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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (detail) (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (detail) (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (detail) (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (detail) (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
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| Fra Angelico Descent from the Cross (detail) (Pala Strozzi) ca. 1432-34 tempera on panel Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence |
"Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, known to posterity as Fra Angelico (ca. 1395-1455) . . . provided an important source of income to his Order [the Observant Dominicans]. By 1440, the friar was one of the leading painters of Florence, producing altarpieces and devotional pictures for a broad network of lay patrons. . . . Fra Angelico's status may have helped him attract a secular clientele, but he was also accustomed to painting according to the expectations of such customers. His stylistic choices in this regard are significant: he learned a great deal from the work of Masaccio and Donatello, yet he showed far greater allegiance to the decorative color, rich detailing, and aristocratically refined figures of Gentile da Fabriano. Fra Angelico was certainly aware that the vanguard of Florentine art in his generation had created a mode of expression that pursued emotional conviction and rejected ornamental finesse . . . yet this is not the route that he himself pursued."
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| Filippo Lippi Coronation of the Virgin 1441-47 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Filippo Lippi Coronation of the Virgin (detail) 1441-47 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
"Another friar painter who responded rapidly to the new unified altarpiece format was Fra Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406-1469) of the Carmelite Order, who was also closely associated with the Medici and their supporters. Lippi would become as famous for his scandalous personal life as Fra Angelico would for his piety, yet like the Dominican friar his painting mediated the concerns of the cloister and the city. . . . Lippi and his patrons seem on other occasions to have preferred the older multi-paneled altarpiece: the one he made between 1441 and 1447 for the church of Sant' Ambrogio [directly above] effectively combines the possibilities of the polyptych with the more modern unified format. Here the three-arched frame recalls the subdivisions of older altarpieces; dividing and prioritizing visual information, it also serves as a screen behind which figures move in a coherent inner space. The perspective construction of the great throne serves deliberately to misalign its architecture with the divisions of the frame, enhancing the sense of a spatial volume extending beyond the arches and even in front of them . . ."
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| Filippo Lippi Adoration of the Child with St Hilarion, St Jerome, and Mary Magdalen ca. 1455 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
"Painters . . . still depended largely on an "absolute color" system, one that had been in use with only modest changes since the Middle Ages. This system exploited the fact that the pigments painters used came from minerals, many of them valuable, and it put a premium on the richness of the resulting surface. Painters would arrange the hues on their palette in a series of gradations, starting with the most intense or saturated version of a pigment and proceeding through tones that had been made lighter by blending them with white. (Cennini describes one characteristic way of proceeding according to which the painter would use three different tones of each hue, laying these in next to one another to model forms.) The painter would approach each object he wanted to represent with any given color more or less independently, modeling it with a pigment that had a greater or lesser proportion of white. . . . The absolute color system was particularly appealing for images where richness was itself a theme, but a painter who studied the real effects of light in nature was bound to be unhappy with it for a number of reasons. To begin, the relationship between light and color that it implied would be precisely the opposite of what one actually witnessed. . . . The system can also result in a kind of fragmentation of the picture, since the painting of any solid-colored object will be determined with a mind to the overall pattern of the surface but with minimal consideration of the tones used for any two neighboring objects."
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| Filippo Lippi Adoration of the Child (detail) ca. 1455 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Filippo Lippi Adoration of the Child (detail) ca. 1455 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo Portrait of a Lady ca. 1470 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
"Shown in profile, the woman does not return the gaze of whatever man commissioned or looked upon her, inviting him to linger on the rendering of the fine materials, the elongated neck, and the delicate contours of the face. The close cropping of the picture field only underscores the sense of nearness. Particularly in a genre like portraiture, these features combine to give the sense of a present, living person, as if the portrait's object were just beyond the picture plane. And yet, nearly all the details that seem most individualizing are also highly conventionalized. Facing to the left, the figure follows the format of nearly every other painted picture of a women from the period. The sky and clouds behind her face are not markers of an actual place, but components of the standard blue background used in the Pollaiuolo workshop for such works, bringing out the lovely if suspiciously un-Mediterranean paleness of the woman's skin. Perhaps the sitter dyed her hair blonde, but even if she did not, the painter would likely have made her blonde for the permanent record, since this was an essential feature of the ideal that had been canonized in poetic descriptions of beautiful women. . . . It is entirely possible that the jewels she wears resemble their model more than the face they ornament does, and it is symptomatic that the portrait, though made by a famous painter for a wealthy patron, remains anonymous." [This text excerpted from the description of a similar but different Pollaiuolo portrait].
– Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (Thames & Hudson, 2012)
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| Antonio del Pollaiuolo Hercules and the Hydra ca. 1475 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Sandro Botticelli Madonna del Magnificat 1483 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Pietro Perugino Portrait of Francesco delle Opere 1494 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |