PUTTING ART (back) IN ITS PLACE

We could experience Ghirlandaio's famous Adoration of the Shepherds on the altar in the side chapel of the Sassetti family to the right of the main altar of the church of Santa Trinità—witnessing how the frescoed scene of the healing of a young boy directly above the altar was set in the Via Tornabuoni immediately in front of this very church.  (Florence, painted in the 1480s)

Commissioned for the meeting room of the Council of Nine, that council’s legislative work— their liturgy—would have been enacted under Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s conscience-pricking gures of virtues and vices embodying the elements of the commonweal and of tyranny.

I began wondering if maybe seeing a frescoed Life of Mary of second- ary fame and quality (like that in the apse of the Orvieto Duomo*) but still unprotected in an active church was a more fruitful and satisfying educa- tive experience than one’s allotted een minutes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova.  (Painted by Ugolino di Prete Ilario in the 1370s-1380s)

 Fra Carnevale (Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini)

Italian, born by 1416—died 1484 Urbino

The Birth of the Virgin

Tempera and oil on wood

To progress tearfully on your knees from one to another of Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art would bring the guards running.  (Newman's series is now displayed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., but was first shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966.)

[Ghirlandaio] painted the altarpiece, depicting the scene of the Adoration of baby Jesus by the shepherds, with the procession of the three Kings in the distance making their progress towards Bethlehem, and he frescoed the walls of the chapel with scenes from the life of Saint Francis.  (Church of Santa Trinità, 1480s)

In fact, this chapel is the burial chapel for the pater familias who funded the lease of the chapel and its decoration.  The sarcophagi in niches in the side walls contain the remains of Francesco and his wife Nera Corsi.

In fact the painting’s border is permeable, reaching out to include the two figures frescoed into the walls on either side of the panel.  These two figures, clearly portraits of Sassetti and his wife, gaze into the painting, as it were, kneeling in adoration of the Christ child.