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ADORATION OF THE MAGI (Attitude towards the viewer in the Renaissance paintings) |
by M Gale
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We will try to explain the gradual mastering and variations of the Renaissance perspective illusionist model through various representations of the Adoration of the magi, and most of all, the most important function of the painting – the attitude towards its viewer. As we will see through discussion of selected paintings, the biblical meaning of the Adoration of the Magi motif was often supplemented with personal interpretations, allegories, portraits, self-portraits, etc.
The motif was unusual for Florentine altar scenes until the 15th century. One of the first presentations of the Adoration of the magi is found on the Strozzi altar of Gentile da Fabiano, dating in 1423. But the 15th century was its golden age, probably due to many brotherhoods in Florence.
One of the most important congregations was so-called Brotherhood of the Magi, (Compania dei Magi, also called Confraternity of the Star). Their selected members also included the Medici family. Compagnia dei Magi organized magnificent processions in Florence, from the monastery of St Marco to the Baptistery, which were performed every five years on Epiphany, the feast day of the Magi. Lorenzo il Magnifico, the grand son of Cosimo il Vecchio was even baptized on January the 6th, the feast day of the Magi.
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| Benozzo Gozzoli, Procession of the Magi, Medici Chapel, about 1459 |
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Members of the important families in Florence were often portrayed as magi or as their companions on the paintings with the motif of the Adoration of the Magi. There are several representations of this motif which depicted portraits of Medici. They were made by the most known Italian renaissance artists such as Gozzoli, Botticelli, Veneziano, Lippi, Ghirlandaio… These paintings were commissioned mostly by members of the family or by his followers.
Telling the Story
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| Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, 1423 |
The Adoration of the Magi from Gentile da Fabriano dating in 1423, presents the complete story of the adoration of the magi as described in the Bible; from the announcement of the birth of Christ, till the arrival of the magi with their suite to Jerusalem and their adoration to the new prophet. This type of presentation – the telling of the story in direct connection to the text – was one of the characteristics of the medieval figuration. According to many theologians, the religious paintings mainly served as a support to the text:
Images are permitted, but only on the condition that they fulfill the office of communicating the world to the unlettered. Their role is that of an accessible and palatable substitute.1
In his research of the religious paintings function, Michael Baxandal cites a passage from the Catolicon by John of Genoa, dating back in the 13th century, which was the standard dictionary of the period:
You have to understand there are three reasons for paintings in churches. First, for educating simple people, because the painting teaches them as a book would. Second, the mysteries of embodiment and the appearance of the saints are more active in our minds if we look at them every day. Third, they encourage religious feelings, for they are more in touch with the visual image, than with the spoken word. 2
Strozzi’s altar is not familiar with the Renaissance space perspective, because it is still under the influence of the late medieval space presentation (trecentesque) which distinguished between close (bigger) and far (smaller).
Central Vanishing Point
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| Masaccio, Adoration of the Magi, 1426 |
Massaccio’s Adoration of the Magi included in a polyptych in Pisa and dating in 1426 is a total contrast to Gentile’s narrative and ornamental perception of the space. Masacci’s space is denoted by standard usage of the perspective which, by using the central vanishing point, enables him to realistically arrange the figures and the landscapes. Even Alberti thanked him for using the “old motif” in a completely new way in the appendix to the Italian version of his most famous work Della Pitura:
I believed ... that Nature, mistress of things, had grown old and weary, and was no longer producing intellects any more than giants on a vast and wonderful scale... But after I came back here to this most beautiful of cities from the long exile in which we Albertis have grown old, I recognized in many, but above all in you Filippo Brunelleschi, and in our great friend the sculptor Donatello, and in others, Nencio Ghiberti?, Luca della Robia and Masaccio, a talent ingegno for every laudable enterprise in no way inferior to any of the ancients who gained frame in these arts. 3
Although there are some composition similarities with Gentile’s Adoration of the Magi (the holy family portrayed from the profile on the right side, adoration of the magi in the middle and the suite with horses on the left side), Masaccio did concentrate on the basic motif. The painting ceases to be a mare illustration of the text (in this case the biblical story), but an independent composition within a Renaissance comprehension of the space.
The progressive, if by no means uniformly accepted, disentanglement of the figural from its textual task – the denarrativization of the ocular we might call it – was an important element in this larger shift from reading the world as an intelligible text (the "book of nature") to looking at it as an observable but meaningless object, which Foucault and others have argued was the emblem of the modern epistemological order. Only with this epochal transformation could the "mechanization of the world picture" so essential to modern science to take place. 4
The painting also presents the full-figured portraits of the commissioner Giuliano di Ser Colino and his son. They are painted in perspective and incorporated in the scene, but at the same time, mostly because they are placed in the front and have very realistic faces and clothes, they appear as if observing the scene from the outside and still look like the medieval (mostly northern) votive portraits of the commissioners at the side edges of the paintings. We will be able to observe the incorporation of the portrait into the biblical space in later presentations of this motif (Botticelli).
In the mass of bodies in the upper right side of the painting, we notice a face of a servant looking at us and it is probably one of those figures which attracts the viewer’s attention and draws him into the painting as we will see later on.
Mirror Shape
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| Domenico Veneziano, Adoration of the Magi, 1438-39 |
Domenico Veneziano most certainly knew the paintings of his predecessors. The landscape in his Adoration of the Magi dating in 1438-1439 is similar to Gentile da Fabriano’s landscape as painted by Masaccio. The position of the holy family, the first king and the suit is similar to those in Masaccio, it is actually their mirror projection. The painting as a whole also reminds us of the mirror because of its shape which is – also a novelty – round.
Central Pyramid Shape
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| Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, about 1470-74 |
The same painting shape was also used by Sandro Botticelli in one of his early variations of the same motif, in the so called London's Adoration of the Magi which is time vise (1470-1475) much older than Domenico Veneziano’s. In this and other paintings from the Adoration of the Magi “series” (mostly in presentations from Washington Naional Gallery and Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence) created in the 70s and 80s of the 15th century, Botticelli dealt with composition and space in the painting. The central pyramid shape present in all mentioned paintings later also occurs in Leonardo da Vinci.
Artist’s Signature
Botticelli is completely sovereign in mastering the Renaissance space in the painting, even to the extent of using the perspective model transferring the visible world in the painting as a tool for researching the “unreal”. He uses many perspectives in composition which is, from Alberti’s point of view, inadmissible. But it enables him to accomplish different affects noticeable from the viewpoint:
Unlike that of Piero /della Francesca/, Botticelli's perspective space is fragmentary, dreamlike, and even when it seems real its very reality is only the surreality that torments us in dreams.5
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| Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, about 1475 |
The Adoration of the Magi dating in 1475 is painted from two different perspectives; the antique ruins on the right side are painted from a different perspective than the central composition which is based on a central vanishing point. The central vanishing point directs the viewer towards the center of action, while the edge of the painting with antique arches looks like some kind of residue, or an excess, which makes the painting recognizable and creates a place for the author to place himself.
Botticelli literally paints himself as one of the men assisting the central event and represents the portraits of the Medici family and their ‘court’. The gold full-figure self-portrait of the author on the right side of the painting looking directly at the viewer is actually his signature. But it belongs to a completely different register, as a mentioned “mistake” in the painting, and has in this particular case a function of a person catching the gaze of the viewer and introducing to him the event on the painting.
The function of introducing is in a sense a leftover from a medieval tradition which is being gradually omitted, because now days it is the vanishing point which is taking over this function. The meaning of similar ‘medieval remains’ is also discussed by Baxandall, who compares them to medieval choirs, festioli, who often introduced plays as angels and remained on the stage throughout the play functioning as mediators between the viewers and events and were also often used by painters.6
Alberti also wrote about characters making contact with the viewers in his Discussion on painting:
I like to see in a narrative someone who advises us or points out to us what is going on or draws us near with a gesture to look or, with worried expression or wild eyes, warns us not to approach, or draws attention to something dangerous or marvelous in it, or invites you to weep with them or to laugh. 7
Botticelli’s self-portrait is more interesting from the point of view of a portrait and an self-portrait than as a character introducing us into the painting. A portrait is one of the genre scenes which are in Renaissance aware of the communication with the viewer.
Motionless Eye
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| Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, about 1478-80 |
The composition of this painting is in comparison to the early version of the same motif ‘more accurate’. The perspective rays converge into a single, central vanishing point placed in the center of the painting right where the central motif is. The perspective point also represents the peak of the perspective circle which is made out of the figures from the suite.
The last Botticelli’s painting of this motif is in composition similar to Leonardo’s unfinished painting of the Adoration of the Magi. Both paintings represent Alberti’s one point perspective model with the central vanishing point which turns the viewers look into the center event most accurately.
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| Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481 |
But if the viewer becomes the privileged center of the perspective view, than his view point becomes a motionless eye. Leonardo himself points that out, when he explains the difference between the visual stereoscopic perception of the world and its expression on a two dimensional surface of a painting:
The paintings, even if completed with the most perfected shapes, shadowing, light and color, cannot be seen in the same relief as the real life model, unless we look at the real life model from a great distance with one eye.8
Even Leonardo supposedly painted his auto portrait at the side of the painting, separated from the crowd and pointing towards the event on the painting.
Geometric Projection as a Tool
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| Domenico del Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Shepherds, about 1485 |
In Ghirlandaio’s painting the Adoration of the Shepherds we can notice the influence of the northern painting (Portinari Altarpiece) in realistically painted animals and faces of the main protagonists and something which is especially interesting to us, in the composition of the painting. The image does not begin with the frame, but instead it directly cuts into the space and places the viewer in the painting. So the viewer has, in contrast to the motionless eye of the Italian Renaissance, a function of a living, moving eye, an ambulatory presence.
Svetlana Alpers defends the theory that the Netherlands artists were sooner aware of the two dimensional reality of the canvas and were because of that a lot more skeptical about the usage of perspective than the Italians, so they devoted more time to expression of the textures and colors of nontransparent and smooth surfaces, than to creating an illusionist perspective.9
Here, a point Maurice Merleau Ponty already made, is proved again. The painters knew from experience that perspective technique does not solve the problems of the painting and no projection can become its fundamental law. The painters understood the geometric projection as a tool, a starting point which provided them with many different ways.
Madness of Vision
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| Perino del Vaga, Nativity, 1534 |
In Perino del Vaga’s Nativity dating in 1534 we witness the ending of the Renaissance – mannerism. The space is completely filled with scenes – the central motif of adoration is in front, right before the viewers eyes, above it we see God with angels in the clouds, which are placed a little further at the back, and a figure moving up a staircase the furthest in the back – reminiscence of the architectural composition of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi. In the middle of the lower edge there is a quote – the painter’s signature and the date of the painting on a painted lamella in perspective, which is reminiscent of Dürer.
The saturation of the visual perspective model with various images10 and pluralism of spaces reaches its climax in the coming period. Baroque, which was fighting against the totalitarian view from view-from-above, was marked by the research of the madness of vision, states Christine Buci-Glucksmann. Among others also through bending, disfiguring and deforming the perspective which was up to this point so systematically used.11
1. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regimec, Cambridge, 1981, p. 1.
2. Michael Baxandall, Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford Univeersity Press, 1972.
3. Leon Batista Alberti, On Painting.
4. Martin Jay, Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, California, 1993, p. 51.
5. Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting - Sculpture - Architecture, London, 1987, p. 324.
6. Michael Baxandall, Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford Univeersity Press, 1972.
7. John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Washington D.C., 1988, p. 33.
8. Michael Baxandall, Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford Univeersity Press, 1972.
9. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, 1983.
10. Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting - Sculpture - Architecture, London, 1987, pp. 561-562.
11. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir: De l'estetique baroque, Paris, 1986.
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