FRA ANGELICO's STAIR ANNUNCIATION

FRA ANGELICO'S STAIR ANNUNCIATION

Fra Angelico's large Annunciation fresco painted between 1435 and 1445 for the convent of San Marco in Florence is a great example of why it is important to look at the context in which art works are produced in order to understand them. (Best book on the monastery decoration is William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, Yale Press, 1993.)
        This painting is a large fresco painted on the wall of a Dominican monastery dedicated to Saint Mark in the city of Florence. The scene represented is the Angel Gabriel coming to tell the Virgin Mary that she will be impregnated by God and bear the Messiah. The fresco appears at the top of the stairs which run from the refectory to the living quarters in San Marco.
       A Dominican monk himself, Fra Angelico wanted to make an image of Mary that reflected the simple life of the monks who lived in cells on the second floor of the monastery.
The stool in the painting looks like a simple wooden stool,

the walls of the Virgin's house are not decorated, and she wears simple clothing and no jewellery. The cell room with one window depicted behind her resembles the cells with one window in the monastery itself, right down the hallway on either side of the painting.

 

The fictive Corinthian capitals in the foreground of the painting look like the actual Corinthian capitals designed by Michelozzo for plain columns holding up the courtyard of the Medici Palace on Via Larga (Via Cavour.)

 

And the fictive Ionic capitals with the plain, unfluted columns which fence in the space of her room on the left are identical to the actual Ionic capitals and columns in the library just down the monastery hall to the right of the image.

It is still a library designed by Michelozzo that contains displays of wonderful 15th-century manuscripts. The library collection was either paid for by Cosimo de' Medici or came from the private library of Cosimo's close friend, Niccolo Niccoli. When Niccoli died, Cosimo took over his
library and with it began the monastery library, then added his own purchases afterwards.

The use of contemporary architectural motifs from actual buildings by Michelozzo is Fra Angelico's way of modernizing the Annunciation story and making it take place in the 15th century. It is also Fra Angelico's way of telling his fellow Dominicans that they live close to the house where the Annunciation took place, that the Virgin had a room like their own cell room, and that a similar space to the one she occupies can be found in the library.
       To see how the Annunciation fits in to the lives of the monks living in the cells, it is a good idea
to look at a plan of the monastery on the second floor:

The church is on the left, the courtyard with the monks' cells on the right, the library at D. At the top of the stairs from the first floor, at small @ at the back of the plan is the Annunciation on the hallway wall. At 38 to the left of @ further down the hallway is a room with a stairwell next to it that leads to the church. That room and the room behind it, 39, were private cells of the patron of the monastery, Cosimo de' Medici, the de facto leader of Florence in the period Fra Angelico is painting, 1435-45. Originally, not shown on this map, there was a connecting corridor from Cosimo de' Medici's two cells to the library as well. The route from his second cell to the library is shown below in yellow:

The stairs to the church and the corridor to the library intimate that Cosimo could come and go without interacting with the monks at all. Cosimo was so invested in the monastery that he gave money for the main altarpiece for the church, painted by Fra Angelico:

as well as money for the library designed by Michelozzo. Michelozzo also built the staircase that led
directly from the church nave up to the condo he set up for Cosimo.  Cosimo, the great Florentine banker and businessman, would come to San Marco for meditation and prayer and reading, and to get away from his family home down the street on Via Larga (now Via Cavour).

 

For Cosimo's condo Fra Angelico painted images of the Crucifixion and Adoration of the Magi inside the two rooms of the private cell. The first room entered had the Crucifixion, the room up the short flight of stairs held the Adoration scene.
 

Since Cosimo was a member of the Confraternity of the Magi and probably participated in great pageant parades in June for the celebration of the Feast of the Magi (January 6th being too cold for parades,) the painting of the story of the Magi in his private layman's cell was self-reflective and congratulatory. He did not become a monk, he lived as a layman, but because he paid for the monastic community's building and church, as well as Fra Angelico's salary as painter of the cells and altarpiece, he was given special privileges and allowed to visit his monastic lodgings whenever he wished. From there he could access the library to look at his manuscripts, too.
         But what does he have to do with the Annunciation painted at the top of the stairs? He was the
patron who paid for it, too, but for its decoration he was not thinking about himself; he would have been thinking about the welfare of the monks who lived in the cells.
They dedicated their lives to Mary, so an image of the Virgin at the beginning of her motherhood would have stimulated them to be as humble and submissive as she was when approached by the angel. The fact that Fra Angelico's Annunciation is painted in the ACCEPTANCE STAGE is in keeping with how Cosimo and the church superiors would have wanted the monks to view their own lives, as lives accepting God's will in the same way that Mary did. Her simple surroundings reinforce their own servitude and plain living and would help them to agree to exclusion from life outside the monastery and to adhere to the purpose of a simple, clean, good existence.
         The green bushes and dark green cypresses (symbols of death) seen beyond the wooden fence enclosure on the left of the painting are at once a reference to the Garden of Eden where original sin began and a reference to the fact that later Christ will die for everyone's sins and atone for the Garden of Eden. Within the enclosure there is a green lawn with flowers springing up. That is meant to be a visual depiction of Mary as the "hortus conclusus" the "enclosed garden" and the "porta clausa," the
"closed door," both of which were terms applied to her in her mysterious capacity to be a virgin and fertile at the same time.

On the bottom pavement of the Annunciation scene are written two things in Latin. The first says,

"Salve, Mater pietatis / et totius Trinitatis / nobile triclinium / Maria!"

Hail, Mother of mercy and the complete Trinity, noble resting place, Mary!

and another which says, "Beware, lest you fail to say a Hail Mary when passing by this image of the intact Virgin."

The first is addressed to the Virgin in praise of her. The second seems to be an admonitory regulation
of the monks who would pass by this image on their way to meals and church services several times a day. Their prayers were required when going up and down the stairs.

The stair Annunciation painted by Fra Angelico sometime between 1435 and 1445 served then as
a focal image for the comings and goings of the monks living there. The light source in the painting comes from the left, and in the hallway there is a window to the left of the painting, so the real light and the pictorial light combine to make the image look realistic. The shadows of the Virgin's body fall to the right, suggesting the light is coming from the left. The arches are lit on the exterior or right,
suggesting left-streaming light. The space is set up using not quite perfect one-point perspective, but the diagonals meet within the lighted window of the small cell, by which the artist is saying that the center of their universe is light. Angelico's light and architecture create the illusion that the room of the Virgin and Angel continues beyond the wall as one walks up the stairs, as though he has made another cell without real building materials, mirroring the magical transformation in the scene of the Virgin into mother.

 

One of my friends reports that the last step of this flight of stairs up to the fresco is higher than the other steps, with the result that anyone coming up these stairs into the monastic living quarters, is forced to their knees by the physical encumbrance of the stair height. Exactly what the monk's superiors wanted; a submissive and praying friar, ready to say Hail Mary to the woman who received a message from an unearthly being with acceptance. And the acceptance extends to an angel whose wings are in an unlikely rainbow pattern:

Gabriel's wings become a symbol of all that is luminescent and miraculous about this event. The monks would have understood that their attraction to the beauty of these wings could ensure their
acceptance of the lives of prayer and fasting, to some, lives of physical hardship. Fra Angelico created a beautiful scene to enhance the religious fervor of his fellow cell-mates. Cosimo paid for the work but his own stairs from the nave had no such image. Cosimo could return to his palazzo and the real world after his time of meditation in his own cells. For the Dominicans in the confines of the monastery, no such relief. But both Cosimo and Fra Angelico realized that they could offer the monks a divine consolation. How much easier it was to enter into the rigor of monastic deprivation if your visual senses could be stimulated and caressed with two sweet beings encountering love.

The Annunciation fresco of Fra Angelico offered private joy at the top of the stair, an intimacy that
made all hardship bearable.

ANNUNCIATION STAGES

STAGES OF THE ANNUNCIATION in ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART


Over the course of this blog we have looked at four Annunciations, one each by Simone Martini, Della Robbia, Botticelli, Leonardo. In the process we have discussed the five stages of the Annunciation which are present in the text in Luke, Chapter 1: 26-38 in the Bible. Michael Baxandall introduced these stages for visual images of the Annunciation in his interpretations of 15th-century sermons in his 1972 book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford.) In that book he made a case for five stages: FEAR, REFLECTION, INQUIRY, ACCEPTANCE, and MERIT.

FEAR: Simone Martini's Annunciation of 1333 in the Uffizi is an example of the FEAR STAGE. The Madonna recoils from the Angel and has a frown on her face.
TEXT in LUKE 1: 29 - And when she saw him she was troubled at his saying.

 FEAR STAGE


REFLECTION:
Both Botticelli's Lehman Collection Annunciation (1485-92) and Della Robbia's Annunciation in the Ospedale degli Innocenti of 1470 are examples of the REFLECTION STAGE. The Madonna looks down at her book and holds one hand on her breast.
TEXT IN LUKE 1: 29: and she cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

 Lehman Collection Annunciation by Botticelli, Met Museum, New York.

 Della Robbia Annunciation, Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1470.

 Both are REFLECTION

INQUIRY:  Leonardo's Annunciation now in the Uffizi is an example of Inquiry. The Madonna holds up one hand and stops reading, looks directly at the angel.
TEXT IN LUKE 1: 34: Then said Mary unto the angel, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" 



INQUIRY


ACCEPTANCE:  FRA ANGELICO's Annunciation at the top of the stairs in San Marco.
The Madonna folds both hands over her chest and bows her head to the angel.
TEXT in LUKE 1: 38 - And Mary said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. be it unto me according to thy word."

ACCEPTANCE

MERIT stage - is difficult to convey in visual images and is rarely painted in the 15th century.
This stage involves the hymn to God that Mary says in her heart and this part of the text occurs after she has visited Elizabeth and is praising God for the miracle that has happened. Merit may include part of the text referred to as the Magnificat.
TEXT Luke 1: 46-47: My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
For our purposes this part of the story of the Annunciation is not represented in Annunciation scenes.

But for all other Annunciations of this period, it is possible to see in the gestures of Mary and sometimes of the Angel the FOUR different STAGES that are mentioned in the sermons with regard to the Luke text.
So now you can test these whenever you see an Annunciation in a museum. For instance, which stage is being represented here?

 Fra Angelico's Annunciation in Madrid, c.1435.
Yes, Acceptance, and here?

 Botticelli predella panel for San Marco Coronation, Uffizi, 1488-90



 
and Della Robbia's Annunciation made for La Verna, Italy, 1470's?
Yes,  both Reflection

And sometimes it is possible to see artists trying to represent two stages at once or the state of being
in between two stages:  Between FEAR AND REFLECTION: Botticelli, Annunciation, Uffizi, 1489.

Between FEAR AND REFLECTION:
Donatello's Annunciation, terracotta, 1433, Church of Santa Croce, Florence

BETWEEN REFLECTION AND INQUIRY

Piero della Francesca's Annunciation in San Francesco, Arezzo, 1462.

BETWEEN REFLECTION AND ACCEPTANCE: Filippo Lippi's Annunciation, c. 1435-40, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C..

Most of the representations of the stages are dependent on the gestures of the Madonna, and the Angel's gestures often match hers, but in some cases not.

The story of the introduction of the thought of pregnancy and the actuality of pregnancy is a story which most human beings can relate to since it is the story of reproduction. It is also a story about the major change in a life cycle of a human being where a single person stops thinking about life alone and starts to think about another human being's welfare. The story of creation that transforms most people as they travel from birth to death is portrayed as a common theme here, and is what continues to make Annunciation scenes appealing. The idea that that creation is God's doing is the nature of this particular pregnancy scene since Mary is a Virgin and has "not known a man." In all of these Annunciation scenes the messenger who delivers the miraculous news is a neuter or male angel; sometimes together with God the Father who is actually up in heaven looking down, as in the Piero della Francesca image, and sometimes with God suggested by hands sending out the dove of the Holy Spirit to convey the heavenly nature of the magic, as in Fra Filippo Lippi's 1449-59 Annunciation in the National Gallery in London.

For fifteenth century artists the Annunciation is rendered as an invitation to dance. The angel often bows as he flies in, the Madonna responds by kneeling to the news in humility. The graceful nature of their gestures conveys a conversation between the spiritual world and the earthly. The Angel asks the question as he tells Mary, Mary replies to the question. A whole sentence is formed by the interaction of the two figures. A courtly request to dance or impregnate, a humble yes in reply. In the case below, another Filippo Lippi Annunciation, the dove flies in above the angel's head with streams of golden light to send the words to Mary.



The universal notion of wooing and acceptance of wooing is repeated over and over again in fifteenth-century images and sermon discussions. The excitement of young love is what seduces the artists and the viewers and makes the Annunciation the fertile ground for representing the hidden sexuality of all ages. It is the uncertainty before the final act that is most moving and meaningful.

BELLINI'S PESARO ALTARPIECE (B)

BELLINI's PESARO ALTARPIECE (B)

In the previous blog entry (A) we discussed the main section of the Pesaro Altarpiece painted by Giovanni Bellini probably in 1475, with its subject, the Coronation of the Virgin with Saints. In this blog entry I wish to talk about the gable painting that was originally above the main section and the predella panels that are still beneath it in the museum.

The gable painting, now in the Vatican Museums, is a scene of the Deposition, the taking of Christ's body off the cross before lowering it into the grave. His body perches on the edge of the sarcophagus while Joseph of Arimathaea holds it upright before placing it in his own tomb, a gift he gave to Jesus. Nicodemus, a dark-bearded figure standing above the rest, holds the ointment jar from which Mary Magdalene has taken the oil with which she is caressing Christ's hand.

Mary Magdalene here is focusing on the tender application of ointment to Christ's hand wound.  Her mouth is open, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in concentration. Joseph and Nicodemus watch intently as she takes Christ's left hand in both of hers, gently touching the top and bottom of it as if to recover the whole of him through just his hand. Christ's chest wound still bleeds and Joseph holds up Christ's body with his own.

The solemnity of this scene of death is presented by Bellini "di sotto in su," from below looking up,
because he knew that the viewer of the altarpiece would be looking UP at the gable above the
main scene. (For the questions about whether the Deposition or Compianto was originally intended
for this altarpiece, see Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, Yale, 1989; she thinks it was.) Normally in Renaissance art we would expect this story of the end of Christ's life to be juxtaposed with a story from the beginning, something like the Nativity or the Adoration of the Child, so that we could compare the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end, and learn from that something about the length of Christ's whole life. This altarpiece, instead, places the image of death above a Coronation scene that doubles as a sacred conversation piece with the four saints who are attending the Coronation. We are reminded of the sadness of Christ's death just above the joyful experience of Mary's crowning as Queen of Heaven. Instead of a measurement of Christ's days on earth, though, the altarpiece is a reminder of the shortness of life and how successes such as the crowning of a Queen should be enjoyed while they last.
 
The gable panel and the predella panels (on the bottom of the altarpiece) tell stories of the saints depicted in the main altarpiece and they contribute to the emphasis on the importance of CARPE DIEM as a theme for the altarpiece. When the gable was together with the Coronation, the whole altarpiece would have been very large, as shown below in a conjoining that took place in 1989 for a special exhibit.


The date of the altarpiece has been disputed by scholars since there are no extant documents
to tell us anything about the commission, but it is generally dated between 1471 and 1483. In my blog entry on the Coronation, I have given reasons to date it to 1475. We do know that it was to be placed in the Franciscan church of San Francesco in Pesaro on the main altar, which explains why Saint Francis appears in the main section and the predella. I think Costanzo Sforza had the altarpiece made in celebration of his own wedding which took place over five days in May of 1475. 

The predella panels are wonderful scenes to be studied in and of themselves.

From the left the subjects are:

     Killing of dragon St. Paul's        St. Peter's      Nativity   St. Jerome     St. Francis    St.Terence
     by St. George       Conversion    Crucifixion                    Flagellation   Stigmata

The landscape runs in a continuous sweep behind the figures in the predella scenes and gives them
a coherent whole. The two saints furthest left and right are warrior saints meant to remind us of
Costanzo Sforza's career as a condottiere, while the five scenes in the center correspond to the
saints directly above, that is, St. Paul's Conversion for St. Paul, St. Peter's Crucifixion for St. Peter,
the holy family for Mary and Christ above, St. Jerome's self-flagellation for St. Jerome, and The
Stigmatization of St. Francis for St. Francis above.
From the left:
Killing of dragon by St. George:

Both this scene, where George breaks his lance in the dragon on behalf of the Princess who stands behind on the left, as well as the next scene of St. Paul's Conversion, feature a horse who rises on his
back legs in the same manner as the horse does in a medal of Costanzo Sforza of 1475:

 St. Paul's Conversion

This Conversion scene is set below the figure of St. Paul in the Coronation. In the predella panel Paul is on the ground, having been hit by the truth of the light so forceful that he is knocked from his horse. He looks up to the vision of Christ in the sky. From this moment on Paul is no longer a Roman Jew; he instantly becomes a Christian believer. He is wearing the armor of the Roman army since he was a Roman soldier before his conversion.

In the main altarpiece Paul stands next to St. Peter, so the subsequent predella panel is the story of the Crucifixion of St. Peter:

 

St. Peter was crucified upside down because he didn't think he was worthy to be crucified in the same manner as Christ. His upside-down Crucifixion takes place in front of a building meant to resemble Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome so that the viewer will understand where he was martyred. What is unusual in this scene, however, is that not only is Peter being crucified, but he is being stoned by several men, one of whom, dressed in pink and seen from the back, holds a stone in his right hand.

As Rona Goffen has pointed out in her book on Bellini, the Stoning of St. Peter is not a story from

the usual stories about St. Peter's life recounted in Acts in the Bible. She astutely connects this

predella stoning to the stoning that took place in 1471 in Rome of the newly elected Pope in that year,

Pope Sixtus IV. Sixtus survived, but it is probable that Costanzo Sforza was present in Rome in that

year and witnessed the stoning of the successor of St. Peter. Goffen suggests there are two portraits

over on the left of the scene, but she does not guess at the identities of them:

I think the dark-haired fellow, who looks around 27 years old, is Costanzo Sforza himself, and the cardinal standing next to him in red is Giuliano della Rovere, later Pope Julius II, a great patron of the arts even when he was Cardinal. As Sixtus IV's nephew, Giuliano would have been present at the stoning of his uncle, too. If we reverse the profile portrait of Costanzo on his medal cast in 1475, it 

looks much like the dark-haired man here. 

 

And Giuliano della Rovere's medal portrait resembles the Cardinal in the Stoning scene.

 

Costanzo and Giuliano are related by marriage, and Giuliano would have come to Costanzo's wedding in 1475, four years after they both saw the Pope being stoned in Rome. This panel unites them as witness figures in an important event for the papacy.

The next predella panel is more peaceful, the Nativity underneath Mary and Christ in the main altarpiece.

Mary and Joseph in this scene look down at their newborn child in front of a manger with an ox and ass, and behind them winds a river through a lovely valley landscape. A star with red seraphim can be seen in the open gable of the manger with the sky beyond.

The next two saints in the main altar also have predella stories associated with them; they are St. Jerome and St. Francis:

Flagellation of St. Jerome. Out in the desert Jerome fasted and beat himself with a stone on his chest to atone for sins. In Bellini's version he kneels in white before a simple cross in front of a cave. In one hand he holds a stone and hits his chest with the other.

 St. Francis' Stigmatization follows St. Jerome's self-flagellation:

St. Francis, in the story, was kneeling and praying near a church with his fellow monk, St. Leo, here shown reading a book on the left. They were in La Verna, the cliff location where Francis went to live with his followers. A red seraphim approached in the shape of Christ on the cross, and rays of light

from each of Christ's wounds struck Francis in the same places: one on each hand, one on each foot,

and one on the chest. Francis suffered the pain from the piercing wounds until his death two years after the event. Bellini does paint a church behind the saint, but it is not like any church at La Verna. Instead Bellini painted what he knew: the largest Franciscan church in Venice, its apse end with Gothic pointed arch windows, circled in the drawing below. Bellini reassures the viewer that this

predella is about St. Francis by painting in the Venetian church dedicated to Francis.

 

The final predella panel is of St. Terenzio, who holds a white flag with red cross and a model of Costanzo Sforza's castle, the Rocca Costanza, as it is known as today.

As explained in the previous blog, the presence of Costanzo Sforza's pet project begun in the same year he got married, 1475, seals the altarpiece, too, as one of his projects, and gives us the name of
one of the commissioners. The sea that can be seen in the medal for Costanzo's Castle is still very close to the Rocca Costanza in Pesaro today:

Two guardian saints framing stories of suffering in the predella, with a reminder of death, a memento mori, high above the altarpiece in the gable. 

 

Only two parts of this masterpiece are cheerful: the central subject:

and the predella panel of the Nativity:

They punctuate in the center the concern for death and suffering of the rest of the altar.

The theme of seizing life because it does not last long is displayed by sandwiching the joyful panels between ones that emphasize how hard life can be.
And yet what Bellini puts in the center with the largest figures is the happy story of the Coronation.

And the beautiful Venetian light he throws on the scene from the left so that it lights up the golden
orb on Christ's gown tells us that he is, ultimately, an optimist. Worth a trip to Pesaro to be reminded
of life's glories.