(piano music)
Man: We're in the first room of the Uffizi.
And we're looking at the absolutely monumental
painting by Cimabue of the Madonna Enthroned
originally for Santa Trinita.
Woman: Right, here in Florence.
It's about twelve feet high.
Man: It's huge and it's so big because that's a big church,
Santa Trinita.
It would have needed to be able to be seen
from the back of the church.
Woman: And it's important to remember that it would have been
behind an altar raised up from the ground
in the space of a church.
Very different than the space that we see it in today.
So all of that gold would have glistened
in a very different way.
Man: And kind of important because the churches
are relatively dark,
so that gold would have been really wonderful and luminous.
Of course it also has an important symbolic
value and that is the light of heaven.
Woman: One of the things that we look at when we think
of Cimabue I think going back to Vasari,
who really starts his history with the Renaissance
with Cimabue is some hints at the beginnings of the Renaissance.
And so when we look at this,
we begin to see some of that illusionism
that we think about with the Renaissance.
Man: Right now of course this is 20/20 hindsight.
Woman: Exactly.
Man: Vasari was certainly not a careful art historian
but I think that there is a space that she can sit in.
It's not a rational space.
Woman: No.
Man: You had mentioned that this is the space of heaven.
So I think this is a certain degree of license.
Now this is a painting that would have been hung
fairly high and yet somehow we're looking
down at the step on which the virgin's feet rest.
We're looking actually down on the seat
but we're looking across at the Old Testament
prophets down below.
Woman: And up at Mary herself.
Man: And so there's all kinds of contradictions here.
Woman: Right and yet we can read that the sides
of her throne are closer to us
that the parts of the throne by her shoulders
are set back into space.
Man: And there's even a kind of velocity
that moves our eye back into space.
If you look at the lines that are painted
on the steps, for instance,
where the virgin's feet rest,
it does bring us back into space
and creates a kind of visual pathway.
Woman: And those figures of the prophets
in the foreground are even closer still.
Man: Let's start down with them because this is curious.
They're in a kind of impossible space
in the basement under the throne.
I mean what is that? (laughs)
Woman: They did predict the coming of Christ.
Man: Okay so this is very much a Christian
perspective and the Christians are looking back
to the Old Testament,
laying literally the foundation upon
which Christianity is built.
Woman: So I guess it makes sense
that they are below.
Man: They're holding scrolls as opposed to books,
and that's how we can recognize instantly
that they are not the evangelists,
that they are actually from the Old Testament.
Mary was an enormously important figure
at this time.
Christ was a little terrifying to the medievel mind.
Mary grew in importance what is known as the cult
of the Madonna, the cult of the virgin,
as an intercessor to her son.
That is, people would pray to the Virgin Mary,
and hopefully she would speak maybe to God
on your behalf.
Woman: That's right and that's exactly how
Cimabue shows Mary to us here.
She's pointing to Christ, in a way addressing the viewer,
and then pointing to the Christ child, her son,
and saying, "This is the pathway to God.
"The pathway to salvation is through Christ."
Man: Now Christ, for his part, is looking back to us.
You're absolutely right.
His two fingers are raised as if he is blessing us.
Now the rendering of Christ is really interesting
because of course compared to Mary he is quite small
and he is the appropriate scale.
The problem is, at least to our modern eyes,
is that he doesn't look like an infant.
His head is small in relationship to his body
and he kind of has the features of a grown man
except in a little baby and one of the ways
our historians have acknowledged this is that
this is a symbolic rendering,
that Christ is shown as a man of wisdom
and age is sometimes a way of expressing that.
Symbolically then, here is an all-knowing God.
But here is God as a child,
although later in the Renaissance that
convention will dissipate and we'll see a chubby
baby in its place.
Woman: So I'm noticing the elongated features
of Mary, her long nose, the sort of stylization around her eyes
is almond shaped, her very elongated hand,
and that's coming from Byzantine tradition
that Cimabue is painting in.
Man: What's interesting is Byzantium,
which had been a source of power and culture
in the East,
actually a lot of the artists and intellectuals
had come to Italy in part because of invasions.
So at this moment, at the end of the 1200s,
at the beginning of the 1300s,
there is this infusion of intellectual capital
of artistic tradition that comes into Italy
and really revitalizes the traditions here.
Woman: So sometimes our historians
refer to this period as the Italo-Byzantine.
On the other hand Cimabue is doing things that
point toward the Renaissance.
He is using gold lines to articulate the folds
of drapery but those lines instead of just sort of being flat
and decorative really begin to describe
a sense of the three-dimensional folds of drapery
and Mary herself begins to sort of fill out
and be a little bit less of that thin elongated
figure without any mask that we see before this.
Man: We do have a sense of Mary actually holding
the Christ child to some extent.
Woman: He's a little weightless.
Man: Yeah but the figures are weightless.
The striations, those gold lines that you were speaking about,
help to emphasize that almost two-dimensionality
of those figures, but there are trace of chiaroscuro
in the neck, in the nose, perhaps in the faces of the angels.
You know, these are hints, they are subtle,
but of course we can look back now and see this as the
beginning of the long development of increasing naturalism,
which people like Vasari will look back to
Cimabue as the root of.
Woman: Look for example the two foreground
angels on either side of the throne.
Half of their body is behind the throne,
giving us the real illusion of space,
and their foot comes forward and on the left
the angel's foot comes even a little off the throne.
Man: But they are still very decorative
and one could only imagine what those angels
in the background are actually standing on.
Woman: And you know, the throne itself is so decorative.
Maybe we should just take one moment and talk
about the fact that this is on wood.
That this is painted with tempera.
That the artist is using very thin gold leaf.
That's real gold there that has been attached
to the wood surface.
Man: And we shouldn't underestimate the effort
that it takes to create a panel of wood
that can survive for so many hundreds
of years without warping, without cracking significantly.
Woman: And so there's a lot of workmanship
here that sometimes I think in the era of
the 21st century go to the art store
and buy your supplies,
we kind of forget about this handmade-ness here,
that we have here in all aspects of the materials.
Man: I think that's an important point.
There was not so much the separation between
the art and the craft as we understand it now.
You know he is painter and craftsman.
Woman: Mixing his paints, working on the wood panel,
preparing it and painting it.
(piano music)