Religious Art & Subject of the Madonna

One of the most frequently favorite subjects in religious art throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was that of the Madonna or Virgin and Child. The birth of Christ and the Crucifixion sit at the very center of Christian iconography. Most of the great artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance painted at least one if not more versions of the Madonna and Child, often surrounded by lesser portraits of saints and even portraits of the donor or patron commissioning the work. This brief report will present a visual analysis of two such works found in the collection of the Frick Museum. The first is Gentile Da Fabriano's Madonna and Child, with Sts. Lawrence and Julian. The second is Jan Van Eyck's Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor.

Gentile's rendition of this scene was painted circa 1423-1425 in Tempera on panel. It measures 35 and 3/4 inches by 18 and 1/2 inches and was acquired by the Frick in 1966. The panel contains lyrical linear patterns and an elegantly ornamented surface (The Frick Collection: Paintings: Fabriano: Madonna & Child, 2000, p. 1). It is also said to perpetuate late Gothic traditions in the gentle and graceful figures of the Madonna and Child, while the saints appear to be more forward-looking than work of the same date by Gentile's Florentine contemporaries.

The heads of these two saints are portrait-like and their bodies are solidly modeled and strikingly natural as well as eloquent. Saint Lawrence kneels at the left

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tion to accurate and realistic perspective exhibited by Van Eyck emphasizes the fact that this Northern painter has come closer to the Renaissance understanding of the role of perspective than had Gentile. H.W. Janson (1986) suggests that Van Eyck accomplished an optical phenomenon known as "atmospheric perspective" in this and other works. The perspective results from the fact that the atmosphere is never wholly apparent. Atmospheric perspective is fundamental to our perception of deep space than linear perspective, which records only the diminution in the apparent size of objects as their distance from the observer increases. Janson (1986) claims that this may have been achieved because Van Eyck, unlike Gentile was working in oil rather than tempera. This made it possible to alternate opaque and translucent layers of pigment, imparting a soft, glowing radiance of tone. Though the brilliant colored linear perspective of Gentile is also compelling, it lacks this additional atmospheric element that developed after Gentile had ceased to paint. Both artists have elected to surround their Madonna or Virgin and Child with other figures. These figures have iconographic as well as historical significance. In Gentile's paint

Category: Arts - R