Art Review palazzo, futuristic
Masterpieces From an Italian Workshop
By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
Published: October 8, 2013
PRATO, Italy — This Tuscan city was once the scene of one of the most
romantic scandals of the Italian Renaissance. Here, the artist and
Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi was commissioned to paint an altarpiece
for the convent of Santa Margherita, and happened to meet there an
attractive young novice, Lucrezia Buti. The couple had an affair, and in
around 1457 produced a child, Filippino Lippi, who was to become a
celebrated painter in his own right.
Duomo, Prato/Foto Scala, Florence
Head of a young man, a detail from the frescoes by Paolo Uccello.
It says a great deal about the status of artists in Italy by the
mid-15th century that Pius II, instead of visiting some terrible
punishment on Filippo Lippi and his lover, absolved them of their vows.
Perhaps the pope, a connoisseur and patron of art and architecture, was
swayed by the fact that Lippi was then in the middle of painting a
groundbreaking cycle of frescoes in Prato’s principal church, St.
Stephen.
The golden age of Prato is now the subject of a revelatory exhibition
“From Donatello to Lippi: the Workshop of Prato,” curated by Andrea De
Marchi and Cristina Gnoni Mavarelli. The show brings together works,
including elements of some beautiful altarpieces, that are now widely
dispersed in collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The venue is the
newly restored Palazzo Pretorio, which will later house the city’s
historic art collection and provide space for temporary shows.
Although modest in size compared with nearby Florence, 14th-century
Prato already possessed outstanding artworks by Giovanni Pisano, Agnolo
Gaddi, Bernardo Daddi and Giovanni da Milano. In the first half of the
15th century the town became one of the most important artistic
crucibles in Europe, as its leading citizens attracted first-rate
artists to adorn the ancient church of St. Stephen (now the Duomo, or
cathedral) and other religious foundations.
Both Donatello and Paolo Uccello had worked as assistants to Lorenzo
Ghiberti, one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance in Florence, in
the creation of his first set of bronze doors for the city’s
baptistery. The two clearly found Prato — whose civic patrons seem to
have afforded those they commissioned a large measure of freedom — a
congenial environment in which to experiment and find their styles as
independent masters.
The first of the great sculptural additions to St. Stephen was entrusted
to Donatello and Michelozzo di Bartolomeo in 1428. The commission was
for a pulpit on the exterior of the church, from which a famous relic,
the Girdle of the Virgin Mary, could be displayed to the crowds of
pilgrims who flocked to Prato every year. The sculptors came up with a
revolutionary solution: an almost circular, canopied balcony projecting
vertiginously out of the right-hand corner of St. Stephen’s façade. Its
parapet was embellished with a marble relief of classically inspired
dancing putti — a decorative scheme that Donatello went on to use again
in the choir loft in Florence’s Duomo.
In 1435, Uccello began a major new cycle of frescoes for St. Stephen’s
Chapel of the Assumption. That he was indeed the author of a large part
of these works has only recently been established, greatly enhancing
understanding of the earlier part of his career.
The current show brings together almost all of Uccello’s panels from the
1420s to the 1440s. Along with the frescoes, it offers an unprecedented
survey of the development of this artist, who came to combine gorgeous
Gothic decorative richness with the latest advances in scientific
perspective. The final scenes of the frescoes were completed by Andrea
di Giusto, after Uccello departed in 1436 to Florence, where he executed
in the Duomo his virtuoso equestrian monument in fresco to the English
mercenary general, Sir John Hawkwood.
The exhibition also includes a fine altarpiece by Andrea di Giusto,
panels by Apollonio di Giovanni and an altarpiece by Zanobi Strozzi for
the Assumption chapel in St. Stephen, reunited with the three panels of
the predella, on loan from Dublin.
An entire section is devoted to the so-called Maestro della Natività di
Castello, a name assigned by the art historian Bernard Berenson. More
recently it has been suggested by the scholar Chiara Lachi that the
author of these charming works was Piero di Lorenzo di Pratese, a pupil
of Filippo Lippi’s, who was active in Prato in the years shortly before
his teacher’s arrival here in 1452. The assembling of half a dozen of
the Maestro’s works — among them his only known altarpiece, reunited
with predella panels from London and Philadelphia — offers a unique
opportunity to appreciate better this artist, who was described by the
late art historian Federico Zeri as “one of the most pleasing petits
maîtres of the Florentine quattrocento.”
The final sections of the exhibition offer an impressive display of
works by Filippo Lippi, his accomplished collaborator in Prato (and
later Spoleto) Fra Diamante, and Filippino Lippi. Fra Filippo’s “Madonna
of the Girdle, with Saints,” painted for the Convent of Santa
Margherita in 1456-57, not long before the birth of Filippino, has
particular biographical resonance: According to legend, the artist
seduced Lucrezia after the convent gave her permission to pose for him
for the figure of its titular saint.
Lippi left Prato in 1466 to fresco the Duomo in Spoleto, where his son
came to join him. When Lippi died there in 1469, Fra Diamante became
Filippino’s guardian. In around 1472 the boy entered the studio of
Botticelli (a former student of his father’s) in Florence.
After winning fame in Florence and Rome, Filippino returned to Prato in
the 1490s, where he created a number of works — several of which are on
show here — before his death in 1504, by which time, as Vasari recorded,
the stigma of his birth had been wiped clean not only “by the
excellence of his own art but above all by his courteous and lovable
personality.”
From Donatello to Lippi: The Workshop of Prato. Palazzo Pretorio and Duomo, Prato. Through Jan. 13.
This colourful painting by Italian artist Paolo Uccello depicts part of the battle of San Romano, fought between Florence and Siena in 1432:http://bit.ly/1yyvJX5
This panel is one set of three. The other two are at the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence. You can find our painting in Room 54 of the Gallery.
This panel is one set of three. The other two are at the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence. You can find our painting in Room 54 of the Gallery.
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