To those who may be receiving one of these post-notifications for the first time: This is not a blog; it’s actually part of a book, and will make little sense to you without knowledge of what has come before—which you can easily obtain, along with a goodly amount of satirical theatre as matters progress, by simply entering ttgftyri.org into your web browser, opening the menu, and starting at page one. J.J.

Church of San Francesco, Assisi
Cimabue’s Madonnas have a faint Byzantine look about them, at least in the slight downward tilt of Mary’s head and in her facial detail; but inasmuch as he chose to present her in a somewhat more human, social setting, if only as surrounded by a few angels, he also broke with the somber Byzantine style of composition and created a new, Italian one that ultimately launched—after thirteen long centuries of Christianity’s Doom-and-Gloom art—the renaissance, or ‘reawakening’ of Europe’s forty thousand year old tradition of nature-affirming art.
Cimabue was also the first European painter to almost always depict the Virgin clad in a blue mantle—or sometimes, just cloak or wrap—and red gown.

National Gallery, London

Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, Bologna

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Museum of Santa Verdiana, Castelfiorientino, Italy

Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

Church of Santa Maria Assunta, Positano, Italy

Private Collection

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, a painter who came along a generation after Cimabue and was easily his artistic equal, enthusiastically embraced the new Italian approach to depicting the Madonna.
But now, a quick word about the color blue. Originally, European painters were more or less forced to work with blues made from natural plant dyes, which were so unstable as to be very difficult for serious painters to work with. For one thing, they often cracked and eventually fell apart with age (see Nos. 8 thru 10 above); and then, no plant could yield the rich, deep shade of blue seen above in Mary’s wrap (No. 11).
Blues made from lapiz lazuli, however—a deep-blue stone that had to be brought all the way from Afghanistan, ground into powder, and finally made into aquamarine, the finest of all blue pigments and the one actually used in our wrap—was understandably very expensive; so expensive, that it was used sparingly, when at all. Indeed, one had to be wealthy to afford it; rather, most painters of that day either used the lighter, less brilliant blues derived from plant dyes, settled for blue-blacks, or simply resorted to some other color—in some cases, not excluding simple black itself.
And red is another color that could be very expensive for a painter to work with, depending upon whether it was made from minium (also called ‘red lead’), a relatively cheap pigment made by roasting white lead in the open air and watching it turn yellow and then an orangy shade of red (it was actually called red-orange back in the day), but fades back through yellow almost to its original white over time; ground-up cinnabar, a costly mineral that creates a brilliant, but very pricey vermillion red, notwithstanding that when exposed to too much sunlight, it darkens almost to black; or cochineal bugs, which had to be imported from the cactus country of Mexico—for a few centuries, actually making it the third most valuable New World export—but when dried and ground-up, creates a distinctive carmine red.
See some examples of these below.




So now back to Duccio.

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena

Galleria Sabauda, Turin

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

City Art Gallery, Manchester

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The architect and painter Giotto di Bondone, more or less a contemporary of Duccio but some six years younger, is credited by the 16th-century art-historian Giorgio Vasari—the first historian to use the word ‘Renaissance’ in print to describe what was happening in Italian art back then—as the painter who actually made the decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style in Italy and initiated the “art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life . . .”
Too bad for us that he had so much trouble with those weak, plant-based blues.

Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Arena Chapel, Padua

Basilica of San Francisco, Assisi

Private Collection

Church of San Giorgio alla Costa, Florence

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Private Collection

Louvre, Paris
Bernardo Daddi, who followed Giotto by four years, also created many depictions of the Madonna—and pretty much carried the new Italian color scheme forward.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Courtauld Gallery, London

Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Church of Orsanmichele, Florence

Private Collection, Venice

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

National Gallery, London
As we proceed, it certainly wouldn’t be fair to show you only those paintings where the Virgin is portrayed wearing a blue mantle and red gown, lest you get the impression that she was never portrayed clad in other colors by the Renaissance painters; but on the other hand, as we approach the end of our journey it’s necessary that you come to understand just how saturated the Madonna paintings of that whole, four hundred year period were with that particular color scheme—in Italy, and eventually throughout all Catholic Europe—for a reason that will soon become clear.
And so without further comment, here are just those paintings that would ultimately reveal that reason—with the caveat that while all of them depict the Virgin clad in various shades of the colors at issue here (or in cases where her gown isn’t showing, at least the blue, ranging all the way to near-black), just about every painter in Catholic Europe is found to have veered from them a few times during their career—but truly, very few; say, at the height of the Renaissance, in less than five percent of their representations.



Museo d’Arte Sacra della Val d’Arbia, Buonconvento

Uffizi, Florence

Museo d’Arte Sacra della Val d’Arbia

Musei Civici Fiorentini

Private Collection, Milan

Church of Sant’Angelo, Florence

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Museo Diocesano, Cortona
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2: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/cimabue/madonna/index.html
3: Wikimedia https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cimabue,_maest%C3%A0_di_santa_maria_dei_servi.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
4: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/cimabue/madonna/index.html
5: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/cimabue/madonna/index.html
6: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/cimabue/madonna/index.html
7: Wikimedia https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Madonna_di_Castelfiorentino
9: Wikimedia https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cimabue#/media/File%3AVergine_con_Bambino%2C_Cimabue_o_Giotto.jpg
11: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
12: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
13: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
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29: National Gallery of Art https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.397.html
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31: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
32: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
33: Courtauld Institute of Art https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/lunchtime-talk-bernardo-daddi-triptych-virgin-and-child-200418
34: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
35: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
36: Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bernardo-Daddi
37: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernardo_Daddi_-Orsanmichele_Madonna_and_Child_with_Angels-_WGA05863.jpg
38: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
39: Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438423
40: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
41: Saylingaway https://saylingaway.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/l-ambrogio-lorenzetti/
42: Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/pin/513551163730728565/?nic_v1=1bbHwwXUqdNXmwaXbMVV0MS5ToKv7yUokGCC4fRH%2Fi8r45jX1C2iAghJobUrh98FxC
43: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pietro_Lorenzetti,_Madonna_col_Bambino,_Buonconvento_2.jpg
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49: The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438605
50: Web Gallery of Art https://www.wga.hu/index1.html
Thank you, Jim. These images are glorious. I had a minor in Renaissance Art in college – did not meld well with the Zoology major but I loved it!
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Thanks for your comment; but there’s a point to all these photos, and if you don’t start from the first page of the book, you’re going to miss it entirely. Warm regards, J.J.
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