This article was prompted by a question from an Australian friend who lives in Italy (and has lived there for decades); she had remarked that she and a mutual friend had recently visited the wonderful church of the Santissima Annunziata in central Florence. The enclosed entrance atrium (known as the Chiostro dei Voti) of this beautiful place has Renaissance frescos on all four walls, all of which frescos have suffered over the centuries and so, despite recent restorations, are clearly not as the various artists had left them, they are no longer in their pristine state.
These artists by the way include Andrea del Sarto and his students Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. One of the others who also worked in the Chiostro was Alessio Baldovinetti (1425 - 1499) and it is his fresco which I would like to have a look at today. This fresco has already been briefly cited in reference to still-life painting in the article Some Remarks about Still-life Painting (on this blog), but let's look at it again from a couple of different points of view.
The photo above shows Alessio's complete painting as it appears (albeit slightly distorted by the camera) in the Chiostro dei Voti, situated to the left of the entrance door of the church proper; it is painted on the wall between two arches and has a semi-circular top. It is bordered by a design which includes portrait heads, something which we see also on the sculpted frame of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo (The Holy Family, Uffizi) and, in a similar way, on Ghiberti's so-called Gates of Paradise, the east doors of the Florentine Baptistry.
The painting shows the Nativity, the birth of Christ, before a tumble-down structure with a make-shift roof; the principal characters in the narrative are of course the baby Jesus and his mother Mary and father Joseph. The supporting actors, so to speak, are some shepherds - both in the foreground and in the left middle-distance -, the ox and ass, or donkey, as well as a flock of sheep and five rejoicing angels hovering above (one delivering the good news to the shepherds on the left). Because of the photo here, the ruined building appears somewhat oddly-shaped but in fact it is a simple, normally vertical box. This building occupies slightly more than half of the width of the image, from the right. It is, as it were, balanced on the left by a vast panoramic view of what we may assume to be either the Tiber Valley or, if closer to Florence, the Arno Valley: in either case, the man-made contrasted with, or complemented by, the natural.
A detail of the landscape view on the left of Alessio's Nativity, 1460-62
This juxtaposition of the solid, comparatively dark stone structure and the light, airy expanse of the sun-lit landscape fulfils at least two purposes: first, it provides, on the right, a setting for the stated subject of the image, the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and contains all the requisite elements, as listed above; and secondly, the contrast between the overall darkness of that right side with the clear open brightness on the left is symbolic of the advent of the Light of the World, that is, the birth of Jesus. This is an important departure from the usual symmetry in Italian painting of the Nativity scene, with the adoring mother and her child firmly the central focus. In Alessio's version however, while Mary is still almost the centre of the composition, the vast, highly naturalistic landscape panorama on the left constantly draws one's eye to that side of the picture.
And this landscape is astoundingly compelling as a verifiable space; it recedes ineluctably towards the hazy mountains in the far, far distance, taking us, almost like the flight of a bird, down from the high-point of the Nativity building, across the broad plain of the Arno (or Tiber) River and, following its meandering course, past outlying farmhouses and other structures, past a distant walled-city at the base of that mountain range and finally into the ethereal transformation at the meeting of 'fluid' solidity and moist sky. It reminds one of nothing so much as Alessio's contemporary, Piero della Francesca (1412 - 1492), a painter noted, amongst other things, for just this kind of limpidly lit airy spaciousness. *
Another detail, distorted in the photo, of the right side of the Nativity
In the detail above we see part of the stone building where the young couple has taken shelter, two shepherds (?) on the right, and Saint Joseph on the ground in the centre, reclining on a saddle; it is this small area I would like to examine now. First, it should be mentioned that certain parts of this fresco have suffered substantial losses of colour, in particular almost the entire figure of the shepherd on the left here and certain parts of his companion on the right. I say 'substantial losses' but it does seem possible that in fact various parts, especially of the shepherd on the left, may have been left unpainted! The underpainting seems to be complete but almost all the colour is missing; this applies as well to the canteen or water-bottle just in front of Joseph: the outline form is clear but again, absolutely no colour! Similarly, while Joseph's cloak could be white - if so, a unique invention - it too appears to have been left at an earlier stage and is missing its final colour. Where the colour itself does seem to have suffered over time is the blue of Joseph's tunic; the colour is there but all the modelling has apparently worn off. This could be due to certain technical problems with the application of the paint in the fresco technique, or to weather or rubbing; the same could be said of the ass in the background here, which also looks as though it is without (final) colour. In addition, apparently, Alessio, like Leonardo da Vinci, devised his own experiments with paint, many of which (in both cases) were unsuccessful.
Interestingly, a similar situation exists in Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco, in Arezzo. In this series of related narrative scenes there are two battle paintings and in both - unless the colour has actually dropped off (unlikely if 'buon fresco' [true fresco] had been used) - various parts appear to have never had colour. In this case however, the areas in question are so much part of the whole that they function almost as though they were actually coloured; some of the lances in the scene of the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius for example or, perhaps the most obvious, a trumpeter in the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes: his large 'eastern' hat seems to me to have never been painted-in and exists as an uncoloured abstract shape which, within the context of the scene, works perfectly well (and generally unnoticed) as a kind of 'neutral' colour. This same type of hat is featured three times in the lunette above (The Exaltation of the True Cross), at the top of the same wall, in which at least one is unpainted as well as a section of its wearer's cloak.
A detail of the Battle between Constantine and Maxentius, by Piero della Francesca, c 1452-55 (?), fresco in San Francesco, Arezzo. Note the apparently unpainted lance held by the rider of the brown horse on the left and the limpid landscape between the combatants. The large lacuna above the rider on the right is where an entire section of the plaster has been lost.
The already remarked similarity between Alessio's treatment of landscape and that of Piero della Francesca may be exemplified here as well, that is, in the scene of the Battle between Constantine and Maxentius (see photo above); in the central space which separates the two belligerent forces, Piero has placed a view of a bend in a distant river, a river also, like Alessio's, in a broad plain, with a few houses and small figures along it banks and even a couple of swans, a scene so tranquil and mundane which thus contrasts dramatically with the battle frieze in the immediate foreground! The pale summer blue of the sky and its candid clouds, the brilliantly clear light of Tuscany, painted on various occasions by Piero della Francesca - and by Alessio Baldovinetti at Santissima Annunziata - are true and real observations of fact; whether or not one painter was aware of the work of the other is not known at present. The supposed dates of Piero's work at Arezzo (1452-55) would suggest that he had painted his magnum opus prior to Alessio painting his (1460-62) but it should be pointed out that scholars have great difficulty in agreeing on the dates of many of Piero's works. However, so as not to fall into a common error, and as a painter myself, I may observe that it is more than possible that these two painters knew nothing of each other and simply, because of the similar time and place - mid-15th century Tuscany - arrived at very similar perceptions of the world around them. Both artists indeed are recorded as having worked with Domenico Veneziano whose understanding of this particular quality of light may have contributed to this common outlook.
In the Chiostro dei Voti it is possible that artists such as Andrea del Sarto might attract more attention - as they did with me initially - and especially so since his students, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, also became extremely important painters in their own right. There is something a little awkward in the drawing of the two shepherds(?) in Alessio's Nativity although the figure of Saint Joseph in repose and other objects - the saddle for instance - make it perfectly clear that he knew what he was doing; often his figures do not have the kind of Renaissance 'gravity' about them which is perhaps more obvious in some of the other frescos in this cloister. The slightly more 'illustrative' look of this painting may dissuade closer scrutiny by some visitors: I admit it took me some visits before I really 'tuned in' to Alessio!
Annunciation by Alessio Baldovinetti, c 1457, in the Uffizi.
To finish, I have included the photo above so as to show an example of Alessio's 'easel painting' as opposed to the fresco we have been discussing; incidentally, note the beautiful bright colours, giving us an idea of what his Santissima Annunziata fresco may originally have looked like. This largish picture is kept in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and demonstrates two things about Alessio's work: first and perhaps most obviously, his complete command of perspective drawing - in fact, some might argue, and I amongst them, that the real protagonist of this picture is actually illusion created by perspective, together with the beautiful colour; and secondly, it further exemplifies the earlier observation that Alessio's figures have an anachronistic quality, in this case, an adherence to the earlier courtly style known as International Gothic. Their graceful elongated bodies and static gestures are out of keeping with the very 'modern' perspective-derived setting: not only the perspective construction itself but the 'modern' rounded arches as well. It should be remembered that at this point, about 1457, we have already seen major works by not only Masaccio, but also Donatello, Mantegna and Andrea del Verrocchio, all of which have a robust vigour about them; even Lorenzo Ghiberti, with whom Alessio shares the qualities of his figures to a certain extent, can be quite robust when so inspired.
For the present writer at least, the work of Alessio Baldovinetti was an 'an acquired taste' but once I gave him the time he deserves, I was rewarded with some wonderful moments notwithstanding some reservations. But, in fact, it may be (naively) asked, in the Western tradition, do 'perfect' pictures actually exist? A kind of nonsense question! My response to Alessio's work would seem to suggest that the answer lies more within the viewer than in the objects themselves; does the perfect viewer exist, subject as we are to moods, temper, our culture (education) and so on, even to the effects of the weather? We bring all of ourselves to the act of gazing at art works, including our age, our maturity, and for this reason it is necessary, and fulfilling, to look again and again at not only our favourite works but also at those for which, perhaps, we may have little initial sympathy.
* Indeed, Piero della Francesca also painted a very famous Nativity, unfinished, damaged and apparently a very late work (perhaps 1475), so, later than Alessio's it would seem (now in the National Gallery, London).
Note the distant but clear panoramic river-valley view on the left and also other 'coincidences' such as Saint Joseph, on the right, seated on a very similar saddle. Alessio's and Piero's paintings are not the same but similarities nevertheless exist. Apologies for the poor-quality photo.
Note: all photos in this article taken by the author who reserves copyright.
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