Madonna and Child With Adoring Angel
“Madonna and Child With Adoring Angel” Sandro Botticelli, 1468.
I do not own this image. I have used it for educational purposes only and have linked it to its proprietor: The Norton Simon Museum.
Madonna and Child With Adoring Angel
Botticelli’s Madonna and Child With Adoring Angel, painted in 1468, is a representation of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ (“Madonna” literally translates into “my lady”). There is a subtle interaction between both characters which we rarely see in other interpretations of similar scenes. In most cases, the interaction goes one way: either the Madonna is caring for baby Jesus, therefore granting her importance and power and defining her as a maternal figure, or baby Jesus is shown as powerful and wise (even at his tender years), shifting the power onto him. In Botticelli’s work, there is a circular psychological interaction: it is a scene of mother and son sharing the deep love inherent in such a relationship. We are presented the image as outsiders, as voyeuristic entities which are not supposed to observe this intimate moment; only an angel is allowed such an honor. It is an image of pure, untainted love and devotion which the angel admires in awe. We seem to catch him in the act of sighing and about to become overwhelmed by the scene of the son of God and his virgin mother being humans. This is not an idealized representation of any of the characters (even the angel’s wings are cropped out of the image), this is an image designed to express the humanity behind the story of deified beings. Botticelli is not only telling us they are like us, but also that we are like them. Not only is he humanizing the characters, but he is glorifying the spectator. It is in this statement that we feel the full force of the ideals and values of the Renaissance crash upon us: the rise of the human being.
There are few artists in the history of Art as skillful as Botticelli in presenting such powerful (and even controversial) ideas within a very subtle set of parameters. If looked at carelessly, this painting can be lost in the sea of Madonnas which have been painted in the past, but if we pause and look for the clues, we can see the statement emerge clearly. It is not a coincidence that he was a favorite painter of the Medicis. This image feels strangely concrete for a theme which can easily lend itself to conceptual embellishment. He strips everything down to its bare minimum and presents a distilled set of concepts and statements which were circulating during the era in what would appear to most as a simplistic representation of a holy moment. There is no eye contact because none is needed: the physical contact establishes the interaction and sets the dynamic of the interaction between both figures. They are admiring each other just as loved ones do and both seem to be at peace. The only sense of power that we get from any of the characters is the standing position of Jesus: he seems to have an oddly solid stance for a baby his age, it is a rigid, almost awkward gesture of the figure which lies in contrast with what his upper body and facial expression are conveying. The angel is ignored by both figures, it could be said that he is our companion in the admiration of the scene. He is closer to us, not by any type of direct interaction, but by his exclusion from the moment by the other two characters. We also fall into that category of “the excluded," therefore identifying with the angel’s sense of awe and admiration.
This painting is a clear example of the transition from late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. An important aspect to consider in terms of this assumption is purely technical: oil painting was rising as a reputable medium for naturalistic representation whereas tempera was visually harder and very difficult to control. There are various factors that caused painters to continue using this technique before fully accepting oil paint: 1) the weather wasn’t as harsh as what it was in Northern Europe, permitting a complete drying of the painting to happen and not making it necessary to work in a new medium; 2) tempera usually has to be hatched in order to build up the values and the colors, although Botticelli shows us a different method, consisting of layering thin washes and modulating the form and values with soft layers of pure color instead of hatching; 3) tempera requires hatching, while oil doesn’t, this made it difficult for artists trained in the hatching method to start working in terms of value and with an oily medium. 4)Tempera requires soft and precise work which is very mechanical and time-consuming in its application.
At the same time Botticelli painted this panel, da Vinci was probably starting his experimentations with oil paint under Verrocchio (also Botticelli’s master). Both artists had an ongoing feud as giants of the painting world during the Renaissance. They each heavily criticized the other’s styles and techniques, which drove them harder to reach the highest degree of refinement that had been known in painting (next to the van Eycks). The Medici family was a strong supporter of Botticelli and commissioned paintings from him, which explains why he never felt the need to accommodate for a new technical development in his art. The mannerisms we see in his figures stand out in a context in which the human was praised over any mythology; his metaphors extend to a realm beyond the palpable concreteness so common during the period. Although this painting touches on that concreteness very effectively, it is in Botticelli that we see the culmination of a technique which dates further back than Anno Domini and which was highly studied by Greek minds, we see a perfection of balance between craft and concept, and history and context.
As one of the greatest masters of the technique, Botticelli was able to stand his ground around a shifting set of values within painting: while everybody was adopting the new technique, he kept perfecting the old. He probably did not trust oil paint because of the reputation built by the atramentum (the Greek black oil) which tended to drastically darken values. We can observe his sensibility for describing light in the high key compression of values his paintings fall into. He tended to have a very subtle use of color, a subtlety which had not yet been attained in oil painting. Besides, tempera had been time-tested in many different settings: panels, canvas, walls (for fresco touch-ups and for complete tempera paintings), manuscripts, and furniture and had never failed to provide beauty, stability, and clarity when properly used. Despite this, we see artists such as Ghirlandaio and Verrocchio experimenting on their tempera paintings with sections painted in oil. Even as far back as Cennino Cennini, we can read accounts which speak of draperies painted in oil and tempera being reserved for the skin.
It is in this vibrant context that Botticelli was pressured to make a choice of medium for his work. He chose to play it safe and maintain the old dogmas. In all fairness to him, who could deny the teachings of Giotto? The Italian school had always been a school of water, and he wasn’t about to turn to grease for his subtle image-making. It sounds outrageous now that we are able to look back at the master-pieces painted since in oil, but if we put ourselves in his shoes, I doubt we would change anything in our formula for visual representation that might jeopardize our healthy income, which was being provided by none other than the Medicis.
Botticelli developed a complex system of glazing and scumbling similar to that we now are familiar with for oil painting and, which no doubt, is the origin of such a system. Through a graphic contrast of values surrounded by an airy, light, directional hatching, he is able to build up beautiful effects which poetically describe space, depth, volume and light. The transparencies used in his tempera painting are clean, concise and colorful, albeit conventional. He follows the maxim set by Giotto and later written about by Cennini: establish the modeling of the form in neutral greens and push the colors into the correct value allocation over this initial order. His compositions tend to be highly complex but never are able to shake off the rigidity in the figures which tempera seems to invariably lead to. It is unclear whether he retained that stiffness because of personal choice, lack of knowledge on how to work otherwise, or as a backlash against the leading tendencies of the time. What we do know is that even when he has this stiffness in the figures, they hold so strongly together as a cohesive image that we do not question the power of his expressive and narrative character.
This particular painting showcases a heavily triangular composition with the one of the main contact points (Mary’s hand) between Mary and Jesus marked as a centralized element, holding the base of the triangle in place. The upper point of the triangle is reinforced by the contact of the faces (also centralized along the main vertical axis of the composition). This basic geometry is offset by the curvature which interacts with the top of the triangle. The arches soften the transition from angular, to round, to the fluidity of the winding road and vegetation. He plays with the ebb and flow of space on the canvas; we start off by noticing Jesus, then Mary, the Angel, and then back to Jesus. The arch running from the angel’s face to Mary’s head keeps the circular reading continuous by connecting both figures.The pillar on the right next to Mary’s head stops our eyes from shooting out the right section of the panel, and it then takes us back to the circular idea.
We are confronted with the compositional balancing act which takes place between the centralized figure of Jesus with the colorful garments that Mary wears. The angel on the left follows the system of dead coloring from the sections surrounding Mary. When examined closely, we notice that the angel was a later addition to the composition: the drawing lines are apparent underneath him, and the way his sleeve drapes over the vase on the foreground and his ornament falls on the table is physically impossible and feels unnatural. Here we see one of the biggest weaknesses of tempera: the inability to make significant changes (pentimenti) to a painting without those changes showing through.
We are given a demonstration of dexterity in the transitions of volumes. Every value is separated by minimal value shifts which are just enough to describe the form being represented. Even the changes in temperature are very subtle: He goes from light to mid-tone to dark, and warm to neutral to cold, apparently without effort. These changes are framed by an arc formed by the blues in the sky and on the robe. These blues run from central top to central bottom and arc towards the right side of the panel, they are contrasted and accented by the sharp shard of red cloth showing through. These interactions establish a rhythm which interlaces with the static architecture, giving it more life. It is also a very clever way of connecting the inside space with the outside space without the spectators noticing what just happened with their perception and how they were fooled. It’s a skillful slide-of-hand by the artist.The only real point of hard contrast in the value range which Botticelli offers is the black cloth which also seems to weave behind Jesus’s legs and onto the landscape that lies beyond the arch.
Once we start conceptualizing his compositional choices into abstract geometry and the psychological play of these interlocking abstractions and combine them with the psychological interplay between the figures, we can begin to grasp the complexity of his visual propositions. Here we are confronted with a painter’s painter: although he pleases the non-artist with his images, he also appeals to the artist can untangle the process of conception and understand Botticelli’s temperament and creative choices through the selective deconstruction of patterns and interactions within a seemingly simple image.
Works Cited
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Doerner, Max. The Materials of the Artist & Their Use in Painting. New York, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc, 1934. Print.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon. Soap Bubbles. New York, New York. 15-07-2011
The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, Ca. Sandro Filipepi Botticelli. The Madonna and Child With Adoring Angel. Pasadena, Ca. 10-05-2014
Wehlte, Kurt. The Materials & Techniques of Painting, With a Supplement on Color Theory. New York, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1982. Print.
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists, Volume I. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 1987. Print.