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THE INSIDE
Dark Ages, shiny art at the AGO Art showing the paradises and purgatories of the 14th century imagination is an acquired taste David Stokes The AGO’s new exhibition, “Revealing the Early Renaissance,” contains more than 90 pieces from Florence during the first half of the 14th century and includes triptychs, altarpieces, and manuscript pages. It is a serious and difficult show though it has an enigmatic charm. The thematic content of the art is overwhelmingly (and for the secular patron, numbingly) religious. The majority of the works repeatedly show the same handful of tropes from the bible—madonnas, crucifixions, etc. As they come from before the perspectival experimentation of the high Renaissance (Michelangelo et. al. show up 100 years later) there seems to be one general formula for all the faces and figures. But once one looks past the religious obsessiveness of the themes and warms to the particular style of the paintings, contemporary viewers will find this an art of graceful and delicate detail. There is something odd and alien about the faces in the show that is deeply haunting. Work after work features ethereal and exquisitely draped figures shown in harmonious arrangements standing in seas of gold (the dominant material of the show); they face the viewer with weightless and wordless address. Their skin is gauzy and soft as clouds, and one feels that in this art emotions are deep and buried; meant to be subtly suggested and understood rather than vividly expressed. The feelings of separation, sorrow and restraint abound. Violence is also unflinchingly common. Heads are hacked off and saints die heroic deaths to become martyrs: the action heroes of their time they are bathed in eternal gold, their flesh evocatively and knowingly -- in a time wracked by plague -- painted paper thin. Some of the works show the near-cinematic tableau that the more expressive artists could coax from stock religious scenes. Pacino di Bonaguida’s Polyptych with
Crucifixion has Christ’s blood exploding out in geyers like a slasher film effect and pooling around a skull beneath the cross. Taddeo Gaddi’s Stigmatization of St. Francis shows a flying Jesus shooting what looks like five red lasers at St. Francis. But perhaps the show’s most charming details are small and from anonymous hands. For example, the twisting brocades of flowers and gilded
text whose incredible and inspiring hand-painted intricacies appear at near magnifying-glass scale. And sneaking in, slowly, in the midst of the religious scenes, are scenes of refreshingly humanistic and romantic pathos. There is a figure of a heartbroken and lonely Dante sitting in the middle an illuminated ‘N’ on the first page of his book. One finds a scene featuring a bunch of friends out
hunting together. In one manuscript there is the sight of a princess, a dragon, a knight, and a white horse all together in a rousing -- and strikingly secular -- vignette about the fight for love. This sudden explosion of gold-lined artistry featured in the exhibit came to Florence largely because it became the regional centre of trade. Her banks and textiles manufacturing generated large profits
The Virgin and Child with Saints and Allegorical Figures, about 1315–20, Giotto di Bondone (Italian, about 1267–1337). Tempera and gold leaf on panel.
and their owners, the burghers -- a new and growing class of middle class citizens -- felt secure enough from the power of the church to spend on fashionable luxury. Florence was also an independent republic and it’s civic pride -- a new concept in medieval Europe -- resulted in art being used as Florentine propaganda (there is one scene called The Expulsion of the Poor from Siena and The Poor of Siena Being Generously Received in Florence). With all its gold and rigourous craftsmanship, these works were the expensive corporate art of its day and birthed the trends of middle class ostentation and aesthetic appreciation. These paintings and their paint were expensive and difficult to make. Many of the colours were made from precious stones (like lapis lazuli) which were crushed and then applied by trained artists to wood or paper. Grinding up the nicest materials they knew of and using them to make art was a good idea in terms of artistic longevity; over six hundred years later, the colours are so exceptionally vivid they look like they were painted yesterday. In the gallery, contemporary viewers are shown art in volumes that reaches Stendhal syndrome-inducing proportions. People who lived during the 14th century likely would not see works like this often, so when they did it was likely the most beautiful thing they would see for a while. The sight of such scenes inspired them to use faith as a means to get through the grim reality of their present and aim for the gold-lined paradise beyond. For us now, however, this show is a chance to understand and marvel at the treasures of the past, even though, for all it’s gold, it’s nothing close to heaven.
Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art opens March 16 at the AGO, 317 Dundas Street West.