 In this case study, we're going to discuss the work of Gentile de Fabriano, who was a painter active in Florence in the early part of the 15th century. So both of the works that you're seeing here are from the 1420s, roughly, and on the left we see a coronation of the virgin with the virgin sort of bowing before Christ. You see the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering over them as Christ makes a gesture of blessing and places a crown upon his mother's head, signifying that she's queen of heaven. And then flanking them on either side, we see angels with scrolls of music, so they are obviously singing hymns of praise, and you might notice that they are significantly smaller than Christ and the virgin. That is an indication that they are less important in the hierarchy. So we call this either a hierarchical scale or a hieratic scale, when you have a difference in scale based on the importance of the figures. On the right, we have a nativity scene that is also sort of a virgin and child scene combined. So we actually have the virgin dominating the picture and brought way into the foreground. And then in the background, you can see on the left Joseph on the right, the stable and the manger, and then far in the distance on the left, sort of behind Mary's halo, you can see the shepherds watching their flocks and perhaps even responding to an angel. It looks like there's a little bit of wear and tear in the gilding and the one shepherd has fallen down and the other one is shielding his eyes. So it's possible that there would have been an angel up there at one point. Before we move on and look at the specific use of ultramarine blue derived from lapis in these paintings, I want to make the point that if you haven't taken a course in Renaissance art, a lot of people tend to think of the Italian Renaissance as a period in which scientific perspective was developed and a very illusionistic and scientific way of sort of creating space using geometric methodologies but at the same time that this very sort of spare and scientific method was being developed, there were also artists working in much more decorative and sumptuous styles, ones that have been linked to more the Gothic of the past than these artists working with the new perspective system. And it's important to recognize that both of these styles existed simultaneously and someone like Gentile de Fabriano or his contemporaries like Benozzo Gotzoli were very, very highly paid to create visually sumptuous and expensive works like this. And I want to call your attention particularly to the work on the left, which is as much about the coronation of the virgin, the subject matter being shown as it is about the sumptuous materials being used in it in a very deliberate way to call our attention to the richness. Notice how the gold particularly dominates. And the other thing that's happening here is that Gentile de Fabriano is probably working for a patron in the cloth industry in Florence, which was one of the most dominant industries and they were known for their rich brocades. And so that aspect of Florentine culture and the Florentine economy is showing up in this work. If we look closely at this adoration scene with the virgin adoring the child and her lap, you can see that it's really beautifully painted with a great deal of detail, particularly with all of the little flowers around the virgin as she sits. You can see elaborate tooling that's been done in the gilded areas of the canvas and little areas where Gentile de Fabriano actually punched holes into the gilding to make patterns. And then there are also little inscriptions on the hem of the virgin's gown. So there's a really wonderful wealth of detail and lots to see that can reward a viewer that looks at this very closely. And if you want, you can go to the Getty website and look up this painting and zoom way in on it. I hope you notice when we look at this example that it is strikingly different from the painting that shows the virgin in a landscape. Here there's no landscape setting whatsoever. Everything is happening up against a gold background. And then we have this elaborate green cloth of honor that seems to form a rug at the feet of the Virgin Mary and Christ who is crowning her Queen of Heaven and also sort of a backdrop to them. And so it kind of makes the scene much more sumptuous and rich, but also serves to kind of flatten out the space and deny us from having a kind of landscape that we can imagine ourselves wandering around in. You might notice the angels carrying scrolls of music on either side. And you might ask why all of this cloth is so elaborate. Well, one of the major exports of Florence and one of the most powerful economic forces in the city of Florence in the 15th century was the clothworking guilds. And Florence was known in the 15th and 16th centuries particularly for the quality of its fine brocades and velvet cloths in wool and in silks. And so here we have to assume that the patron of this work must have been heavenly involved in the cloth industry and would have been incredibly rich as well. The sheer amount of gold here is also kind of stunning. We have a gold frame, we have a gold setting, we have gold on every one of the figures, the angels are dominated by gold. And as we'll see in these two works, Gentile de Fabrigano uses very different techniques based on the amount of gold that he's using and the way that he's treating the paint pigments on top of that gold. Here are our two Madonna side by side. On the right we have a very humble new mother, a virgin who is just given birth to the Christ child and she's in rather humble surroundings. Yes we have gold in this painting but it's being used quite sparingly. It's very possible that the patron of this work couldn't afford to have too much gilding used in the painting and so was somewhat picky about where it went. Similarly, if you take a look at the robe of our virgin on the right in this sort of nativity adoration scene, she has a much darker blue robe on. And ultramarine derived from lapis lazuli is a pigment that is translucent and it is most effective when it is used in glazes over top of other pigments or other materials. And here it's pretty clear that to save some money, Gentile de Fabrigano probably because he's not being paid to use much ultramarine by his patron is using less expensive blues first in the under paintings. So he could have used for example indigo dye that would have been precipitated as a solid and mixed as a paint pigment or he could have used azurite which was an expensive pigment but it was not expensive to the degree that ultramarine was expensive and he could have done the under paintings for the virgin's garment using those and that just applied a final glaze of the ultramarine. The reason that I suspect to use these cheaper pigments is that azurite in particular is known to degrade over time and to darken and also to sort of revert to amalakite green. So that's very possibly what happened here. You'll notice that the virgin's mantle almost looks black. Now if we take a look on the other side you'll notice that the blue is vibrant and electric almost and similarly the green of that cloth of honor has a really luminous quality and what Gentile has done here is he has actually taken both of these pigments the malachite green and the ultramarine blue. They're both mineral pigments that are rather translucent and he has applied them in relatively thin glazes of tempura over top of the gold surface and so the the effect of that is that the gold shines through and reflects the light on that that affects the painting and so it makes these areas seem to glow from within. The red you might notice is a much more opaque pigment and so you don't get that quality of the the gold being reflected through it. It really hides the gold and you'll notice that Gentile is using that fairly sparingly but he's using it to give the effect of sort of a purple with stippling on the virgin's mantle around her head and then he's using it to highlight areas like her gown and certain areas on the blue brocade and the green brocade as well. We know exactly how works like these paintings by Gentile would have been painted and in the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshoff in Germany they have actually reproduced the carving, preparing and painting of a relief figure of a saint. You can see him on the altar panel on the right and then you can see the stages of preparation here. This is a 15th century figure so roughly contemporary to what we're seeing from Gentile de Fabriano. Of course we're not dealing with something that was carved but a lot of the other steps are the same. What I want you to notice is that the wood surface on the left is first coated with a ground that will make the wood accept the painting more readily. This is probably a plaster-based gesso or possibly something like rabbit glue, something that will provide a good base for the paint and the areas that are gilded receive a red clay and then the the gold leaf is stuck down to that and you can see that the finest gold is reserved for the halo and the crown. Certain areas are silvered as well and then of course the final version can be seen in on the right hand side but what I want you to notice about this is that typically an artist would only apply gilding to the areas that were meant to show through as pure gold so what Gentile de Fabriano is doing in that coronation image where it looks like almost the entire surface has been gilded before he did any painting at all that makes it one heck of a luxury object. Gold was worth 10 times the price of silver in the 15th century and it was tremendously expensive. So to return to our adoration and nativity scene what you see here is Gentile de Fabriano treating the gold in a much more usual manner for a 15th century artist. He's not overdoing his use of it. He's placing it only in the areas that are really meant to shine through as gold like the Christ child's halo like some of the trim of the virgin's gown and then the background with her halo and Joseph's halo but it's not an egregious use of gold and you can see the very clear difference between those areas that are gilded and the areas that are painted simply with other pigments as underpainting. Artists and patrons so the people who paid for things were business people. They understood what things cost and contracts and there are quite a few contracts that survive from 15th century Florence and from many other places contracts tended to stipulate how much of an expensive material would be used and in what way. And so when we look at a work like this that is covered in gold and then the pigments are used to enhance the reflective quality of that gold so the ultramarine in some ways is almost playing second fiddle to the gilding that shows through from it and similarly that malachite green and that really wonderful red on on Christ's robe which is different from the the the crimson that we're seeing on the virgin's gown. These are all meant to to really show off the the wealth of the patron and also the fact that this person was so wealthy that they chose to dedicate something this expensive to Christ and the Virgin Mary. So this is kind of showing off how much money you have but also showing off how religious you are at the same time and again it's a just an amazing work in large part because of the way that that blue is treated. I just want to finish with some zoomed in views here because when you zoom way way in on this painting you can actually make out some of the individual brush strokes that were used by Gentile de Fabriano in his work and it's just fascinating to see. You can see where he has altered the the thickness of the ultramarine sometimes with a really heavy application sometimes with a really light application. You can also see where he's gone in and given a texture to that gold so that it looks like it is gold brocade cloth and so he uses little parallel lines done in kind of a dark brown and also in kind of a yellow in order to enhance that textile quality of the the gold leaf. Some of the gold leaf is also engraved in addition to some of the punching and stamped work that we have here you can see patterns that have been scratched into it or impressed with kind of a sharp tool and so that engraving helps to give us that sense of texture and one of the things that Gentile de Fabriano does in his work and you see this in a number of works from the 15th century in Italy and in other areas is there's there's a three dimensionality to his surface he's treating the gold kind of like a gold object rather than trying to give us the illusion of gold by using different colors and so there's a physicality here. You might also notice some of the areas of kind of what look like dirty varnish here and there where some of the the over painting might have gotten a little a little gunk into it particularly in the detail on the right. Here's our final closest view and here's where I think you can really appreciate just the the mastery of material and technique shown by Gentile de Fabriano. You can see how he's using just little sketchy black lines to help enhance some of the contours of the virgin's mantle and her robe to deepen those shadows. You can see the really delicate brushwork in the face of the Madonna. He's done a lot of modeling in the under painting and then he's gone in on top with glazes and then just putting little tiny delicate touches of white here and there or those little red stipples. It really is a magnificent work and I also really like this particular image because just on the the sort of left corner of this slide you can get a real sense for the fluidity of that ultramarine blue paint where he painted it on. This would have been ultramarine derived from lapis the highest grade possible and then mixed with egg yolk so it has wonderful staying power power and dries really really really hard and with kind of a golden translucent quality. Gentile de Fabriano probably would have been told in his contract exactly how much ultramarine to use, exactly how much gold there might have been an upper and a lower end of the spectrum for each one of these luxury materials. When you're looking at a work like this the brightest blue the closest to that pure ultramarine is always reserved for the most important figure and in this case it's the Virgin.