Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Prophets
ca. 1280 - 1290
Tempera on wood
12’ 7” x 7’ 4”
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy
WATCH THIS and take notes:
READ THIS and take notes:
Adapted from "The Human Body"
http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/proto-renaissance.html
We have bodies that exist in space, and this has been a fundamental challenge for artists through history.
In ancient Greece and Rome, artists embraced the realities of the human body and the way that our bodies move in space (naturalism). For the next thousand years though, after Europe transitioned from a pagan culture to a Christian one in the middle ages, the physical was largely ignored in favor of the heavenly, spiritual realm.
Medieval human figures were still rendered, but they were elongated, flattened and static, or in other words, they were made to function symbolically.
Space
Instead of earthly settings, we often see flat, gold backgrounds. There were some exceptions along the way, but it’s not until the end of the 13th century in Italy that artists began to (re)explore the physical realities of the human figure in space. Here, they begin the long process of figuring out how space can become a rational, measurable environment in which their newly naturalistic figures can sit, stand and move.
Florence & Siena
In Italy, there were two city-states where we can see this renewed interest in the human figure and space: Florence and Siena. The primary artists in Siena were Duccio, the Lorenzetti Brothers, and Simone Martini. And in Florence, we look to the art of Cimabue and Giotto.
Whereas medieval artists often preferred a flat, gold background, these artists began to construct earthly environments for their figures to inhabit. We see landscapes and architecture in their paintings, though these are often represented schematically. These Florentine and Sienese artists employed diagonal lines that appear to recede and in this way convey a simple illusion of space, though that space is far from rational to our eyes. When we look closely, we can see that the space would be impossible to move through, and that the scale of the architecture often doesn’t match the size of the figures.
AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
1. Compare this painting to the Justinian mosaic.....what is similar in the way that they depict space? What is different? How did Cimabue try to depict "real" space?
2. Explain the difference between naturalism and symbolism, especially as it relates to the changes in art between the Greek sculptures we studied and the work of Cimabue.
3. The narrators use the term, "chiaroscuro," in the video - what does this term mean and how does it relate to concept of "space"?
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