The Madonna of Senigallia by Piero della Francesca

In this article, a generalist analysis is the main concern so that the iconological significance of say, the coral necklace worn by the Christ Child, is not explored. It is the 'painting choices' that the artist has made which are of interest, although obviously, these involve iconographical-iconological considerations.

 On seeing La Madonna di Senigallia in Urbino for the first time many years ago, I was absolutely transfixed although, at the time, knowing nothing about the painting, and only minimally more about Piero!

*********

The Madonna of Senigallia is a smallish painting in oil on panel, about 61 x 53.5 cm, and is kept in Urbino, in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. It dates from between 1470 and 1478 and so, like many of Piero's works, this one too is hard to chronologically pin down. Much time and effort have been spent by art historians on trying to date the relatively few works by this great master known to still exist; a small handful of his pieces actually were dated by him and around those solid dates the critical opinion oscillates. 1 

I have chosen this small masterwork because, unlike a number of other very well-known pictures by Piero della Francesca (the Montefeltro Altarpiece; the Arezzo Cycle of frescos), the principal ingredients are modest, mundane, homely even. I have in other places already noted the normal paucity of elaborative decoration in Piero's work, but this painting especially is a good example of this characteristic of his, particularly in his treatment of the principal actor. Let's look now at the physical 'content' of the image, including the Madonna and the other figures.

La Madonna di Senigallia by Piero della Francesca. Photo by the author taken at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. The painting is exhibited in its own special case and so there are odd reflections here, such as the small blue spot to the left of the Madonna's head.

Put very simply, this image shows four figures in front of a grey wall, all with their heads at approximately the same height, except for that, which is higher, of the female figure in the centre; in the wall there is a doorway, leading to another room. The centrally-placed woman is wearing a red dress and a blue mantle - she is holding a child in her arms; the figure on the left is dressed in blue, with some gold elements; the figure on the right, in pink with some pearls.

Apart from some minor details - the gold and jewellery worn by the accompanying angels and the coral necklace worn by the infant Jesus - the scene itself, the ambience, and especially the clothing of the Madonna, may be read as those of a 'normal' person, as opposed to those of a wealthy one, or a noble. The Madonna's dress in particular is of a simple rustic style and even the mandatory blue cloak (her standard attribute) appears to be of a relatively humble nature, particularly if compared with that in other of Piero's paintings portraying the Madonna. Her veil, and the way it is worn, turned up as though she is ready to do some kind of work, also contrast notably with other such images. 2 

The Madonna herself is in the near foreground and, judging by the relative size of the angels, they would seem to be some few feet behind her. This size discrepancy - allowing that there is no agreed average height of angels! - may also be due to a long tradition of representing the Madonna and saints as noticeably larger than other actors in a religious picture, that is to say, as at the top of a kind of iconographical hierarchy. Be that as it may, if the scale operating in this picture is a natural one, it puts the wall therefore a few paces behind where the angels are. These positions could mean therefore, that there is a distance of several meters between the Madonna and the grey wall [*]. And that wall is interesting because in it there are two openings: one is the obvious doorway leading us even further back into the (fictive) space on the left, and the other is a type of shallow opening, a cupboard, cut into the thickness of  the wall itself. If we look carefully, we see that the left side of the decorative moulding surrounding that cupboard is very shallow, whereas the space on the right side of that same moulding, i.e. inside the cupboard, is quite deep. This 'cupboard in the wall' is called in Italian 'armadio a muro'; the verticals of both the door-frame and the 'armadio a muro' moulding incidentally, form a kind of frame around the figure of the Madonna.

This cupboard in itself is not so important, except that it adds further subtlety to the range of depth created by Piero, really only clear after prolonged study of the image, in what at first glance appears to be, as described above, merely some figures in front of a grey wall. If we now return our gaze to the Madonna, we can appreciate just how close she actually is to the front edge of the picture, that is, to us! Looking next at that doorway opening into a room on the left, we see a further space, a deeper 'cut' into the flat plane of the board on which the image is painted. We move past the left angel into a substantial room, lit by a lead-light window through which passes, in the Flemish manner, the filtered light of a bright, winter's day. The angle of that light entering that room in that northern way, complete with the lighted dust particles floating in the air, creates a line which leads directly to the raised hand of the Child - and farther on, his coral necklace and the flower in his other hand. Such 'directional pointers' operate, one could say in spite of the depth illusion, across the flat surface of the panel; this means that Piero, like many artists, manipulates his various pictorial devices simultaneously, in two spheres as it were, i.e. within the illusion and across the illusion. We see then, that Piero has created not a rather flat scene, with yes, a room in the background; but, in fact, that he has contrived a complex spatial puzzle, made the more intriguing since we can't see the lower parts of the figures. 

The two angels are interesting for a number of reasons: first, only one hand is visible for each; secondly, their 'handless' arms both point up (directional pointers) towards the Virgin's shoulders, leading our eyes back to her face; thirdly, the angels are not only turned slightly differently, but also facing different directions: the left one - like the Child - is clearly looking, fixedly, out at us, the viewers, while the right-hand one is looking at either the Madonna (most likely) or at something 'off screen' so to speak - as the Madonna herself appears to be doing.  

This raises another feature typical of the work of Piero della Francesca: his avoidance of symmetry or, to put it another way, his preference for, or even love of, asymmetry. Given that the main actor in a religious Renaissance painting normally has to occupy the centre of the composition (the Madonna in this case), once that is established, Piero does his level best to contrive harmonious balance from asymmetry. In this regard, the Flagellation may be taken as a supreme, and supremely radical example (this complex picture, which plays with 'near' and 'far', is however more than simply the relation between symmetry and asymmetry) 3. Asymmetry 'balancing' hierarchical centrality can be found as well in the early London Baptism and the later Resurrection at Sansepolcro.

Importantly though, apart from the extreme and restrained elegance of the composition of the Senigallia Madonna, what the artist has done is present a vision of her quite unlike the norm. To begin with, she is no Queen of Heaven, she wears no crown, wears no elaborate and costly silks or damasks, she doesn't have even a halo (as do not any of the other figures, except perhaps for the angel on the left who has always struck us as having at least a de facto halo, due to his circular hair style!). This Madonna to all intents and purposes is a central Italian house-wife, perhaps of the mercantile or artisan class, a strong yet fine woman, holding in her arms a child such as one might expect such a woman to give birth to. She brings to mind another sturdy, possibly rural dame, and that is the Madonna del Parto.

The Madonna del Parto (The Pregnant Madonna) by Piero della Francesca

fresco, 260 x 203 cm, about 1455-60 Monterchi, Museo della Madonna del Parto. Photo: the author

In this splendid fresco, now in its own little museum somewhat off the beaten track, we meet again a strong country woman, very late in her pregnancy, opening her in fact specially-designed (expandable) blue dress 4, showing her bulging belly, and attended or revealed by the twin angels (drawn from the same cartoon, reversed). That blue dress, possibly, could be understood as replacing the usual (blue) cloak or mantle. There are indications of high-status in this work however, as for instance the beautifully-worked material of the tent in which she is standing, as well as the very expensive lining of that same tent in Siberian squirrel (according to Zanieri, see Note 1; according to Bridgeman, ermine; see Note 2); unlike the Senigallia Madonna, she does have a halo, a golden one, like those of the angels, which reflects the lining of her tent. The point about this though is that, in spite of her few if significant noble trappings, she remains a woman of her country environment and not a woman of the court. The original site of this now reduced fresco is a small rural town and nothing at all like Florence or Ferrara, centres of the humanist universe at the time. In this sublime image by the way, the two angels come very obviously equipped with the standard means of angel locomotion, viz. wings; in the Senigallia panel, although there, they are very discreet, and play no design role in that picture. It may be noted here in the Monterchi fresco, the lovely game played by Piero in the colour scheme of those angels, alternating placements of red and green throughout their figures. Finally, unlike the Senigallia Madonna, this woman is shown full length and interestingly, from a three-quarter view, as though to accent her state of pregnancy; in the Senigallia picture, the Madonna is shown front-on.

At this point, a word or two could be said about the Child. To begin with, he really isn't a typical child as such, in fact being more akin to the figure on the lid of an Etruscan funerary monument or casket, dressed as he is like a little Roman (or Etruscan) nobleman! And essentially, he has about as much liveliness as some of those figures do, being small alabaster or clay portrait statues as they are. But the perhaps more interesting point about this image of the Christ Child is that he is the only figure in this picture with his mouth even partly open, as though everyone else were silent to allow him to speak. This is a notable thing in a work by Piero della Francesca as, in the vast majority of cases, his figures are mute! Even in his famous battle scenes in the Arezzo frescos, many of his combatants are in fact silent. 5 

Here we may quickly call to mind the also beautiful Misericordia Madonna (Misericordia Polyptych, Sansepolcro) as another example of Piero's taste one could say, for country girls (see Note 6)! Again, a strong, unpretentious but powerful woman, almost devoid of signs of wealth or earthly nobility, her crown and brooch accepted as necessary attributes. Like both the Senigallia and the Monterchi Madonnas, she is quite young, a remarkable (for us) fact of life for marriageable women of that time, appearing very young to 21st century western eyes.

Detail of the Madonna of the Misericordia Polyptych, Museo Civico, Sansepolcro. Photo: the author

By way of contrast, the Montefeltro Altarpiece in Milan and the Sant'Antonio Polyptych in Perugia both contain Madonnas of the more 'acceptable' or expected type, obviously more out of reach we could say, more the Queen of Heaven figure than the lady of the people- albeit a very refined one - which we see in Senigallia. Incidentally, an interesting 'coincidence' may be seen in the mantle or cloak worn by the also-young and unadorned annunciate Madonna in the top section of the Perugia polyptych: the lining of this blue cloak would seem to be exactly the same as that worn by the Madonna in the Senigallia panel; the blue (?) in this latter painting perhaps having faded, the cloak in the Perugia Annunciation gives a much better idea of their original condition. 

The Magdalen by Piero della Francesca, fresco in situ

190 x 105 cm, Arezzo Cathedral.

Finally, another figure which I feel demonstrates this tendency in Piero's work towards quietly forceful strong women is the physically imposing Magdalen, a fresco in the cathedral at Arezzo 6. Also in this work we can find the hallmarks of our painter: clear, straightforward, uncluttered, almost abstract statements, areas defined as much by colour as by anything else, a happy absence of superfluous detail or decoration, and a seeming deep respect for self-contained women as active agents of change.

1 Pamela Zanieri in I Grandi Maestri series, published by the SCALA Group, 2012: 'Piero della Francesca', p 138ff.  For the Madonna del Parto, p 100.

But, James R. Banker for instance, in 'Piero della Francesca, Artist and Man', OUP, 2014, places the Senigallia Madonna between 1475 and 1477, along with the Brera Altarpiece: see chronology p xix.

2 For an excellent discussion of the fabrics, clothes and fashions of the general period, see Jane Bridgeman's essay in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, 2002, ed. by Jeryldene M. Wood, p 76ff; (p 82 for the ermine reference).

3 ibid: in relation to the asymmetrical pattern of the blue gold-brocaded garment of the figure on the extreme right foreground, p 84.

4 ibid, see p 82 ('gamurra da parto').

5 This however, may not be as strange or peculiar as it might seem, as we recall a description of a battle by an ancient Greek general: in this he speaks about the way his men approached the enemy, in battle formation, but in complete silence. This brief but extraordinary description goes against all we may have learned from popular culture about such events, and throws us into the terrified minds of those men, walking, as some clearly were, to their certain death.

6 ".... this pure monument to peasant nobility", to quote Roberto Longhi in 'Piero della Francesca', in the 2002 Stanley Moss-Sheep Meadow Press edition of the 1927 original. Incidentally, Longhi on p 56,  discussing the Madonna del Parto, also maintains the 'pavilion' tent is ermine-lined. Later, p 269, Longhi quotes a passage from Andre' Chastel (1956) in which he - Chastel - says: "The impersonality of (Piero's) art is what gives it its nobility; but it is softened by two aspects: the first is rustic, rural, evident even in the physical types ..." Although found after the early drafts of this article, this comment supports my own observations.

[*] P.S.  The research carried out during a recent cleaning of the Senigallia Madonna would seem to confirm this analysis, although I had not been aware of this information until after the publication of my article earlier this year. The data and much else besides can be found in: 'La luce e il mistero - La Madonna di Senigallia nella sua città. Il capolavoro di Piero della Francesca dopo il restauro' edited by Gabriele Barucca and published by il lavoro editoriale, 2011. See especially the chapter 'La restituzione prospettica (Jacopo Russo), and particularly the very interesting diagrams on pp144-147. It was determined that the Madonna is 2.65 metres from the wall of the first room and that the angels are about half a metre closer to it than the Madonna is.

Piero della Francesca and St John the Evangelist

A short comparison of two images of the same subject by the one painter.

In this article, we shall look at mainly two images of St John the Evangelist painted by Piero della Francesca: one is a figure in the Montefeltro Altarpiece c1472-741, kept at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, and the other is a (now) stand-alone figure in the Frick Collection in New York - originally part of the Sant'Agostino Polyptych, c1465-69. This second image has several of its companion pieces dispersed in different galleries around the world but, today, like those companions, is visible only in isolation; this in itself has both disadvantages and also important advantages. In the first place, because the original altarpiece has been broken up, and its various parts, as said, dispersed, we cannot any longer 'read' the entire composition as Piero would have intended it to be read, and as his patrons would have expected it to be read. However, on the other hand, in its present state, the Frick's St John as a stand-alone image has a chance to 'function', so to speak, in its own right, and we might say, more powerfully as an independent statement.

The Montefeltro Altarpiece by Piero della Francesca

Pinacoteca di Brera: oil on panel, 251 x 172 cm

By contrast, the Brera Altarpiece is basically intact, although not quite, as slim sections have been removed - cut off - from three sides. For our purposes this fact is not too important as we are principally interested in the rendering of St John the Evangelist, independently of the rest of the image. Piero however, did paint at least one other St John the Evangelist, according to some historians, and that is the figure immediately to the viewer's right of the standing Madonna in the Misericordia Polyptych (c1445-62), in the Museo Civico at Sansepolcro (Piero's birthplace). This particular St John is in very poor condition, with its colour much faded and damaged by excessive cracking.

Two paintings of St John the Evangelist by Piero della Francesca: 

on the left, as a detail from the Montefeltro (Brera) Altarpiece; 

on the right, in the Frick Collection (oil and tempera on panel, 131.5 x 58 cm) 

note: the colours in the reproductions above should not be taken as any more than approximations to the actual colours; however, these images do give an indication of the difference between the reds in the two paintings.

Saint John Brera and St John Frick

Wrapped as they are in their heavy red cloaks which complement the green of their tunics underneath, these beautiful-faced elderly men are equally wrapped in their thoughts, so carefully and subtly suggested by Piero. In the case of the Frick's St John, his face, his expression, is caught between reading and contemplation; his activity is internal and there is no movement, not even of the wind, to disturb either those thoughts or the monumental sculptural cloak which covers and reveals his massive character. The Montefeltro Evangelist, not quite so protected by his lighter-toned cloak, and holding his book in exactly the same way as the Misericordia John, is more long-faced and finely-featured and perhaps, not so intense as his Frick cousin. Yet he is still intense, staring it seems at the Child, soon to become the man, the Saviour; still a child that John's book shows he has already written the life of: a time-denying faculty of pictures! Like his cousin in New York, he is restrained, poised, profound.

The Misericordia Polyptych by Piero della Francesca, kept in the Museo Civico at Sansepolcro; note St John the Evangelist immediately to our right of the Madonna. Photo: the author

Before listing some of the differences and the similarities to be found in the two main works under discussion, we should mention that we know which figure is St John the Evangelist because of his iconographical attributes, viz. an elderly man with a large volume containing the Gospel he wrote. As there are several Saints John to be encountered in the Christian pantheon (an oxymoron we admit!), the Church and to some extent tradition, have decided on the attributes each saint must have; St John the Evangelist - as opposed to St John the Baptist for example - carries a large book 2. Other saints are also sometimes shown with large books (see San Bernardino to the right of St John in the image above) and so initially, alternative names were suggested as the subject of the pictures in question; at present, it is generally agreed that these are images representing the Evangelist John.

So, to begin with those books, the Brera one is blue and closed; the Frick's is green and open. 

Both saints, seen from the right, are elderly, with a mid-length white beard and longish white hair; in the Brera panel St John is bald on top while in the Frick's he has a good head of short-cropped white hair!

In spite of the somewhat gaunt face of the Brera John, and his white hair and baldness, he does actually seem to be only in early middle-age; whereas the Frick's St John, the more robust and sun-tanned of the two, is also the older! 

They both have quite severe expressions, with mouths closed. 

Both are bare-footed: in the Brera image however, the saint appears to be about to take a step forward, whereas the Frick saint is quite static.

The directions of the gazes of the two saints are also different, the Brera John seeming to look in the direction of the Child (that is, drawing us into the centre of the image), while the attention of the Frick's St John is directed, apparently, at his book (that is, encouraging us to stay within his particular niche or space).

Both men have robust, workman-like hands; these two men would seem not to be too genteel as saints go!

In the Brera picture, St John has no halo; in the Frick he has a gold one, a disk drawn in perspective.

In both paintings, the saints are wearing a heavy, red cloak of some kind, possibly a reference to St John's actual historical period, that is, the first century AD. The Brera cloak is of a paler tone, edging towards a pink; the Frick's is tending towards a bluer magenta-like red, much deeper and weightier. 

Both wear a longish green garment under the cloak, the Brera's coming to just below the knee and the Frick's to just above the ankle.

The hems of both these green garments are decorated: the Brera one with a stitched gold thread, strangely modest given the quantity of precious decoration and jewels elsewhere (itself a somewhat curious feature in Piero's pictures); the Frick, by contrast, is much more elaborate, with gold thread, jewels and pearls!

Needless to say, the environments in which our saints are standing are quite dissimilar, that of the Brera being a highly-developed architectural setting - almost certainly a church transept (much critical discussion about this too). Saint John Frick however, is standing in front of what appears to be an ornamental, marble parapet; somewhere in any case, much simpler than where he stands in Milano!

As is clear from the re-appearance of St John the Evangelist (and of other Saints John) so often in religious imagery of this general period, this saint had a particular significance for the people who paid artists to make such images. Apart from personal, so-called 'name-saint' relationships, St John the Evangelist was it seems a patron saint of Sansepolcro (at the time, Borgo San Sepolcro). But the existence of a general type for a given saint, an iconographical template almost, does not, and did not, preclude the expression of the individual artist's personality. In fact, as far as the work of Piero della Francesca is concerned, I believe he himself developed a series of 'templates' - or partial visual formulas - for his commonly-used types; an example of such a template could be seen possibly in the head of our Frick St John and the face of Chosroes in the Arezzo Cycle, but from different angles. The same could be said of his Madonnas, with particular similarities visible in for example, the Arezzo Cycle Annunciation, the Brera Altarpiece and the Misericordia Polyptych (again, with differences in the angles). Two common features are the long, broad nose and the slightly protruding lower lip - also seen in many of his male faces, including St John Frick. In any case, clear and acknowledged examples where he used the same cartoon, may be seen in certain female figures in the retinue of the Queen of Sheba in the Arezzo Cycle, as well as in the two angels holding the open curtain in the Madonna del Parto.

A detail of the Madonna in the Brera Altarpiece: note the long oval face, the long broad nose, and the almost pouting mouth, a result of Piero's typical mouth structure, that is, a smallish upper lip with a strong light on the lower one, creating a pouting or protruding effect; characteristics visible to some degree also in the angels here, behind the Madonna.

But Piero's personality is revealed, in spite of templates or even, partly because of them, in the overall impact of any particular (main) figure: the Frick's St John, as we have noted elsewhere, is an immensely powerful presence, due in part to its solitary nature as a matter of fact, but also to the, what could be termed, moral weight of this figure, conveyed largely by the force of its plastic reality (or, the illusion of that). This incidentally, points up one of the most delightful aspects of looking at pictures: we are dealing with an illusion, but, in some cases, the illusion is so powerful - and here we don't mean convincing in the 'realist' sense - that an unresolvable dichotomy is created by what we know to be the real fact of what we are seeing (coloured stuff spread out in an orderly way on a flat surface) and the 'presence', and real psychological impact, of that very same illusion. For those of us who love pictures (and art in general) and are open to such things, this exchange one might say, a type of cyclical metamorphosis, between the accepted, recognized illusion and the 'real' world, is one of the confounding surprises always lying in wait: for a brief moment, the 'illusion' is reality! This to some extent is true also for literature, dance, the theatre and so on. The intense focusing of the mind, of one's concentration, induced by works of art, including abstract art, helps to make of a given image a more or less complete reality, certainly a 'reality' of the intellect and the spirit.

The supposed St John the Evangelist from the right side of the Misericordia Polyptych (see full image above). This figure is much deteriorated and is therefore hard to judge but the particular stiffness of the face does seem unlike Piero's usual feeling. Note that this St John is also bare-foot and has a halo, as well as the now-mandatory book.

The other image of St John the Evangelist (above) which we referred to earlier, that in the Misericordia Polyptych, appears to us quite a bit unlike Piero's 'normal' figures: less robust than others, less compelling in its 'presence'. In spite of the typical 'Piero' modelling of his cloak (an oddity here however is the uncharacteristic spear head-like fold in the cloak at the bottom right), the figure, and especially the head, seem stiff and statue-like, that is, lifeless. This is made clearer when this St John is compared with two other figures in the same work, Saints Sebastian and John the Baptist, standing to the viewer's left of the open-armed Madonna: there is no 'inner life' in this John the Evangelist. We should note that the identification of this particular figure as John the Evangelist is not universal, some writers referring to him rather as St Andrew 3.

From my point of view, the Frick's St John is the most successful one of this group. The Brera's John plays a role in a much larger and more complex drama, part of which is performed by his reddish cloak: in this panel, St John the Baptist is standing on the extreme left, wearing blue, a primary colour; on the extreme right, we have our St John the Evangelist, in red, another primary colour; and in the centre, we have various shades of yellow, the other primary colour! Naturally, the actors chosen to play in a drama of the kind we see in the Brera Altarpiece are not selected at random, quite the opposite; here is not the place to go into an exegesis of that work, nor of the role of St John the Evangelist in it, except to say that, this St John is one of several saints called in, as though in a procession, to take part in a type of silent (contemplative) ceremony. As such, he also lacks the independent force of his Frick brother and functions, to a certain extent, as simply one member of a group. The role of the Frick Collection's St John is finely balanced and extremely subtle, and anything but straightforward.

This exquisite picture, also called St John the Evangelist, is interesting because, if indeed it is meant to represent our St John, it has none of his usual attributes, except perhaps for the quality (in this case) of being young. Here he appears to be the mournful figure at the base of the Cross, another traditional role for him, as well as being the author of a Gospel. It is kept at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC and is ascribed to the anonymous Master of the Franciscan Crucifixes. (Photo: the author)

1 A note about the dates: art-historical opinion is divided about the dating of almost all of Piero della Francesca's output, this being further confused by the fact that Piero travelled a lot, even while engaged on a given commission - such as the Arezzo fresco cycle - sometimes beginning new work in a different place, and then returning to work again on a previous commission in another place, for example, the Misericordia Polyptych in Sansepolcro.

2 Earlier images of St John the Evangelist, the writer of a Gospel, often showed him as a much younger man - perhaps on the island of Patmos, writing his Revelation - and accompanied by an eagle; or as one of the figures lamenting the crucifixion of Christ. But towards Piero's time, his representation had begun to change and John as a very long-lived saint became an acceptable image. Panofsky devotes quite a bit of space to this very subject, viz. the transformation, over usually quite a long time, of the attributes of all kinds of figures: Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 1939; Icon edition, 1972; Chapter III, p69 ff. 

3 Both Alessandro Angelini (1985) in 'Piero della Francesca' by Scala (The Great Masters of Art series), and Pamela Zanieri (2012) in the series 'I Grandi Maestri', name this figure as St Andrew whereas, in the catalogue of the exhibition 'Piero della Francesca in America', 2013, the same figure is referred to as St John the Evangelist by Nathaniel Silver.