Coronation of the Virgin | |
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Artist | Filippo Lippi |
Year | 1441–1447 |
Medium | Tempera on panel |
Dimensions | 220 cm × 287 cm (87 in × 113 in) |
Location | Uffizi, Florence |
The Coronation of the Virgin (in Italian Incoronazione Maringhi) is a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin by the Italian Renaissance master Filippo Lippi, in the Uffizi, Florence.
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Transcription
(jazz music) Male: We're in the Morgan Library in New York. We're looking at one of its real treasures. This is the Lindau Gospel cover. Female: This is old. Male: It is. It's really old. This is from the 9th century. That is from the 800s. This was a moment when there was an attempt to reestablish the kind of empire that the Romans had once known under Charlemagne. Female: Charlemagne was looking to Constatine as his model and was trying to recreate the empire of Constantine, and also to try and recreate the artistic styles that were present in that early Christian period. Male: It's interesting that Constantine, a great Roman emperor, but also the first emperor to have legalized, or had decriminalized Christianity. It's a really interesting choice by Charlemagne to focus on that particular emperor, because he's so much a bridge between the power of the older pagan Roman empire and the new Christian world. Female: That's correct. Male: We don't usually think of the cover as the work of art itself. Female: That's right. Really, there are so very few Medieval book covers that survive, so when we get a good one like this it is really something that is very special. What we're looking at is the cover of the Lindau Gospels. A Gospel book contains Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, together with some extra material. It might have a calendar or a litany on the inside. Clearly all of the emphasis here is on the outside. We see an image of the crucifixion. It's a very Carolingian representation that follows the Triumphant Christ. Male: Later representations of Christ on the cross see his body responding to gravity. We might see a real sense of pain. But here, we don't. Female: No, not at all. We see an emphasis of the divine nature of Christ; the Christ who is God who doesn't suffer. The only sense of suffering that we can see is a little bit of blood dripping from the hands. Other than that, he is tall and proud and in no way responding to the pain he is suffering. Male: We call this Carolingian. It comes from the workshop of Charlemagne, actually. This was probably made for Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bold. Especially in the representation in gold of the cloth, you can really get a sense of the way that these artists were looking back to the Classical tradition. Female: That's correct. They're looking back to the Classical tradition and, of course, Classical art is really concerned with drapery and drapery folds and artists are trying at this time, in the Carolingian period, to revive that style and they're trying to look at Classical models, at earlier Classical models, and emulate that in their art. I think we can especially see that in these bottom two figures that are mourning Christ. Male: This idea of reviving the Classical tradition is not just the system of representation. It has to do with reforming language, setting down a set of common laws. Female: That's correct. There's political reform that's going on at this time. There is education reform and there is also church reform that's happening to try and standardize and modernize the church and society at this time. Male: This is an unbelievably glorious object. Look at the amount of gold, the amount of jewels. It is almost architectural. Female: Scooting down, we can see all of the arches that help to make up the shape of the cross as thought the cross itself is like a building. If we think to later church plans, this is the kind of shape of a church building that we would expect to see. Male: Ah, so the kind of basilica structure? Female: Absolutely. With a long nave and a transept. Male: It's not only a representation, then, of Christ on the cross, but it actually has a deeper symbolic meaning. Female: Absolutely. The jewels are very sumptuous and there are pearls and other sparkly things that make this appear very attractive. Male: I see emeralds and I see rubies. Female: All in this wonderful gold setting. What we want to see is that those have particular reference to the heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. In chapters 21, 22, there is a lot of description of the gates in the city and of the heavenly Jerusalem. A lot of Medieval authors wrote commentaries to try and explain these in more human terms. If we see all these pearls, the pearls are often described as referring to the Apostles in the heavenly city. Male: I find this fascinating because one generally thinks of the Gospel books themselves as containing all of the meaning, all of the message. But here we're seeing on the very cover iconography that foretells the contents of the book within. Female: That's right. And effectively how to get to Heaven, how to arrive in the heavenly Jerusalem. This book takes you there. This book leads you to salavation. Male: This is a very precious object, obviously. It's just a tour de force of the jeweler's art. It's using a technique which is called repousse, which is to say that the sculptural figures, Christ and the other mourning figures that surround Christ, are actually hammered from the inside to create that positive image. Female: If we look at the figure of Christ, artists have really tried to bring out that Classicism; that we don't have strange muscles appearing and that the artist has tried to smooth over the body of Christ in a way that is very un-Medieval. Male: So, this is a stepping back from the abstraction of the human body that had been so pervasive in the years before the Carolingian revival. This is an attempt, then, to look back. It's interesting to think what kinds of sources would these artisans have had available to them from ancient Rome, from ancient Greece. Female: Well, they would have had books and drawings hidden away in monastic libraries. They would have had drawings from earlier versions of illustrated Gospel books. So they're looking back in their libraries to these earlier Christian books which retain more of a flavor of pagan drawing and pagan illustration from the Classical world. Male: It's just such a marvelous illustration of the complex relationship which the Medieval Christians had with the Classical tradition that had come before them. (jazz music)
History
Francesco Maringhi, procuratore of the church of Sant'Ambrogio, left money after his death in 1441 for a new painting at the high altar of the church. Bills of the payments for the work until 1447 have been preserved.
In the late 1430s, brother Filippo Lippi had left the convent of the Carmine convent to open an artist workshop of his own; however, having no money enough to pay assistants and apprentices, he worked alone with two usual collaborators, Fra Carnevale and Fra Diamante, along with an unknown "Piero di Lorenzo dipintore". For the Coronation of the Virgin, however, Lippi had to call in a total of six external painters, who were responsible also for the gilded frame, now lost. Originally the work had a predella, also lost, with the exception of a small panel with a Miracle of St Ambrose, now in the Berlin State Museums.
The work was immediately admired and was copied by numerous painters. It remained in Sant'Ambrogio until 1810, when it was stolen. Later it was sold to the Galleria dell'Accademia, from which it was transferred to the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.
Description
The work is composed of a single panel, divided into three sectors by the arches. At the sides of the central arch are two tondos, depicting the Angel of Annunciation and the Virgin.
The main scene features a crowd of biblical figures, angels and saints, portrayed in informal positions; most of them are probably portraits of existing people. As usual, the scene is set in Heaven, but Lippi decided to avoid the outdated gilded background, replacing it with a striped sky which alludes to the seven sectors of the Paradise. In the middle, in a commanding position, are Christ and the kneeling Madonna who is going to be crowned, within a majestic marble throne in perspective. The latter includes the shell-shaped niche, featured in other paintings by Lippi.
Four angels hold a gilded ribbon, while in the lower level is a series of kneeling saints; on the left and right are other two groups of saints and angels, inspired to the crowded choirs of older works, such as the Incoronation of the Virgin by Lorenzo Monaco. The elevated pavement of the side groups creates a perspective triangle whose apex is the Virgin's head.
Amongst the figures in the middle can be recognized Mary Magdalene and St. Eustace (titular of one of the most important altars in the church) with his sons and his wife. These figures are shorter than normal, as the painter imagined them to be correctly seen from below, in perspective, by the nuns of the Sant'Ambrogio convent from their separated choirs.
Kneeling at the side are the work's commissioner, facing a cartouche with the write ISTE PERFECIT OPUS ("this one finished the work"), while on the left is a self-portrait of Filippo Lippi in the religious habit of a Carmelite friar (as he was). Standing on the sides are the two titular saints of the church: St. Ambrose (left) and St. John the Baptist (right), whose austere representation reveal the influence of Masaccio.
This painting is described at length in lines 344-389 of Robert Browning's poem 'Fra Lippo Lippi', published in 1855 in his collection Men and Women.