Paris: Grant Allen's Historical GuidesAllen, Grant
History
Paris: Grant Allen's Historical Guides
Allen, Grant
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Guidebooks
Do not confound with any of these =devotional Madonnas=, with or
without select groups of saints, various other classes of
picture which somewhat resemble them. Each of these has in early
art its own proper convention and treatment: it was a recognised
species. A =Holy Family=, for example, consists, as a rule, of a
Madonna, the Infant Christ, St. Joseph, St. Elizabeth, and the
child Baptist. Like the other subjects, it is sometimes
complicated by the addition of selected Saints as spectators or
assessors. A =Coronation of the Virgin=, again, is an entirely
celestial scene, taking place in the calm of the heavenly
regions. The Madonna is usually crowned by her Son, but
sometimes by angels or by the Eternal Father. (Several
interesting examples of this, for comparison, occur in Room VI,
ground floor, at Cluny.) =Nativities=, of course, belong rather
to the group of pictorial histories, such as the Life of Christ,
or the Seven Joys of Mary. The sculptures in the ambulatory at
Notre-Dame give one a good idea of such continuous histories.
One interesting set of Madonnas, largely exemplified here, to
take a particular example, is the later Lombard type of the
=School of Leonardo=. This type, well distinguished by its
regular oval features, its gentle smile of inner happiness, and
its peculiar waving hair with wisps over the shoulders, is
usually regarded as essentially belonging to Leonardo himself
and his immediate followers. It is foreshadowed, however, by
Foppa, Borgognone, and other early Lombard painters, specimens
of whom are not numerous in the Louvre. Leonardo, when he came
to Milan to Ludovico Sforza, adopted this local type, which he
transfused with Florentine grace and with his own peculiar
subdued smile, as one sees it already in the Mona Lisa. From
Leonardo, again, it was taken, with more or less success, by his
immediate pupils, Beltraffio, Solario, Cesare di Sesto, and
others, as well as by Luini, who was not a pupil of Leonardo
himself, but who was deeply influenced by the master’s methods
and his works in Milan. The number of these Leonardesque
Madonnas in the Louvre is exceptionally great, while Leonardo
himself can here be better estimated than in Italy. Nowhere else
perhaps, save possibly at Milan, can this type as a whole be
compared by the student to so great advantage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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