CARNEVALE, Fra

This drawing, which display stylistic affinities with Filippo Lippi’s works, is attributed to Fra Carnevale who worked in Lippi’s workshop. The kneeling monk is copied from Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin, while the female bears a striking resemblance to some of the figures in the Barberini panels by Fra Carnevale, both in folds and in the geometric clarity of the folds of drapery.

The purpose of this enigmatic drawing, which shows male nudes posed variously on a podium, is not known. It is perhaps a preliminary planning for a panel.

This small, enigmatic and unfinished panel is painted on both sides. On the front of the panel is the figure of a youthful hero or young god on a podium made up of three polygonal plinths. The construction of the decahedron corresponds exactly to the geometric precepts set down by Piero della Francesca in his famous treatise. The ancient ruin in the background is a fairly faithful reconstruction of the Arch of the Argentari near the church of San Giorgio al Velabro in Rome. The arch is not only seen fully restored rather than in its actual state - in the Quattrocento it was partly incorporated into the church of San Giorgio al Velabro - but it is completed with a pediment.

On the back of the panel a fictive, geometric intarsia is represented.

This painting, distinguished by its rather unorthodox composition, was executed by a close follower of Filippo Lippi, most likely by Fra Carnevale. (The names of Giovanni di Francesco, the Master of Pratovecchio and Giovanni Boccati are also mentioned in the literature.) The face of the Madonna bears a strong similarity to that of the Annunciation by Lippi in the Martelli Chapel in San Lorenzo, Florence.

This painting is one of the three portraits that have been ascribed to Fra Carnevale. If the attribution correct then it documents the artist’s transformation into an exponent of a North Italian courtly style; there is, indeed, no hint of the Florentine training with Filippo Lippi we know Fra Carnevale to have received.

The portrait reads as a marble relief to which colour has been added.

The panels depicting St John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, St Peter, and St Francis (now in various museums) once belonged to a single altarpiece, which was a polyptych that consisted of ten panels arranged in two registers. The original location of the polyptych is not known, it comes perhaps from Loreto or from its environment. The panels show the influence of Domenico Veneziano.

The panels depicting St John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, St Peter, and St Francis (now in various museums) once belonged to a single altarpiece, which was a polyptych that consisted of ten panels arranged in two registers. The original location of the polyptych is not known, it comes perhaps from Loreto or from its environment. The panels show the influence of Domenico Veneziano.

The panels depicting St John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, St Peter, and St Francis (now in various museums) once belonged to a single altarpiece, which was a polyptych that consisted of ten panels arranged in two registers. The original location of the polyptych is not known, it comes perhaps from Loreto or from its environment. The panels show the influence of Domenico Veneziano.

By the mid-fifteenth century it had become standard workshop practice in Florence to work from posed models; for the most part they were young, male studio assistants (garzoni), although studies of females are also occasionally encountered. Those drawings that survived are either in pen and ink with brown wash on white paper and have a predominantly linear quality, or are in the more pictorial technique of brown or gray wash heightened with white gouache on blue paper.

Presumably Fra Carnevale executed drawings in the workshop of Filippo Lippi. The central figure in the drawing in Stockholm can be identified as David with the head of Goliath. It is clearly taken from a posed model making do with a chamber pot for Goliath’s head.

This painting has a great number of familiar symbols of the Virgin to evoke the life of a patrician Florentine. The Annunciation is shown taking place in an open court before the Virgin’s house. Her bedchamber, luxuriously decorated with ermine hangings, curtains, and a small, open cupboard, is seen through a marble door at right. Behind the Virgin a green curtain has been drawn back to reveal the view through another door into a dining room, where a table, stool, and bench are arranged in front of a staircase leading up past an open window. An elaborate bronze grill is shown unlocked, with a key in its open gate. It provides symbolic as well as visual access to an area paved with inlaid marble slabs in front of an altar set up against the exterior wall of the house. Beyond this sanctified area is a deep, colonnaded portico, at the end of which is a door surmounted by an escutcheon supported by two winged putti that leads to an arbour and a closed gate. The walled garden (the ‘hortus conclusus’) to the left of the colonnade is surrounded by the arbour and contains cyprus trees (symbols of the Virgin), a well (the ‘fons hortorum’), a thatched structure of some sort, and peacocks (symbols of immortality).

The arms of Jacques Coeur (c. 1395-1456), the wealthy merchant and finance minister of Charles VII are prominently displayed in the tympanum of the door behind the Virgin, indicating that the painting was commissioned by Jacques Coeur who had a special devotion to the Annunciation: the subject is depicted in a magnificent stained-glass window illuminating his family chapel in Bourges Cathedral.

It is in the domestication of the religious theme and the fastidious attention given to the architecture that Fra Carnevale reveals his authorship. Also characteristic of Fra Carnevale is the system of perspective which is based on the same principles as that found in his Annunciation in Washington.

This painting originally was ascribed to Fra Filippo Lippi. In fact the composition was inspired by two of Lippi’s altarpieces, an Annunciation in San Lorenzo, Florence, and another in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From the first of these derive the pose and upward gaze of the angel, the solid haloes with channeling, and the steep perspective of the buildings terminating in a salmon-coloured wall with an open door. From the second, Fra Carnevale has taken the modest stance and gesture of the Virgin.

What is completely original to this depiction is the idea of staging the Annunciation in a street bordered by elegant colonnades rather than in the Virgin’s bedroom, a cloister, an enclosed garden, or a church-like interior, as was traditional. The buildings, with their salmon and pink trim, are distinctly Florentine in style, although completely unlike those in Lippi’s work. The ornamented arches of two of the buildings recall those in the background of Ghiberti’s relief of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba on the Gates of Paradise of the Baptistery in Florence. The perspective system is rigorous: a pinhole indicating the vanishing point has been made in the right doorjamb, eight centimetres from the base of the door; virtually all of the orthogonals recede to this point.

Two panels of virtually the same size, depicting scenes constructed on a precisely mirror-image perspective grid, are in the centre of sustained scholarly debate which extends to both the subjects, the function, and the authorship. They depict ostensibly religious subjects with a plethora of detail taken, on the one hand, from contemporary life and inspired, on the other, by humanist-antiquarian interests. One of the panels (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) represents the Birth of the Virgin, the other (in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) probably shows the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.

These two highly original pictures can be identified with an altarpiece painted by Fra Carnevale for a lay fraternity of flagellants in the hospital church of Santa Maria della Bella in Urbino. In the seventeenth century the altarpiece was confiscated by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and in the 1930s they were sold from the Barberini collection to the museums in New York and Boston.

It is remarkable that the mother of the child - rather young for Saint Anne - is depicted lying in bed nude. Virtually every fifteenth-century scene of the Birth of the Virgin shows Anne reclining in bed, decorously dressed to receive visitors. However, the three maids attending Saint Anne - unlike the woman seated alongside her - are clothed all’antica. This implies that the birth has been imagined as a past event refracted through contemporary life.

The panels depicting St John the Baptist, the Crucifixion, St Peter, and St Francis (now in various museums) once belonged to a single altarpiece, which was a polyptych that consisted of ten panels arranged in two registers. The original location of the polyptych is not known, it comes perhaps from Loreto or from its environment. The panels show the influence of Domenico Veneziano.

Two panels of virtually the same size, depicting scenes constructed on a precisely mirror-image perspective grid, are in the centre of sustained scholarly debate which extends to both the subjects, the function, and the authorship. They depict ostensibly religious subjects with a plethora of detail taken, on the one hand, from contemporary life and inspired, on the other, by humanist-antiquarian interests. One of the panels (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) represents the Birth of the Virgin, the other (in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) probably shows the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.

These two highly original pictures can be identified with an altarpiece painted by Fra Carnevale for a lay fraternity of flagellants in the hospital church of Santa Maria della Bella in Urbino. In the seventeenth century the altarpiece was confiscated by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and in the 1930s they were sold from the Barberini collection to the museums in New York and Boston.

The Virgin (the young girl in blue) is depicted at the head of the procession filing into the basilica-like temple. She passes three beggars - a common embellishment of the scene. Instead of the traditional Jewish priest officiating at the event, Fra Carnevale places three figures at the high altar, apparently a Franciscan, a Dominican and a hooded figure - while two pilgrims are seen against the right-hand entrance pier. The remaining figures in the church are exclusively young males who chat, rest, or walk about. The decorative reliefs on the church fa�ade above clearly depict events in the Virgin’s life, The Annunciation and the Visitation. On the basis of the columns a dancing maenad and a satyr with pipes, as well as a classical urn with a branch protruding from its opening symbolize the pagan past.

The Virgin (the young girl in blue) is depicted at the head of the procession filing into the basilica-like temple. She passes three beggars - a common embellishment of the scene.

The Virgin (the young girl in blue) is depicted at the head of the procession filing into the basilica-like temple. She passes three beggars - a common embellishment of the scene. Two pilgrims are seen against the right-hand entrance pier. On the basis of the columns a dancing maenad and a satyr with pipes, as well as a classical urn with a branch protruding from its opening symbolize the pagan past.

Instead of the traditional Jewish priest officiating at the event, Fra Carnevale places three figures at the high altar, apparently a Franciscan, a Dominican and a hooded figure - while two pilgrims are seen against the right-hand entrance pier. The remaining figures in the church are exclusively young males who chat, rest, or walk about.

This panel - together with another representing the Birth of the Virgin, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York - formed part of a highly original altarpiece commissioned in 1467 for the Church of Santa Maria della Bella at Urbino. In both works, the mature artist reveals himself to be a learned scholar well-versed in the vocabulary of architecture.