Ognissanti Polyptych: lateral panel – (Giovanni Da Milano) ◄ ankstesnis Kitas ►

Menininkas: Giovanni Da Milano

Dydis: 133 x 41 cm

Muziejus: Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence, Italy)

technika: Tempera

"Ever since Duccio's Maesta, Sienese painters had found in the two parts of the altarpiece - the large-scale icon, and the small narrative panels - quite different expressive possibilities. The predella was the territory of the contingent, of dramatic action unfolding in time, in the city street or across the landscape. Its scale was inherently humble, intimate; it became the natural location for that civic and vernacular imagery most characteristic of Sienese tradition. Giovanni di Paolo's main altarpieces nearly always present a Madonna in 'sacred conversation' with her attendant saints, offering very little opportunity for spatial and compositional play; after 1450, when the Florentine unbroken rectangular format became a dominant convention, they are seldom of much interest. His gifts are released, almost exclusively, in the predella. Giovanni di Paolo painted at least a hundred of these small narrative panels. His storytelling is entertaining, pungent, funny and compelling.St Stephen Suckled by a Doe is the opening scene of an outstandingly fine predella, added to a dull altarpiece of The Madonna with Saints (Bernardino and Jerome among them) painted some fifty years earlier by Andrea Vanni. It stood in a pilgrimage church on the outskirts of Siena, whose relics included one of the rocks with which St Stephen was stoned.A paved foreground with a steep street behind provides the setting for one of the strangest and most beautiful images Giovanni ever painted. Although the doors of the two facing palaces are open, the street is uncannily deserted. Into this spellbound, silent city has strayed the delicate grey doe, giving her milk to the infant Stephen, already haloed in his swaddling bands. The patterned pavement splays outwards, as though radiating from the semi-heraldic beast herself. Giovanni's colour is limited here almost entirely to white, black, pink and red."