Day 242 - Trecento paintings

 March 22, 2021

Gallery 624 transports us back to Italy in the 14th and early 15th centuries. All the paintings are religious in theme, with many depicting the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, or some saint or other. Many were wrested from altarpieces whose panels were split up and sold separately, and while it's nice to be able to see them at the Met, it's a loss not to know what the fully assembled works looked like. 

While the subjects are spiritual, I'm struck by how decorative many of the paintings are. My eye is drawn over and over to brilliant red and blue garments and elaborately patterned surfaces. The gold backgrounds accentuate the high seriousness and holiness of the scenes being represented,  but they also must have brought pleasure to the viewers.

Some of the works are by painters whose names are familiar to me (small pieces by Giotto, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Fra Angelico, for example), and others are by painters whose names I'd heard before but really didn't know at all (like Cosimo Tura). But the two works profiled today are by painters who were completely unknown to me until now. The first, a Madonna and Child, an independent panel about 20" wide and 30" high in tempera on wood with a gold ground, is by Paolo di Giovanni Fei, a Sienese painter who was active by 1369 and died in 1411.  According to the signage, it may have stood on an altar or hung in a domestic interior. The painting is very frontal; that and Mary's perfectly oval face remind me strongly of an icon.  But the work depicts the Christ child nursing, something I've never seen in an icon; Mary's breast pokes out at a rather odd angle from under her cape, and the baby clasps it to his mouth with his left hand. What I really love about the image, though, is that with his right hand, the chubby infant grabs onto the toes of his right foot.  The painter obviously knew how babies like to play with their feet, and the gesture gives a very human touch to the sacred image.

The second work is also a Madonna and Child, this time with donors, painted by Giovanni da Milano around 1365. It too is in tempera on wood with a gold ground. The lunette-shaped piece, perhaps four feet long on the straight edge, shows the Christ Child welcoming into heaven the donor and his wife, who are much smaller in scale than the holy figures.  The work was probably set into an arch above a tomb, says the sign. But I would much rather think of it as having hung in the donors' bedroom, where it would have provided the couple with constant reassurance that they would be saved and reunited after death. I wish this kind of comfort were available to me, but it isn't (not that I'm sure with whom I'd want to be permanently reunited).