BOCCATI, Giovanni di Piermatteo

The painting is a very poor state of preservation. In spite of considerable deterioration, the influence of contemporary Flemish art is clear, as are elements from the late-Gothic idiom.

Boccati painted the subject in several variants It is interesting to note that these versions show features unusual in Italian painting of the period, features which are characteristic of Jan van Eyck and his school in Flemish painting.

Boccati introduced this type of small paintings for private devotion into Umbria and the Marches, specializing in images of the Crucifixion. Aside from the present example, four others survive.

The structure of this Crucifixion scene is unusual with its off-central axis. There is some uncertainty over whether this small panel was originally an independent work or was joined with another painting to form a diptych. The composition suggests that the artist was familiar with an early Netherlandish compositional prototype probably associable with Jan van Eyck.

This painting is called the Madonna of the Orchestra. Ideas that are at once similar to yet different from the Madonna del Pergolato emerge in this smaller altarpiece, which was painted in Perugia about a decade later. The expressive di sotto in sù perspective lends a sort of monumentality to the blond, music-making angels playing a variety of instruments - including a lute, tambourine, cymbals, rebec, reed pipe and harp - as they stand on a high, semicircular podium around the Virgin’s throne; together with two additional angels in the foreground playing a portable organ and a zither, they give the painting its traditional name: the Madonna of the Orchestra. What is striking here with respect to the Pergolato Altarpiece is the new, systematic insistence on a marble revetment, although the effect is tempered by the meadow in the foreground emphasized by the two little angels who kneel to pick flowers.

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Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro: Gratioso

This panel is the first of three scenes from the predella of the Madonna del Pergolato altarpiece. The other two panels depict the Way to Calvary and the Crucifixion.

In this panel, the procession of figures proceeds along a diagonal from the left, veering in the foreground to enter the middle distance on the right, creating a sort of “fish-eye” view. The suggestively confused climax of the action takes place at the right side of the panel, in an enclosed, wooded garden of Gethsemane. Soldiers have battered down the garden’s wattle fence, while three apostles flee in terror through the trees. No less violent is the scene of St Peter throwing himself upon Malchus, the High Priest’s servant, to cut off his ear. The slender figure of Christ all but disappears in the melee.

The suggestively confused climax of the action takes place at the right side of the panel, in an enclosed, wooded garden of Gethsemane. Soldiers have battered down the garden’s wattle fence, while three apostles flee in terror through the trees. No less violent is the scene of St Peter throwing himself upon Malchus, the High Priest’s servant, to cut off his ear. The slender figure of Christ all but disappears in the melee.

This panel is part of the Belforte Altarpiece, the largest (483 x 323 cm) fifteenth-century polyptych in the Marches. This altarpiece of complex structure survived almost intact. The polyptych was temporarily dismantled during the recent restoration which made possible the detailed study of its individual panels, among them the pinnacle panel depicting the Blessed Guardato (born about 1360 in Visso), a local holy figure with relatively minor iconographic importance.

The Belforte polyptych is an excellent example of Boccati’s mature style.

The panel is also called Madonna del Pergolato.

Originating from the Chapel of St Sabinus in Orvieto Cathedral, this altarpiece is one of the most important paintings of the fifteenth-century Umbrian School. From 1445 onwards, Giovanni Boccati worked mainly in Perugia and was influenced partly by the Florentine masters Benozzo Gozzoli and Filippo Lippi but also by Piero della Francesca. He went on to develop a style of his own in which the interpretation is more lyrical and the means of expression more naive and immediate than those of his masters. His compositions, however, remained traditional, and in many of his paintings we find only slight variations of the arrangement seen in this picture.

In this altarpiece the assembly of saints and angels surrounding the Virgin are placed under a pergola - hence the name given to the work. The back of the Virgin’s throne is replaced by a leafy exedra, but the throne itself is of wood, decorated with certosina intarsia; the lateral walls and benches are marble, rendered in a uniform pink typical of the palette of Filippo Lippi.