Thursday, January 28, 2021

Quattrocento Tempera Painting in Florence III

Neri di Bicci
Coronation of the Virgin
ca. 1460-61
tempera on panel
Palazzo Pretorio, Prato

Neri di Bicci
Virgin and Child with Angels
ca. 1460
tempera on panel
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Neri di Bicci
Martyrdom of St Sebastian
with St Blaise and St Anthony Abbot

ca. 1475-90
tempera on panel
Chiesa di San Biagio, Montecatini Val di Cecina

"Neri di Bicci was the second son and pupil of Bicci di Lorenzo.  He was the last artist in a family whose workshop can be traced back to his grandfather, Lorenzo di Bicci.  Under Neri's direction the workshop was extremely successful and catered to a wide number of patrons.  The details of its activity, including the names of the many pupils and assistants that passed through it, are recorded from 1453 to 1475 in the workshop diary.  This journal, the most extensive surviving document relating to a 15th-century painter, is preserved in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.  . . .  Though active throughout most of the 15th century, Neri remained faithful, at least in content, to the tradition established by his father and grandfather.  . . .  Of his four sons and two daughters, not one became an artist."

– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Canada  

Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop
Tobias and the Angel
ca. 1470
tempera on panel
National Gallery, London

Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi
Virgin and Child with Two Angels
ca. 1476-79
tempera on panel
National Gallery, London

Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi
Virgin and Child with Two Angels (detail)
ca. 1476-79
tempera on panel
National Gallery, London

"Verrocchio trained not only as a goldsmith and sculptor, but also as a painter, probably with the early Renaissance master Fra Filippo Lippi.  Verrocchio's altarpieces and devotional pictures are distinguished by their emphatic sense of three-dimensional space and volume, derived from his experience in sculpture.  They reveal a subtle play of light and shadow, and fine detail in the rendering of objects such as veils, cloths, and brooches.  The artist ran a busy workshop with many gifted collaborators and students, including Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli.  Leonardo spent his formative years in the master's studio, where he learned to model in light and dark and to depict energetically twisting figures.  Above all, Leonardo and other pupils acquired from Verrocchio a spirit of inquiry and experimentation in the making of art.  As a Florentine humanist wrote in the early 1500s, "Whatever painters have that is good, they drank from Verrocchio's spring."  

– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Domenico Ghirlandaio and workshop
Man of Sorrows
ca. 1475
tempera on panel
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Portrait of a Young Man
ca. 1480-90
tempera on panel
National Gallery, London

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1490
tempera on panel
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

"Born in 1449, Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi was called Ghirlandaio because his goldsmith father specialized in creating gold and silver garlands (ghirlande).  Though presumably trained in his father's profession, Ghirlandaio worked under Alesso Baldovinetti, according to Vasari.  And he may also have assisted Andrea del Verrocchio, as his early panel paintings and frescoes clearly betray that master's influence.  In temperament and approach, however, Ghirlandaio differed from both of his putative painting teachers.  "Pronto, presto, e facile," as Vasari described him, Ghirlandaio simplified their painstakingly realistic styles into one more suitable for fresco.  The artist was, in fact, primarily active in that medium, creating extensive fresco cycles.  . . .  To complete such vast undertakings, Ghirlandaio employed a highly organized workshop, which included his brothers Davide and Benedetto but also his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi, and even the young Michelangelo."    

– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Davide Ghirlandaio
Portrait of Selvaggia Sassetti
ca. 1487-88
tempera on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Sandro Botticelli
The Birth of Venus
1484-85
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Sandro Botticelli
Pallas and the Centaur
ca. 1482
tempera on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Bartolomeo della Gatta
The Annunciation (detail)
ca. 1480
tempera on panel
Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon

Raffaellino del Garbo
The Annunciation
ca. 1490
tempera on panel
Chiesa di San Donato in Polverosa

Piero di Cosimo
Mary Magdalen Reading
ca. 1490-95
tempera on panel
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

"Piero di Cosimo was a decade younger than Leonardo da Vinci and thirteen years older than Michelangelo.  He was keenly aware of Leonardo's ideas about nature, but his training provided an altogether more conservative background.  As a youth he worked on the frescoes decorating the walls of the Sistine Chapel, under the direction of his teacher Cosimo Rosselli.  He thus worked alongside Botticelli, Perugino, and Signorelli.  He was, in short, a painter with a foot in two worlds, and although Vasari places Piero's biography firmly among the "moderns" – between Correggio and Bramante – he went out of his way to emphasize the artist's eccentricities." 

– from biographical notes at the Metropolitan Museum, New York

"Giorgio Vasari wrote two biographies of the Florentine painter Piero de Cosimo: the text published in the second edition of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1568 is a much-revised version of the first, printed in 1550.  Both works are profoundly teleological, since they are both based on a misleading notion of artistic progress: the first culminating in the figure of Michelangelo, who mastered all three major arts, and the second ending with the eulogy of the Accademia del Disegno, recently founded (1563) under the political auspices of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici.  . . .  Piero's lives do not fit the theoretical model, and their meaning can be fully appreciated only when they are embedded in a network that connects Vasari's récit of Paolo Uccello's biography with his fictional life of Jacopo Pontormo.  All three were represented as improper intellectual figures deeply absorbed in their creative process, and their behavior allegedly endangered Vasari's efforts to promote a new figure of the artist perfectly integrated into the courtly society of his own time."

– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC