radically at odds with contemporary notions about the meaning and significance of Brunelleschi's architecture.  These contemporary notions anachronistically assert that his architecture was in some sense proto-modern, that its "clean lines" and "pure surfaces" were indicative of a "functional approach", much ahead of its time; or, as the foremost Brunelleschi authority, Howard Saalman put it, Mies van der Rohe "avant la lettre" (Filippo Brunelleschi: The Buildings, Penn State Press, 1993).  

It is highly unlikely that Brunelleschi's famous frame-works throughout his oeuvre were intended everywhere to be empty.  How he himself might have filled them is the subject of our next essay.

For More on The HOLY TRINITY, See Here: