Day 5: November 14, 2016, #605
The Inheritance
Inside a 15th century Florentine palazzo, Madonnas were dispatched to the bedroom; family portraits hung in the public rooms up front. A gallery of Florentine painting and sculptural relief exhibited the distinction. On one side of the room split by opposite entranceways, panel paintings depicted an aristocracy, often in its youthful prime. On the other side hung images of Mary and the Christ child. Ever reserved and inscrutable, Mary seemed to know more than her age and more than those across the parquet floor. Most of the paintings shared a visual crop close to the waist. Only the Christ child kept his toes. Painters had dispensed with gangly legs and rendered their sitters close to life-size, just across the picture plane. These individuals looked shockingly present as they gazed eye-level straight into the room.
The gallery was a choir stall of looks. An appreciation for ducal hats and heavy doublets on one side of the room was matched by a reverence for Mary’s blue robe on the other. Both sets of pictures beamed affection for the next generation. At times, this adoration mingled with awe. The babes, boys and young men in these paintings were the future. The young women depicted bore it.
Mary gazes down with almond-shaped eyes, her eyelids low and taut. Her face is pure retreat and concentration. Her eyes were not the drowsy dilated saucers of Botticelli’s young lady on the other side of the room. Only rarely did Mary look directly at the Christ child. Instead, she remained total interiority, heavenly mother close at hand. Across the way, young men glanced out with extroverted pretense. They could have been looking out a window of the family palace. Perhaps they hoped– or the painters did on their behalf– that this very look would usher in the confidence of their fathers.
During the Italian Renaissance, artists fell in love with the physical world and an individual’s place in it. A fascination with perspective trained attention on the figure in space. Sculptural embodiment landed on the canvas. While the painters of Northern Europe delighted in the realism of surface detail– wood, silk, brass and ermine trim, for instance– Florentine artists investigated human roundness. Knees, nostrils and knuckles captivated them. And when skin stretched over flesh, things got pink and rosy. Angels offered an opportunity to paint these things plus cheeks again and again.
These Florentine paintings were so immediate they seemed bent on a meeting. They scouted for attention and almost begged to be looked in the eye. The longer I stayed, the more serious the room got. A weight comes with any blessing. The future looms and with it the family good. We would never know the private ambitions and particular prayers of these subjects. Visitors did not linger long. Even the guard looked overwhelmed. Slumped against a coin case in the center of the room, I thought she might have fallen asleep. I moved closer in disbelief. With lowered lids, she was staring at her phone.
No matter how sacred or secular, the paintings on both sides of the room shared a deference despite their outward appeal. Destiny involves submission. Whether to the artist, to history, a father, fate or God, these figures seemed to grasp that they did not control the scene. Their painted likeness simply underscored this truth. Their robes looked heavier in light of that fact. Whether they understood it or not, and Mary certainly did, each of these young men and women had a role to play in a drama larger than themselves. Composure was more than decorum. It offered an aesthetic equal to the task: reception and resistance. This is how one dealt with the inheritance. This is what it looked like to be framed.
