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Updated: June 27, 2025
Look well and carefully at the predella first. He then turned and passed through the folding-doors into a room of great size, crowded with easels, upon which pictures were resting. The predella before me seemed a miracle of imaginative power.
The predella has an Annunciation, Nativity, and Circumcision; all showing the same able style, but more injured by time than the picture. Another charming painting of this period is the Nativity at the Pitti, a round, on panel. The Madonna is not quite so noble as that of the Salutation, but the limbs of the child are beautifully rounded.
No less beautiful are the five compartments of the predella to the altar-piece still in San Domenico at Fiesole which were purchased for the National Gallery in 1860 at the then alarming price of £3500 with no less than two hundred and sixty little figures of saintly personages, "so beautiful," as Vasari says, "that they appear to be truly beings of Paradise."
Again, in a series of predella histories of the Virgin, in the same place, also a very mediocre and anonymous work, there is extraordinary charm in the conception of the respective positions of Mary and Joseph at their wedding: he is quite old and grey; she young, unformed, almost a child, and she has to stand on two steps to be on his level, raising her head with a beautiful, childlike earnestness, quite unlike the conventional bridal timidity of other painters.
In the predella St. Peter preaches at Rome, St. Mark writes his Gospel, the Kings come to adore Jesus in Bethlehem, and St. Mark is martyred. The whole is like some marvellous introit for St. Mark's day, in which the name of Mary has passed by.
The predella and here let me advise the visitor never to overlook the predellas, where the artist often throws off formality and allows his more natural feelings to have play, almost as though he painted the picture for others and the predella for himself is peculiarly interesting. Look, at the left, at the death of an old Saint attended by monks and nuns, whose grief is profound.
The colour in the first panel of the "Annunciation" is especially beautiful, and there is a noble simplicity in the composition, as well as a breadth and certainty of touch that give the picture great grandeur. The predella is divided by painted pilasters into three parts.
In S. Maria Maggiore, also, in a chapel near the side-door which leads to S. Giovanni, where there are the panel and predella of Masaccio, he wrought an Annunciation in fresco, wherein he made a building worthy of consideration, which was something new and difficult in those times, seeing that it was the first possessing any beauty of manner which was seen by craftsmen, showing them with grace and proportion how to manage the receding of lines, and how to give so great an extent to a level space which is small and confined, that it appears far distant and large; and when to this, with judgment and grace, men can add shadows and lights by means of colours in their proper places, there is no doubt that they cause an illusion to the eye, so that it appears that the painting is real and in relief.
But we must first glance at the pretty little Lorenzo di Credi, No. 1160, the Annunciation, an artificial work full of nice thoughts and touches, with the prettiest little blue Virgin imaginable, a heavenly landscape, and a predella in monochrome, in one scene of which Eve rises from the side of the sleeping Adam with extraordinary realism.
Now Andrea had finished in those days a panel-picture of the Annunciation for the Church of the Friars of S. Gallo, which is now destroyed, as has been related in his Life; and he gave the predella of that panel-picture to Jacopo to execute in oils.
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