Political Geography and the Arts | Trecemto Inheritance

Political Geography and the Arts

• In the late 14th century, the world's nature depended on where a craftsman was located.

• "Italy" as a country didn't exist during the centuries discussed in the book, as the idea of nations only took hold in Europe in the 18th century, and the country of Italy with its current boundaries dates to the late 19th century.

• Before 1400, what is now Italy was divided among three interregional powers:

  • The Holy Roman Empire:

    • Claimed inheritance from the Caesars.
    • Nominally controlled Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
    • Theoretical rule extended to Florence and Siena, but many northern Italian city-states asserted independence in the 12th century.

  • The Papal States:

    • Ruled by the Pope in Rome with both spiritual and temporal power.

  • Naples:

    • A city and kingdom encompassing the lower part of the peninsula.

  • Sicily:

    • Ruled by dynasties from Germany, France, and Spain.
    • Territorial boundaries were subject to change.
    • In the 15th century, the Kingdom of Aragon (Spain) united Naples and Sicily.
    • Florence and Milan expanded territorially.
    • Venice became an empire, expanding along the Adriatic coast into Greece.
    • Artists moving between cities often encountered different governments, customs, and languages.

• In 1400, wealth was concentrated in the north, enabling lavish patronage and expensive decorative projects.

  • The Northern economy was mercantile, contrasted with the agrarian south.
  • The North held major population and artistic centers.
  • Painting, sculpture, and architecture were outlets for regional rivalries, where communities competed through monuments and military exploits.

Architecture and Place

• A city's location affected building and art appearance.

  • Florence:

    • Used pietra forte (strong stone) for civic buildings in the 13th century.
    • The Bargello (Palazzo del Podestà) used this stone, creating a heavy and impregnable effect.
    • Pietra forte was locally sourced, making it cheaper and distinguishing Florentine buildings from others.
    • Florentine architecture appeared to extend directly from the surrounding land.

  • Venice:

    • Favored colorful architecture with imported stones.
    • The Basilica of San Marco was clad in striated marble and spoglia (columns and reliefs) from distant lands.
    • Mosaics covered every surface using glass and stone tesserae.
    • Exotic materials announced Venice's connection to foreign cities, especially Byzantium (Istanbul).
    • The architecture advertised Venice's ability to exploit eastern trade routes.
    • San Marco could only have been built in a city on the water, serving as a gateway to the East and a hub for European trade.

  • Florence's Palazzo dei Priori (town hall) used pietra forte rustication, similar to the Bargello.

  • Siena built its response in brick.

  • City officials chose durable but humble materials, discouraging pretension from government officers.

  • This set a standard for communal order elsewhere.

    • Michelangelo and others later modified medieval structures in Rome, maintaining the combination of elements with a tall tower rising over a piazza.

• Architecture in this period took on few new functions.

  • A city's location, government, and economic relationships determined building needs.
  • Most new structures conformed to older types.
  • Palaces (grand urban residences) came into their own during this period.
  • The most impressive structures were renovations or expansions of existing works.
    • Venice established the Basilica of San Marco by combining and replacing elements from earlier churches, later modifying the western side, enclosing domes, adding mosaics, and joining new spoglia to exterior walls.

• Conventional building forms:

  • The largest churches were basilicas (rectangular structures divided by aisles), following ancient Roman conventions.
  • Under the Caesars, basilicas served various purposes; early Christians adopted them for religious ends.
    • St. Peter's in Rome (begun c. 330–360) focused on a tabernacle covering the remains of the Apostle credited with introducing Christianity to the city in the first century CE.
    • The original basilica had a high, wide nave leading to the altar zone, open wooden trusses supporting a peaked roof, a clerestory with windows, aisles at both sides separated by columns, and an apse (vaulted semicircular projection).
    • Later churches varied this model (e.g., two side aisles, elimination of the transept, a more cross-like plan).
    • Rejecting the basic template meant working against a tradition that had endured for a millennium.
  • The cathedral was the main church in most towns and cities.
  • A baptistery (congregational space for infant baptism) often accompanied the cathedral.
    • Medieval churches were longitudinal and cruciform, while baptisteries were centrally planned.
    • Baptisteries accommodated gatherings around the font.
    • Republics valued baptisteries more than cities under dynastic rule, as they served as a place for the town to come together and welcome a new citizen into its midst.
  • Baptisteries had a more limited future than town halls or basilicas, but towns continued to decorate them, often employing major artists.

The Pisano Family: The New Architectural Sculpture

• Leading up to 1400, many of the best sculptors trained in Pisa, where works linked to the city's cathedral served as a training ground.

• Pisa's cathedral complex supported civic uses, and carved monuments in stone gave shape and meaning to rituals.

• Pisa furnished its baptistery with an elevated pulpit, giving it a purpose beyond administering the sacrament.

• Nicola Pisano (c. 1220–1278/84):

  • Signed the pulpit in Latin as "Nicola Pisanus."
  • Completed around 1260, the hexagonal structure featured five reliefs narrating the life of Christ from the Annunciation and Nativity to the Last Judgment.
  • The scenes were divided by colonnettes, personified Virtues, and the figure of St. John, with prophets and sibyls in the spandrels.
  • The polygonal pulpit with sculptural program was unprecedented, testifying to the inventiveness of its maker and to the varying functions of the baptistery.
  • Documents suggest the pulpit served as a platform for reading passages from the New Testament and for ceremonies such as knightings.
  • In the panel combining the Annunciation and Nativity, the figures looked monumental, drawing on the style of ancient Roman sarcophagus reliefs.
  • Romanism evoked the glories of the ancient empire, possibly inspired by Nicola's patrons or his work for Emperor Frederick II.
  • The Pisa Baptistery pulpit inspired local imitations.

• Giovanni Pisano (c. 1250–c. 1315):

  • Collaborated with his father, Nicola, on a pulpit for Siena Cathedral.
  • Carved pulpits for the church of Sant’Andrea at Pistoia and for Pisa Cathedral.
  • Moved away from his father’s static, monumental effects, multiplying and making slender, dynamic figures.
  • His version of the Annunciation and Nativity closely followed his father’s composition.
  • Giovanni sought to maximize variety and figural invention, prioritizing the representation of emotion over nobility.
  • He showed a modern sensibility, referring to the sculpture of the previous generation rather than antiquity.
  • The columns were supported by lions, with the addition of a crouching human figure representing Adam.
  • Renaissance artists saw sculptures like Giovanni’s as works to rival.

• Tino da Camaino (c. 1285–c. 1337):

  • Giovanni Pisano’s most distinguished student.
  • Created a tomb for Emperor Henry VII in Pisa Cathedral in 1315.
  • Moved south to work for the Angevin rulers of Naples.
  • Collaborated with architect Gagliardo Primario on the tomb of Mary of Hungary in the church of Santa Maria Donna Regina, completed 1325–26.
  • The monument stood at the border of architecture and sculpture.
  • Four winged figures representing the Cardinal Virtues bore a sarcophagus, celebrating Mary’s fecundity by portraying eleven of her fourteen children.
  • The sarcophagus lid became the floor of a chamber, where angels revealed Mary on her deathbed, presented as a younger woman.
  • A second figure of Mary knelt before the Virgin Mary, while an angel bore an offering from the deceased regent: the church of Santa Maria Donna Regina itself.

Giotto: The Painter and the Legend

• Lorenzo Ghiberti considered Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) to be of special significance.
  • Giotto "brought in natural art, and grace with it" and was the "inventor and discoverer of much learning that had been buried some six hundred years."
• Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) made Giotto’s name a byword for renewal and innovation.
• Ghiberti referred to Giotto as a native of "Etruria" (Tuscany), linking renewal to a local origin.
  • Ghiberti stated that “the art of painting flourished in Etruria more than in any other age, much more than it ever did even in Greece.”
• Ghiberti regarded the "Greek style" (Byzantine tradition) as decisive for the painting in Italy before Giotto.
  • Travelers had imported Byzantine paintings of Christ and the Virgin (icons) from the eastern Mediterranean.
  • Late medieval Italians learned to work in this style and painted their own icons.
• Cimabue (c. 1240–c. 1302) was Giotto’s teacher and, in Ghiberti’s eyes, a master of the Greek style.
• Cimabue's Virgin and Child with Angels (1280-86) possesses many features of the Greek style.
  • The figures inhabit a timeless and spaceless realm.
  • Gold striations define the folds of the Virgin's gown.
  • The painting’s characters are symmetrical and repetitive.
• Cimabue constructed his Virgin’s throne to suggest recession in space.
• Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna bears out Ghiberti’s general perception of the difference between the two artists.
  • Giotto’s Virgin and Child are solid and weighty.
  • Giotto painted shadows of diminishing intensity.
  • Angels appear to stand one behind the other.
• The idea of one individual transforming the history of art is a key myth of the Renaissance.
• Giotto was one of the more accomplished members of a wave of artists working in new styles around 1300.
• Pietro Cavallini (c. 1250–c. 1330) was a Roman painter and mosaicist whose wall paintings at St. Peter’s in Rome were “most excellently done and with great relief.”
  • Cavallini retains a bit of the old Greek style.
  • Fragments of wall paintings (c. 1290) on the inner facade of the Roman church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere pre-date anything ascribed to Giotto.

Mural Painting: The “Upper Church” at Assisi

• Cavallini’s Last Judgment belonged to a larger project of redecoration that would have included the entire nave of Santa Cecilia.

• Cavallini painted during the reign of Pope Nicholas IV, the century’s greatest sponsor of large-scale murals.

• Nicholas was the first Pope to have come from the ranks of the Franciscans.

• Franciscans and Dominicans sought to make the teachings of the Church intelligible and relevant to the ordinary people of Europe.

• Mendicant friars lived and worked in the cities, drawing vast crowds to new, large churches designed for preaching.

• In their sermons, the friars dwelt on the virtue of charity, confronting the mercantile principle of self-interest with an insistence on the common good and regard for the poor.

• Pope Nicholas took a particular interest in the pioneer basilica of the Franciscan Order, San Francesco in Assisi (begun 1228).

• Nicholas provided the impetus for the decoration of the building now called the “upper church.”

• Murals in the upper church narrate an authorized version of the life of St. Francis, stressing his social mission, miracles, Christ-like nature, and close relations with the papacy.

• Proclaiming institutional approval was necessary because Francis had been a controversial figure during his lifetime, and some of his followers were persecuted.

• Francis was believed to have had the wounds of Christ (stigmata) miraculously imprinted on his body, and the cycle of paintings depicts this miracle's legal verification.

• Appealing to a popular audience, the murals show Francis’s life unfolding in a contemporary Italian city, populated by recognizable human types performing with dramatic gestures and vivid expressions.

• The moment where the young Francis renounces his family and worldly possessions is a key episode.

  • Looking toward heaven, Francis sees the hand of God signaling approval.
  • The bishop of Assisi covers the young man, mortified that Francis has discarded even his clothes.
  • The architecture registers the gulf between the secular world and the world of the Church.

Private Patronage: The Arena Chapel

• Followers of saints Francis or Dominic could demonstrate their regard for the poor through donations to the friars.

• Prominent families could endow chapels in mendicant churches, paying for vestments, candles, liturgical vessels, and decoration.

• In return, family members obtained the right to be buried in the chapel, assuring themselves of future prayers.

• Giotto’s most famous paintings are the murals he executed in Padua for Enrico Scrovegni.

• The paintings decorated a chapel that Scrovegni had built near his palace, referred to as the “Arena” Chapel.

• Constructing a small, private church was to bypass the usual institutions and appeal directly to divine intercessors.

• Scrovegni adopted a decorative scheme that late medieval basilicas had made familiar.

• Giotto covered the walls with three rows of narrative scenes unfolding the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ, with panels of simulated marble and monochrome figures of personified Virtues and Vices.

• Portraits of Christ and the Evangelists appear in the vault against a field of blue, unifying the effect.

• Giotto demonstrates his ability to render pictorial space.

  • Little chapels and overhanging storeys house the Annunciation, appearing to project into the chamber.

• Giotto’s approach gave prominence to the moment of Christ’s miraculous conception in the womb of the Virgin.

• God the Father charges the angel Gabriel with his mission.

• The Holy Spirit would have seemed to emerge from outside.

• The use of a partly gilded panel evokes the older tradition of sacred images.

• Giotto’s narrative scenes concentrate on a single significant gesture or encounter.

• Repeated costumes and architectural settings allow the viewer to track characters.

• Christ is usually shown advancing in profile from left to right, his right hand raised in blessing or bringing about a miracle.

• In The Betrayal of Christ, Judas identifies Christ with a kiss, and Jesus remains resolute, signaling his more-than-human nature.

• Giotto organizes the figures so that subordinate episodes do not detract from the main event.

• In contrast to Byzantine painters, Giotto sometimes shows only parts of figures, cropped by the frame.

• The processional motion of the narrative is suspended in the scenes of the Passion, especially in The Entombment of Christ.

  • The mourners lower the corpse into the lap of the Virgin, drawn toward the ground.
  • Seated figures communicate grief through the inertia of their bodies.
  • Angels materialize to wail along with them.

• With scenes of Christ’s resurrection, Christ’s motion assumes a triumphal character, and he ascends to heaven.

• The chapel’s narratives culminate with a rendering of the end of human history.

  • The Last Judgment occupies the surface of the inner facade.
  • Two angels "roll up" the blue, revealing a golden eternity beyond.
  • Christ appears as judge, with the Apostles enthroned to his left and right.
  • A massive cross separates the damned from the saved.
  • Among the sinners are usurers (money-lenders) and simonists (sellers of spiritual things).

• Scrovegni wanted all to know that he had invested his family’s wealth into his chapel:

  • Giotto shows him offering the building to the Virgin Mary.
  • The Virgin reaches out to accept it.
  • Scrovegni re-dedicated an entrepreneurial initiative elsewhere, advertising his influence.

• The clergy were scandalized that a private chapel succeeded in drawing away worshipers.

• Murals like these set the standards for vivid and emotionally convincing pictorial narrative.

• Ghiberti placed a high premium on effective narrative.

• Giotto’s influence resulted from his system of workshop organization and training.

• Wherever Giotto took on an assignment, he put together a large team of experienced painters and apprentices.

The Bardi Chapel

• Ghiberti was especially familiar with the chapel that the Bardi family commissioned in the church of Santa Croce, Florence.

• There, Giotto painted an abbreviated Franciscan cycle of seven episodes.

• He heightened the drama of the hostile reaction by Francis’s father and added details such as the children throwing stones at Francis.

• The architecture creates the space in which the action occurs.

  • Francis is aligned with the corner of a massive cubic building, a visual turning-point between the sacred and secular worlds.

Devotional Imagery: Siena Duccio’s Maestà

• If Giotto represented the fountainhead of modern painting to a Florentine like Ghiberti, the Sienese Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255–1319) offered the most powerful contemporary alternative.

• Duccio painted all of his secure surviving works on panel, taking the Virgin as his primary subject.

• Outside of the Mass, the cult of the Virgin as intercessor was the most important manifestation of Christian devotion.

• She was invoked by individuals and by entire communities, often in great collective rituals culminating inside a city’s most important church.

• Duccio’s Virgin and Child with Saints (Maestà) (1308–11) was installed in Siena Cathedral.

• Siena dedicated itself to the protection of the Virgin, effectively designating her as its "Queen," in 1260.

• Duccio undertook the Maestà to replace an older icon with a painting “far more beautiful, and more devout, and larger.”

• The work was carried from the painter’s house to the cathedral with a great procession.

• Duccio’s Maestà was painted on both sides, to go on an altar that divided the clergy from the laypeople.

• The side facing the congregation shows a continuous wide picture field with the Virgin and Child and their heavenly attendants.

  • Angels flank the throne, and the composition includes an assembly of saints, including Siena's four patrons.

• Originally, the main panel was augmented with a row of smaller panels above and below, presenting episodes from the Virgin's life.

• The other side of the Maestà faced the clergy, depicting forty episodes from the life of Christ.

  • The largest and most important of which is the Crucifixion on the central axis.

• 14th-century viewers would have found beauty in the visual splendor of precious materials, such as gold and ultramarine (blue pigment made from ground lapis lazuli).

• Duccio tooled the gilded surfaces, imitating chased metal and applying paint over gold to suggest precious damask or embroidered fabric.

• His handling of the pigments showed his command of the principles of light/dark modeling.

• Duccio emphasized the picture surface by a constant overall play of elegant pattern.

• Duccio may have wanted his beholders to see these beautiful flowing lines as something like a personal trademark.

  • He painted in Latin the words "Holy Mother of God, be the cause of peace to Siena and of life to Duccio because he has painted thee thus."

• Duccio undertook experiments in rendering pictorial space, especially in his narrative scenes.

• His Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin takes place in a convincingly realized architectural cell.

• In the panel depicting the Temptation of Christ, Duccio focused on Christ and Satan in a kind of “close-up,” also giving us a panorama of the landscape.

• Duccio showed strong links with older Christian art, especially the Byzantine tradition, which was fully apparent to Ghiberti.

  • Ghiberti would believe Duccio's work was an example of the “Greek style.”

• Like their contemporaries in other cities, they believed certain older Byzantine paintings to date from the time of Christ and the Virgin themselves, revering them as sacred relics.

• Duccio’s Virgins, like his half-length saints and angels, refer to the long-standing traditions of the Byzantine icon.

• Duccio had a cosmopolitan awareness of contemporary art outside Siena, including not only other Tuscan cities but also northern Europe.

• Duccio's flowing line and poses evokes the dominant aesthetic of French courts and cathedrals around 1300 (the Gothic style).

Sienese Art after Duccio

• Duccio was not the only painter to pay attention to the Virgin Mary; she was the premier subject of painting in early 14th-century Italy.

• Largely, such figures were bound by convention: depicted at half-length, placed against a gold background, wearing a garment painted of ultramarine.

• Duccio had rendered the Virgin with an elegance suggesting he was concerned with beauty as much as with replication of earlier types.

• Pietro Lorenzetti’s Madonna di Monticchiello (c. 1311) tilts her head in the same manner as Duccio’s Virgin but focuses her eyes on her son.

  • Christ is a believable child, who rests a hand on his mother’s shoulder as he looks up to her face.
  • Lorenzetti sought to connect religion to the natural world and to the experience of everyday life.

• In 1315, Simone Martini painted a mural in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.

  • Ghiberti admired Martini as an “elegant painter” whose pictures were “very delicately finished.”
  • The subject was the same as Duccio’s Maestà, the enthroned Virgin “in majesty.”

• Simone separated Siena’s four patrons from the larger group, placing them in the company of two angels.

• He modified details to strengthen the sense of an encounter (e.g., saints flanking the Virgin holding a materially lavish baldachin, angels offering the Virgin baskets of flowers, kneeling saints unrolling scrolls with petitions).

• The Virgin’s response appears in Italian words, written across the pavement, addressing the supplicants, rejecting the flowers, and asking for “good counsel,” warning against “those who…scorn me and deceive my land.”

• The Virgin holds the foot of Christ, inviting the viewer’s kiss, while he presents the viewer with his own scroll, which reads, “Love justice, you who judge the earth.”

• The painting's elaborate depiction of textiles is typically Sienese.

• Paradoxically, the painting depends on contemporary imagery of the monarch.

• The Virgin's depicted words are in terza rima, a rhyme scheme used by Petrarch and Dante.

• In 1321, Simone repainted parts of the fresco, including the head of the Virgin, revealing golden hair.

• Simone may have known the French poetry honoring the beautiful blonde lady.

• Their differences owe a lot to their intended settings.

• The panel paintings made for churches were large and heavy.

• Duccio’s massive Maestà was carried through the city in procession, and it was common for paintings to shift locations over the years.

• With most surviving paintings from before 1320, no documentary evidence links them to their original function.

• The growing association of the altar with a particular form of painting is growing: the “polyptych.”

• Individuals, families, and religious groups financed the decoration of individual altars where priests said Mass, with a large panel painting that stood behind the altar table.

• These paintings helped make the church interior the most important space for public art in many cities.

• Another painting by Simone Martini, reassembled in Pisa’s Museo Nazionale, once sat on an altar in the church of Santa Caterina in Pisa.

  • While wild-haired Christ looks up at the Virgin and grasps her robe, she herself would have been at home in a Byzantine icon, staring at the viewer with her hair modestly covered.
  • Isolated, independently framed saints flanked (or surrounded) the Virgin in this work.

• The polyptych form drew upon ancient memory exercises, which encouraged practitioners to associate figures with architectural spaces, and it allowed for shifting attention over the course of a year.

• The recognition that Duccio and Giotto represented alternative approaches to painting affected later altarpieces that took the Virgin as their protagonist.

• Pietro Lorenzetti's altar of St. Savinus, depicting the Birth of the Virgin, emphasizes the values of space and volume associated with Giotto.

  • Lorenzetti treats the tripartite frame of the altarpiece as a three-arched screen through which we see a domestic interior.
  • Treating the picture surface as an opening onto a highly realized fictional space, Lorenzetti dispensed with the gold ground commonly used in altarpiece decoration

• Simone Martini's St. Ansanus altarpiece follows the example of his probable teacher, Duccio, conceiving the painting in terms of fluid outlines.

  • Martini's Virgin seems to recoil at the angel in the flowing plaid mantle, who bends his head to clear the molding of the frame.
  • The whole composition reflects the refined behavior and stylish luxury associated with the old feudal nobility and with princely courts.

Art and the State

The Image of the Sovereign: Bologna and Naples

• Another distinctive innovation of 14th-century art was portraiture.

• The earliest portraits had a political context.

• An early example is the larger-than-life-size statue of Pope Boniface VIII made by the goldsmith Manno di Bandino to adorn the exterior of Bologna’s Palazzo Communale in 1301.

  • Under Boniface’s authoritarian reign, Bologna resorted to extraordinary measures to demonstrate its loyalty, especially after the victory of a pro-papal faction in government.

• Images of living rulers in public spaces were relatively uncommon, and the choice of metal rather than stone was unusual.

• Manno hailed from Siena, and his figure has little to do with the emotive and naturalistic sculpture associated with Giovanni Pisano and his father.

• Boniface has been turned into an image of superhuman authority.

• The officials who commissioned the statue would have been aware of the Pope’s political self-promotion through his own effigy.

• When Boniface was finally arrested and humiliated in 1303, lawyers for the French king declared the Pope to be a pagan idolator.

• The altarpiece commissioned from Simone Martini features the earliest surviving narrative predella.

Signoria and Comune: Verona and Siena

• Apart from Naples and Rome, Italian cities typically had one of two types of government.

  • Northern cities, in which a single sovereign and his attendants ran the show, were called signorie (literally, “lordships”).
  • Central Italian cities had elected councils and called themselves comuni (roughly, “commonwealths” or republics).

• Many signorie had become autocracies only after an earlier communal government had failed.

• The idea of government by a town's leading citizens dated back only a century.

• Most republics were in fact governed by a single political party or a small group of wealthy male citizens.

• Neither the church nor the sovereigns with claim to the region fully recognized their legitimacy.

• One result of this was that even cities with elective governments could embrace images of embodied authority that were “royal” in character.

• In the signoria of Verona, the local potentates also used portraiture to political ends, resulting in a group of the greatest sculptural monuments of the later 14th century.

• Surmounting the baldachin was a second image of the signore, as a military champion on horseback. The image of knighthood lent a civilizing gloss to the violence that characterized the signorial regime.

• This structure attests to its designers’ familiarity with ancient Roman triumphal forms.

• The Veronese signore had no qualms about associating himself with the ancient empire and its history of hereditary rule.

• The primary function generated an image of the ruler that would last well after his death.

• In Siena, the comune had to position itself against such manifestations of coercive rule.

• The beautifully utopian murals of Ambrogio Lorenzetti produced in 1338 for the Room of the Nine Governors and Defenders of the Comune show the limits of the available visual language.

• The chamber served as the meeting place for a small group of officials.

  • The scenes showed the city as it would look if the Nine ruled well, contrasted this with its corrupt opposite.
  • A third wall of personifications (figures standing symbolically for abstract ideas) rendered the principles of “good government.”

• The third wall had two focal points, in the form of Giustizia, or “Justice,” and Ben Comune, or “Common Good.”

• Reading from left to right, the Nine would have seen that Justice controls two scales, one on each side, illustrating the notion that there are two kinds of justice: distributive, which rewards and punishes, and commutative, which mediates disputes.

• This program announced that to submit the city to the rule of an individual rather than a group was inherently to give the city over to conflict and destruction.

• The closest thing to a central character in Lorenzetti’s Good Government is not a person at all but a symbol of anti-individualism ("common good").

Art and Devotion after Giotto

Cult Images and Devotional Life

• Today we single out the work of Giotto, Duccio, or Nicola Pisano but we should bear in mind that this way of looking went against the grain.

• Most Italians who encountered new images were indifferent to the question of who had made them.

• Few paintings and sculptures had titles and early viewers would not have thought titles necessary.

• Altarpieces normally showed the Virgin and Child with saints; mural narratives related the life of the Virgin, of St. Francis, of local patron saints, and, less commonly, of Christ.

• For the majority of Ghiberti’s Florentine contemporaries, the most important image they would have encountered was the Annunciation on the inner facade of a church in Florence.

  • The painting, believed to respond miraculously to prayers, had become the focus of a cult

• In 1292, a mural at a grain reserve began to work miracles.

• By this point, Florentines associated Orsanmichele with the protection of the comune as such.

• The Black Death was a disfiguring, lethal plague that first arrived in Italy in the late 1340s, then again, repeatedly, in the years that followed, decimating the population.

• The Brothers further embellished the cult and site, sponsoring elaborate musical performances, plus a new marble tabernacle to house Daddi’s image.

Painting after the Black Death

• Could an event like the Black Death also transform the way painters conceived and executed their pictures?
• Attempts to answer this question have often focused on Orcagna.
• Historians have seen the bleakness of Orcagna's paintings as an anti-modern turn after the plague.
• Nardo was aiming for an effect similar to Giotto’s monumental depiction of the Last Judgment in the Arena Chapel.
• He goes even further in suppressing effects of pictorial depth from his scenes of the world to come, while greatly multiplying the number of figures.
• His imagery closely follows Inferno from the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.
• The most elaborate Dominican fresco cycle of the period is in the