>> T J Clark: What kind of questions are the most productive questions to ask of Italian
Renaissance painting? We're looking here at a very large altarpiece,
very grand, done at the very end of the 15th century, 1498-1500, by Costa and Maineri.
And by the time they were working on this, the machinery of illusionism had been completely
perfected. They knew how to do architectural depth. They knew how to do the soft shine
of light on armour. They had the world of illusion at their fingertips. Where do we
stand in the illusion it makes? What kind of space are we invited into? I think the
answers to that often are very perplexing. We ask the question and the answer is not
at all obvious.
This painting is a wonderful example of that. Where are we exactly? We seem to be certainly
inside some marvellous architectural structure. But are we safely in an interior or at the
threshold of some buildings? Maybe in some kind of portico or loggia or anteroom, or
throne room, well it's certainly a throne room. There's the Virgin perched on her high
marble plinth. What a marvellous and impossible piece of architecture it is. And, of course,
the ins and outs are punctuated and sort of accelerated by the fact of sculpture and painting
and mosaic-work being on every bending surface. Then look above. Does the throne have a back?
Perhaps we're immediately invited to think it does. There seems to be a red draped rear
to the throne. But then we realise, because two other curtains give us the clue to what
we're looking at are drapes, red curtains of some sort, maybe velvet, which seem to
be hung on the outside of the barrel vault. Really rather far back, it seems, behind the
Virgin.
So we're very, very quickly put in a strange space, a sort of space that's shuttling between
near and far, shallowness and depth. We’re put at a limen, in some kind of liminal space,
some passageway between outside and in. Maybe between secular and sacred, or private and
public. And this seems to me completely typical of Renaissance painting at this point.
It’s as if painting absolutely revels in its ability to make uncanny, impossible but
completely convincing other worlds. Worlds which look extraordinarily plausible and into
which we feel we can enter, but as we enter we begin to realise their strangeness, their
foreignness, their not quite belonging to any world we normally inhabit.