. The study and criticism of Italian art : second series. eaning on his staff. A parapet in frontis strewn with a confusion of objects, a wicker basket,a book, an elliptical wooden box, and the reed crosswhich St. John has just laid down. It would be difficult to find a more fascinatingcomposition. The figures are in perfect harmonywith the surrounding space : they neither lose them-selves in stretches of sky and land too vast for themto hold their own in, as the figures do in a numberof fifteenth-century pictures; nor are they crowdedand stifled, as in the tondi of Signorelli, or the Madonna
. The study and criticism of Italian art : second series. eaning on his staff. A parapet in frontis strewn with a confusion of objects, a wicker basket,a book, an elliptical wooden box, and the reed crosswhich St. John has just laid down. It would be difficult to find a more fascinatingcomposition. The figures are in perfect harmonywith the surrounding space : they neither lose them-selves in stretches of sky and land too vast for themto hold their own in, as the figures do in a numberof fifteenth-century pictures; nor are they crowdedand stifled, as in the tondi of Signorelli, or the Madonna della Seggiola of Raphael. TheMadonna dominates the whole. The other figuresonly serve to complete the harmonious rhythm oflines and contours, which give to the composition thesuggestion of a pyramidal silhouette that, inclosed ina circle, never fails to produce an agreeable impres-sion on the eye; nor is the action less ably see Filippino here at the very happiest moment1 Formerly at Naples, in the Sant Angelo collection. ^m FILIPPINO LIPPI. {Warren Collection, Boston, THE HOLY FAMILY BY FILIPPINO LIPPI 93 of his career, as far from the almost rigid im-movability of his Virgin in the Uffizi altar-piece orof the Madonna in the Vision of the Badia, oreven of the one in the Corsini tondo, as from theaimless and nervous agitation of his last is gracious, measured, serene. Rarelyif ever has the Leonardesque motif of the two holychildren embracing each other, been rendered withgreater naturalness and freedom from of note also is the way the right arms of thefemale figures and the children are entwined, so asto form a semicircle within the tondo. If Filippinohad been a Leonardo, their arms and hands wouldhave been drawn with more life, one would haverealized more vividly that they were organic andprehensile members : if he had been Raphael, thearrangement of line would doubtless have been moresimple and grand; but no one coul
Size: 1585px × 1576px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectartital, bookyear1902
