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Updated: June 27, 2025
They went into the church to give a look at the remaining picture over the altar in the choir, a Virgin with Saints and Angels, the lower part, or predella, of which is now in the National Gallery, London; but Mr. Sumner said they must not stay long, for this was not the object of the day.
His line is firm and clear, simple and structural, of unerring sweep and accuracy, as we see in his numerous predella paintings; but even more remarkable is the wonderful plastic quality of his modelling.
One of the most beautiful and celebrated of the pictures of Angelico da Fiesole is the "Coronation" now in the Louvre; formerly it stood over the high altar of the Church of St. Dominick at Fiesole, where Angelico had been nurtured, and made his profession as monk. The composition is conceived as a grand regal ceremony, but the beings who figure in it are touched with a truly celestial grace. The Redeemer, crowned himself, and wearing the ermine mantle of an earthly monarch, is seated on a magnificent throne, under a Gothic canopy, to which there is an ascent of nine steps. He holds the crown, which he is in the act of placing, with both hands, on the head of the Virgin, who kneels before him, with features of the softest and most delicate beauty, and an expression of divine humility. Her face, seen in profile, is partly shaded by a long transparent veil, flowing over her ample robe of a delicate crimson, beneath which is a blue tunic. On each side a choir of lovely angels, clothed from head to foot in spangled tunics of azure and rose-colour, with shining wings, make celestial music, while they gaze with looks of joy and adoration towards the principal group. Lower down on the right of the throne are eighteen, and on the left twenty-two, of the principal patriarchs, apostles, saints, and martyrs, among whom the worthies of Angelico's own community, St. Dominick and St. Peter Martyr, are of course conspicuous. At the foot of the throne kneel on one side St. Augustine, St. Benedict, St. Charlemagne, the royal saint; St. Nicholas; and St. Thomas Aquinas holding a pen (the great literary saint of the Dominican order, and author of the Office of the Virgin); on the left we have a group of virgins, St. Agnes, St. Catherine with her wheel, St. Catherine of Siena, her habit spangled with stars; St. Cecilia crowned with her roses, and Mary Magdalene, with her long golden hair. Beneath this great composition runs a border or predella, in seven compartments, containing in the centre a Piet
The first, by a Madonna and a Thebaid; the second , in the two predella pictures for the altar-piece of S. Procolo, Sassetta, the best of the Sienese Quattrocento painters, is absent, and Vecchietta is only represented by a predella picture ; it is not till we came to Sodoma, whose famous St.
The predella to this picture is in the Ospedale; it represents the Marriage of the Virgin, the Presentation in the Temple, the Baptism and Entombment of Our Lord. There, too, is a replica of the Madonna of Lippo Lippi in the Uffizi. The Ospedale degli Innocenti was founded in 1421 by the Republic, urged thereto by that Leonardo Bruni who is buried in S. Croce in the tomb by Rossellino.
The predella whereon the said panel rests contains the martyrdom of those two Saints, made with little figures, and so well wrought, that for a small work it is truly a marvel.
Charles F. Murray, one, however, whose help is given much in the form of antagonism, informs me of various critical discoveries lately made, both by himself, and by industrious Germans, of points respecting the authenticity of this and that, which will require notice from me: more especially he tells me of certification that the picture in the Uffizii, of which I accepted the ordinary attribution to Giotto, is by Lorenzo Monaco, which indeed may well be, without in the least diminishing the use to you of what I have written of its predella, and without in the least, if you think rightly of the matter, diminishing your confidence in what I tell you of Giotto generally.
On the nave piers are paintings, most of them of little value. A S. Jerome and S. John the Baptist show decorative feeling in the landscape and its combination with the figure; and on the second pier on each side is a row of nine saints and angels, small figures as if from a predella, which show a combination of Peruginesque and Florentine design and colour.
But to return to Don Lorenzo; he taught Francesco Fiorentino, who, after his death, painted the shrine that is on the Canto di S. Maria Novella, at the head of the Via della Scala, on the way to the Sala del Papa; and he taught another disciple, a Pisan, who painted a Madonna, S. Peter, S. John the Baptist, S. Francis, and S. Ranieri, and three scenes with little figures on the predella of the altar, in the Church of S. Francesco at Pisa, in the Chapel of Rutilio di Ser Baccio Maggiolini; and this work, painted in 1315, was held passing good for something wrought in distemper.
In order to keep him in their midst, they commissioned him to make the stories of S. Anthony of Padua on the predella of the high-altar in the Church of the Friars Minor, which are in low-relief, wrought with so great judgment, that the most excellent masters of that art stand marvelling and amazed before them, as they consider their beautiful and varied compositions, with the great abundance of extraordinary figures and diminishing perspectives.
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