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.